sarma

Ea Sola pursues pain like passion.

For over 10 years, she has dogged the Vietnamese psyche and mined its complex history and rich culture. On stage, she enacts the difficult relation and process between tradition and modernity in her motherland.

Such a summary outline of her artistic concerns and labour may do little justice to the rare gift of time, human devotion and intellectualism that Sola has in fact given to her people and the world in turn.

In her five extant works to date, she has scrutinised specific human experiences in war-gashed Vietnam with the forensic eye of a poet.

She studiously coheres the music and dance resources of Vietnamese ancient culture, and then builds austere tales of human loss and longing.

Her spartan epics begin from pain in death’s after-knell. Her world is one that cannot be comforted, for it denies comfort. In her liturgy of memory, you have little space to breathe and reprieve.

On the unadorned stage in Requiem, memory bleeds once more.

Twenty-two performers of various ages and ordinary mien remember their private stories against a collective backdrop.

Bugles bleat and drums roll in the temple of grief. The supplicants hum and sing forlorn songs. Their mourning turns into petrified laughter, chatter and silent screams.

Pain and music enter their bodies so deeply at one point that they intone as a human dan-bau, the traditional music instrument that wails tragically.

They march in files and criss-cross in geometrical axes. With outstretched arms, they become war aggressors as they map the topography of violence and forgotten paths.

Their feet shuffle, scuttle, swivel and tiptoe back and forth: It is terra infirma and they do not belong on pillaged earth. Their virused bodies twitch and flail: They are demonised by the invisible hand of memory.

Filled with intense vitality and discipline, their natural physiques embody vivid yet undefined images via simple movements and layered abstraction.

In Requiem - an 80-minute treatise on incarceration, impossible forgetting and elusive recollection - their bodies are also ritual carriers of personal suffering and communal consciousness.

A woman crosses the stage with her face down-turned. Her long hair hangs, dripping wet, like excess tears. But her calcified hands are unable to retain a single drop.

This is one of Sola’s many images of the unnamed and unnameable individual. Either deceased or alive, the anonymous citizen is hitherto plagued by an unspoken and unspeakable past.

But through her art, her nation claims its folk voice, reclaims cultural pride, remembers its identity and gains international visibility. It is a face of Vietnam we seldom see.

Played in Singapore to a largely post-war generation audience, Requiem further implicates its spectators with questions on the politics of memory and perspective.

We are alerted by the old man who sits onstage, silently viewing each document of trauma.

How do we frame history? Who is to blame for bad memories? What do we see through the passage of time and tragic doors belonging to another civilisation?

Between yesterday’s reality and today’s depiction, how do we engage with memory and its representation?

Requiem marks the close of Sola’s decade-long journey of exfoliating memory and myth. Her name and profound effort stand distinguished within Asia’s contemporary dance canon.

She delivers the thematic promise in this year’s Arts Festival to “fill your senses” - not through eye-candy or glib rhetoric but rather, by summoning an emotional spirituality based on reason and context.