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Arts Equator | February 25, 2019
“Learning”: Memory, Precision, Uncertainty in a 5-hour Durational Performance at National Gallery Singapore, Jocelyn Chng
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Part of National Gallery Singapore’s special programme Performing Spaces that explores how space can be a “living organism” facilitating encounters between performers and audiences, Learning takes place over two weekends in March 2019.
Learning is choreographed by Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, co-founders of French dance company Le Principe d’incertitude, and will be performed here together with the T.H.E. Second Company. This performance marks the first time Learning is created with a new company of dancers in collaboration with Santoro and Godard. Over the 5-hour duration of the work, National Gallery’s public spaces will be taken over by the dancers, and audiences are invited to witness the dancers’ processes of learning and memory, an experience unique to each performance. In line with the idea of exploring space, each performance will be influenced by the specific spaces that the dancers find themselves in. Part of the challenge will be for the dancers to negotiate and adapt their movements to the spaces that they occupy.
Learning is based on a work titled For Claude Shannon, originally created in 2016, by Santoro and Godard. Santoro is an American dancer and choreographer, one of whose current interests lies in the concept of spectatorship. She earlier pursued neuroscience at Harvard University, from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology. Godard, who has a Master’s degree in applied mathematics, works across varied fields, from stage design and production, to mathematics and language processing. Santoro and Godard have been collaborators since 2009, and their works have been presented at several venues in New York and Paris.
The 2016 piece was inspired by the work of mathematician Claude Elwood Shannon in numerical logic and communication. Santoro and Godard devised a structure in which specific movements for arms and legs could be combined in any number of possibilities that cannot be fully rehearsed. The dancers in the piece are therefore required to learn a specific combination of movements for each performance, drawing from their intimacy with the piece’s movement language, and with each other.
For Claude Shannon was reworked into Learning, first performed in 2018 at contemporary art museum the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
