拉手手 — Tracing a Dance to Hold Hands: New imaginations for a queer Chinese dance

with Chantel Foo

Wednesday, April 30, 7pm
Géza, 306 Maujer

Courtesy Chantel Foo.

In 拉手手 (lā shǒu shou), participants are invited into a maximalist dance space where video collaging serves as both guide and provocation. Through movement, the work co-builds a new vocabulary for queer Chinese dance—one that unfolds in the interstices of place, belonging, and tradition. Designed by resident artist Chantel Foo out of a nostalgia for their Uniquely Singaporean™ upbringing, their queer expatriation from homeland, and desiring towards a dance they might belong to, 拉手手 looks at non-traditional Chinese dance phenomena and aesthetics, including Chinese Square Dances (广场舞 guángchángwǔ) and the memetics of “awkward dance” (尬舞 gàwǔ) on social media, as choreo-political reference points.

Dreaming alongside Dance Dance Revolution, filial piety, absurd internet lineages, live-streaming aunties, Chinese EDM, Douyin deep dives, solo KTV, queer raving, classical Chinese Dance training, and a longing for home, 拉手手 is equal parts resource and joy. Take my hand, let’s dance! 拉手手 will be joined live by Warp Duo, bringing us a beat-heavy set, journeying through mandopop essentials, gritty bass, hyper pop, HanMai, and more, telling a brand new genre-queering sound story with Chantel.

This is a non-prescriptive choreographic scoring for queer and/or Chinese bodies, where awkwardness is embraced. Chantel particularly invites kin of the queer and/or Chinese community to partake in this shared movement practice, though all are warmly welcome. This For Your Reference program is also For Chantel’s Reference—gestures you/we create will be annotated to form a collective index as part of their research project.

This program is part of the For Your Reference series, where our artists in residence share and discuss key references informing their ongoing research at Amant. Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Doors for 拉手手 will open at 6:45pm on Wednesday, April 30 in Géza, located at 306 Maujer.

Chantel Foo is a Chinese Singaporean artist based in London. Chantel’s practice is anchored in performance, working with movement, writing, Real Game Play, and livestreams. Her work and movement style exists at the sticky tension lines where a body’s histories and undoing gather, to come apart. Her interest in moving choreopolitically is tethered to a background in traditional Chinese dance. She seeks to decolonize their dance/body through negotiating docility and rebellion, reimagining rage and spite as strategies of defiance against oppressive codes and doctrines. Nodes of thought include: slippages, residual presences, selfhood, and glitch spaces. They also founded and run a movement studio, Studio Lotusroot, which is a space for embodied encounters and somatic healing through movement.

Warp Duo is the queer Chinese-American duo of Qiujiang Levi Lu and Scott Li utilizing violin, voice, guitar, and live electronics. Scintillating tonalities meet visceral digital distortions in their tension-filled improvisational practice.

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Series

For Your Reference

For Your Reference is a program series that spotlights our current artists in residence and gives them a platform to share ongoing conversations and research.

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