CHOREOGRAPHING IDENTITIES: DANCE AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This thesis is about Singaporean dancer-choreographers and their search for an identity which they can call their own. It addresses the influences of biographies, state ideologies, history and culture on the process of self-understanding and dance choreography. It is strange how sociology often overlooks dance as a prune subject for cultural analysis. The sociology of dance is not developed in Singapore; One aim of this paper is thus to introducing this subfield, proposing that dance may be analyzed like a 'text', and how it could possibly be applied to Singapore, specifically in the area of dance and identity formation. This paper seeks to show the multifarious ways Singaporean dancer choreographers understand their identities over time, and its influence on their choreographies. It thus begins with the pre-independence period when people wrestled with changing political identities and how dance was a vehicle for communicating those changes. Then, with the rise of Singapore as a nation-slate, it is not just individuals who are concerned about their collective identities, but also the state. Dance became a cultural product in which the state can construct reality to affect collective and cultural identities, particularly along the lines of multiracialism and 'Asianness'. These discourses proved to have been replicated by several local choreographers, evident in works or three choreographers selected for this thesis. Though there may be complicity, there is also transcendence and resistance, for choreography entails individual responses afterall. As all these go to show, dance and its choreographic process are no mere moving poetry, but sites, which allow people to define and contest for identities.