A contemporary dance performance evoking feelings of loss, grief and distance.

Artist Dialogue and Presentation 28 September 2024, 4:00PM Esplanade, Annexe Studio, Singapore Contemporary Dance 28 September 2024, 8:00PM 29 September 2024, 6:00PM Esplanade, Annexe Studio, Singapore Countries: Germany, Italy, Singapore

Weaving together text, sound, dance, and visual poetry, Ashley Ho (Singapore) and Domenik Naue (Germany) will present a new performance-installation on loss, grief and distance while braiding connections between botany and illness, labour and care, tradition and regeneration. Last Portrait is a contemporary dance borne through the 2 artists’ collaboration and with guidance from Pietro Marullo (Italy) for 6 months, thanks to online sessions and on-site residencies in Indonesia and Italy. 

This contemporary dance was presented as a set performance as part of the Asia-Europe Festival’s main programme in Rovereto, Italy, in conjunction with the Oriente Occidente Dance Festival. For the Closing Curtain, it will be a continuing exhibition and performance, navigating the landscape of loss, which is transformed through connectivity. In a world of rapid change, it feels like collapse is a spectacle we are watching collectively. Part of a generation hyper-aware of loss, we track change obsessively, also knowing that when we document what is present, we are pointing out everything that can disappear. How can we move forward, not stuck in nostalgia or paralysed by the fear of losing?  

Using excavated personal family objects collected through the years, this iteration invites us to a space where relics of the artists’ performances rest, connecting with spectators through the memories emanating from those pieces. The artists will perform single fragments of their work as they guide and go into conversations with the audience. 

First performed in a defunct (and re-purposed) shipping wharf in Amsterdam in July 2024, the performance-installation is itself a document that will evolve through its different iterations. Last Portrait is an on-going conversation that develops where it travels through: Over het IJ and Dansateliers in the Netherlands, Studio Plesungan in Indonesia, Oriente Occidente in Italy, and Dance Nucleus in Singapore. With intermediate public presentations, the performance always remains an open question and an offering. 

Prior to the performance-installation, Ashley and Domenik, together with Pietro, will engage in a dialogue session titled Psychogeographies: Inter-textual Inscriptions, where they will discuss their collaborative relationship that has seen them working across different spaces (warehouse and wharfs, streets and HDB void decks) and contexts (Europe vs Asia, Amsterdam and Singapore where each has a special relationship with the sea and shipping). They will also speak about their unique approach to creating, in which writing, photographs, digital images, diagrams, videos, objects, gestures, dance, and other forms of inscription are irreverently treated as though they are equal mediums; freely generated and (seemingly randomly) composed together as bricolages. Through obsessive collection of different realia, and playful rewriting of document after document, they generate ‘inter-texts’ that become choreographies that in turn, respond to the different places that they inhabit or travel to.  

Schedule:

THE ARTISTS