Image: Lee Su-Feh Photo: Thum Chia Chieh
LEE SU-FEH’S THE THINGS I CARRY - 2018/19
A Theatre Passe Muraille and Dancemakers Presentation of A Battery Opera Performance
Developed as a part of the Migrant Bodies Project – an E.U. sponsored choreographic program aimed at opening civic and artistic reflections on migration – The Things I Carry is a performance/storytelling hybrid about what happens as people spread across our planet, both voluntarily and involuntarily.
““The Things I Carry” was made despite my resistance at the time to making a solo for myself. It was during the Migrant Bodies Project and I didn’t want to spend time alone in the studio, for all the usual existential dance/art reasons - self-loathing, loss of faith etc etc. But one evening, while my friend the Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciaronni was encouraging me, I said to him, OK, I will make a solo if you agree to be in the room with me, if you agree to hold me. Because we can only know ourselves through our engagement with others. The work comes from my body in relation to things - people, geography, history, current news.”
Lee Su-Feh explores these ideas through story-telling, song, movement and our electronic devices. Along the way, she creates a space that is part ceremony, part conference, part confessional.
Concept, Choreography and Performance
Lee Su-Feh
Dramaturgy
Alessandro Sciarroni
Text
Lee Su-Feh, with excerpts from On A Plane by Chris Bose
Sound Design
Junhong McIntosh-Lee and Lee Su-Feh
Song
Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
Read Su-Feh’s Choreographing Conversation in the September 2018 issue of The Dance Current.
ABOUT LEE SU-FEH
Lee Su-Feh’s work deals with care on macro and micro levels of choreography and life. For the land it takes place on and the first peoples of that land; for the participants she works with, the audience members who enter - clear rules and boundaries set up an environment where a public can feel free to explore and engage with a work, knowing that the space is safe for doing so.
Credits include Children’s Theatre with Janet Pillai, traditional Malay and contemporary dance with Marion D’Cruz in Malaysia, contemporary dance with Lari Leong in Paris, contact improvisation with Peter Bingham in Vancouver; and many years of Chinese martial arts. Before arriving in Vancouver in 1988, she lived in Paris, London, Indonesia and Malaysia. In 1998, Su-Feh won the Prix de Jeune Auteur of the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Seine-St. Denis for her work Gecko Eats Fly. She has been nominated twice for a Jessie Award. In 2012, her solo work The Whole Beast won the BOH Cameronian Award for Outstanding Choreography in Malaysia. In recognition of her contribution to the dance milieu through her work as choreographer, dancer, teacher, and dramaturge, Su-Feh was awarded the Isadora Award (2013) and the Lola Award (2014) by Vancouver’s Dance Centre.
In her first 2017-2018 Residency year, Su-Feh connected with the Toronto community and began her research; Dancemakers also remounted her acclaimed installation work Dance Machine – called “A playful, yet also meditative experience.” Festival TransAmériques (2017)