TRANSMISSION OF THE INVISIBLE RUNS FEB 6-9. $24-$30. ENWAVE THEATRE,
235 QUEENS QUAY W. 416-973-4000. WWW.HARBOURFRONTCENTRE.COM.
The title of multidisciplinary artist Peter Chin’s latest performance, opening next week as part of Harbourfront’s ongoing WorldStage program, is Transmission of the Invisible, a phrase that pertains to the extensive travelling Chin has been doing his entire life. Born in Jamaica and of Chinese, African and Irish descent, Chin — who might be described as a composer-musician-choreographer-dancer-designer-director — has spent long periods of time in Java and Cambodia, the latter of which has been his home for a good part of this decade, and provides the central inspiration for Transmission.
The “transmissions” of the new piece are most noticeably cultural and political, concerning the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Video artist Cylla von Tiedemann worked with Chin in developing and recording scenarios that inform a dance component (von Tiedemann had a whopping 30 tapes from which to edit her film): monks, a child psychologist, a dance teacher, her student and, markedly, a young man and his grandmother, all make an appearance.
“What’s quite distressing in Cambodia is that the younger generation doesn’t know the extent of what happened during the Pol Pot regime, particularly the torture and deprivation,” says Chin. “Even though it’s all quite recent, it’s not taught in schools, and, maybe understandably, seniors don’t know how to talk about it.” The dance teacher and her student in von Tiedemann’s video offer a microcosm: the former is trying to instruct the latter in a classical Cambodian work, representing the staggering loss during the Khmer Rouge period of approximately 90 per cent of the country’s artists, and thus of much of their repertoire.
“A lot of [Transmission] starts in Cambodia, or has imagery from there, but is perhaps more universal than that,” adds Chin. He addresses the concept of trauma, for instance, which has strange, affecting connections to motifs of travel and discovery. Chin is interested in trauma present both psychologically and physically in the children of survivors of atrocities, and this manifests itself in his unique, celebrated choreography. As in his previous Stupa, dancers in Transmission will be using their faces as well as their bodies, suggesting the continuum between emotion or memory and, well, moving flesh.
But Chin’s new piece is by no means an unremittingly haunting thing. In addition to what he describes as “fraught or spiky or angular or troubled” movements, there are ones — “peaceful and beautiful” ones — that convey the wonder and complexity of cultural discovery, whether it arrives through exploring one’s own past, or another country and time. For Chin, an adherent of the Asian philosophy of “total theatre,” there are simply no shortcuts in conveying such states.
“Some ideas or feelings are best manifested through, say, dance one moment, poetry the next, and then music,” says Chin. “Somehow having an array of disciplines at my disposal, or a combination or hybrid of them, allows me to serve the idea better. What gets expressed becomes about the idea alone, rather than the discipline, the technique.”