CHRIS THURMAN: Viewing dance with an eye on the beautiful and true
This year’s JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience provides a digital platform for local and international dance
Every arts writer has an Achilles heel, and mine is dance. I can sing the right tune with musicians. In the fine arts, I’ve learnt to tell a lithograph from an etching. Conceptual art? I can play in that playground. Theatre? Right up my alley. Literary arts? I’ve got degrees aplenty. Digital arts? Like most, I’m digitally capable as a consumer, even if I don’t get the nuances of design and engineering and coding.
But dance — well, dance exposes my ignorance. The technicalities, the history, the vocabulary, all these have remained beyond my grasp. Contemporary dance is a hybrid form, incorporating various “traditional” dance disciplines but also morphing with performance art, live installation, physical theatre and more. It can be befuddling. It can be bathetic. It can also be brave, brain-bending and astonishingly beautiful. ..
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