The Vault: Distilling the Dance

A curatorial experiment in presenting dance beyond the frame of performance

Kiran Kumar is a Singapore-based independent interdisciplinary artist whose practice is dance-centric. About a decade ago, Kiran took an audio-guided walk around Little India conceived by spell#7, a Singapore performance company whose site-specific, environmental audio works weave history, culture and politics into everyday life. Titled Desire Paths, a voice from an earpiece guided Kiran through the landmarks, streets and people of the historic neighbourhood. The experience of simultaneously being both audience and performer has stayed with him since.

In 2016, Kiran responds to the audio archives of spell #7’s Desire Paths in an investigation of the performer’s and audience’s positions in dance. In this instalment of The Vault, in conjunction with the Dance Nucleus ELEMENT residency programme, Kiran seeks to challenge the convention of “spectators watching dancers perform” through four configurations of movement, text and image: an essay-performance, an audio-installation, an exhibition and a workshop. Together, the four configurations may be seen as a curatorial experiment in presenting dance beyond the frame of performance.

This process of actively seeking subtlety has thrown open some fundamental, critical questions on pedagogy, aesthetics and philosophy in dance. This essay-performance takes the form of a reading of an open letter addressed to Kelucharan Mahapatra, the late Odissi guru and a pioneer of the dance’s reconstruction, with the intention of relating the aesthetic and the critical dimensions of my journey.

- Kiran Kumar

Kiran performed Dear Dead Dancer on 2 July at the Centre 42 Black Box and 4 July at the Dance Nucleus Studio. The Centre 42 performance was video-recorded. The video recording is accompanied by documentation of the projection slides, text, and images of the performance.

Yet, the notion of ‘presenting subtle dancing’ inheres a delicate contradiction. This audio installation addresses such a contradiction. It is situated in a theatre black box and it engages a structural set-up for a performance. But there is no dance. There are a few audio recordings, placed on fewer seats; each different from the other, yet all pointing to a common absence.

- Kiran Kumar 

The audio installation There is no dance was presented in the Centre 42 Black Box from 2-6 July 2016. Members of the public were free to listen to any of the MP3 devices laid out in the space.

Expanded Writing

Through this journey I have attempted to unpack the aesthetics of subtle dancing through a practice of ‘expanded writing’. Reading is also fundamental to a writing practice. So this exhibition serves as a library of reading and writing materials that are structured into five strands. These strands may seem to rest as static references on the book shelf, but transform through continuous, dynamic intersections on the reading table. Each visitor may have a unique access point in to materials in this library.

- Kiran Kumar

The exhibition Expanded Writing was held in the Centre 42 Library from 2-6 July 2016.

Kiran Kumar
As an artist, Kiran’s interest is in the making of reflexive spaces for people to inhabit. These are spaces for meditation as much as they are spaces for thought; these are spaces for action as much as for observation. His intention is for these spaces to be inviting, insightful and somehow infinite. Such spaces are activated through his experience of dance, of music, of poetry and of light. With a desire to make such or similar spaces accessible to others, he often makes configurations of images, objects, actions and text, which are open to visitors.

Part of the craft of making reflexive spaces, has been a practice of ‘expanded writing’. The present focus of his writing practice is with two forms: the ‘axiom’ and the ‘anecdote’. While they are each terse and economical in their own right, between the axiomatic and the anecdotal, there is a range of fictionalization to work with.

See more of Kiran’s work here.

Dance Nucleus
Dance Nucleus is an independent dance house, directed and managed by industry practitioners for artists, a home for artists to develop their artistic practice and craft. Dance Nucleus aims to inspire artists, allowing them to initiate ideas, projects and conversations, by providing them with the space and time to incubate these ideas and projects in fruition. ELEMENT is Dance Nucleus’ artist-in-residence programme focusing on movement and choreographic research practice. It supports rigorous discourse, research and wide-ranging experimentation in all movement-based forms, so as to nurture new movement and choreographic expression. Kiran Kumar is the first artist-in-residence under this programme (January – June 2016).

 Find out more about the ELEMENT residency programme here.