FUSE#4

FUSE #4
dance with everyone in the room, seeking to meet the person, whether child
or adult, where they are, and not taking for granted that everyone is moving
the same way. Where in some other dance forms there are expectations that
everyone is doing the same thing, Faye notes that in CI the skill is meeting the
person as they are, with no necessity for a specific leader and follower, and
intentionally replicates this in Rolypoly Family classes and jams where she
warms kids up in those ways. Faye’s commitment to the pedagogical strategy
of “I do we do you do” 8 is then a modeling of possibilities, allowing all who
are present to decide for themselves, but also ceding to the collective energy
of the room and what they make together.
Thinking about agency and care as grounding this work with children,
I considered both Faye’s practice within and outside her work with children
as an ever-evolving whole, including the work of being a mother. For Faye,
being a mother pertains not only to maternal labour but to the activistic involvement
of her child in her work, driven by a need to be visible about this
in order to fill certain gaps in spaces she inhabits. One of Faye’s challenges is
being pigeonholed as a mother, and the potential overriding of this identity
of that of an artistic maker, which came first for her but is now also deeply
imbricated in the creative energies of motherhood. This is mirrored in the
challenge of legibility faced by work for children to be seen as able to transcend
its genre in terms of critical attention, visibility within an arts scene,
and how it fits into the oeuvre of its makers and dedicated pedagogues. 9
When Faye and I presented on our ongoing conversation at SCOPE #6, we
posed the question of what it would look like if children were to become
part of Dance Nucleus space, and the responses we received ranged from
the political--those interested in the resistance and agency of children--to the
personal, such as those who were artists and mothers and were interested in
the boundaries between those aspects of their lives.
The question of legibility and cultivating identifiable expertise is complex
when one’s practice is as polyvalent as Faye’s, and even more so when
labour and creativity is not neatly divided between public and domestic
spheres. For one, motherhood in Faye’s conception is in part an attunement
to vulnerability, risk, and boundary-traversing over time, a mode of being
that overlaps with and informs creative life force. Faye questions why it is
that women are scrutinised and disadvantaged when they are visible as a
mother in certain spheres, and engages with the frustration and fear this
question provokes through acts of negotiating the social contract of what
it means to be a working artist in bringing her child into those spaces. She
does so out of necessity, and with full knowledge that these acts of defiance
may well be read as further evidence to see her as a mother and nothing but.
Yet Faye continues to question and play around with the categories of artist
and mother, asking “When and how does motherhood include artistic work,
communities and networks? When and how does a working artist prevail and
SCOPE
thrive while being a caregiver? What are the social and domestic conventions
that inhibit these?”
One of Faye’s frequent collaborators is her son, who has made performances
with her, such as Baby Bear Mama Bear. 10 This performance by Faye,
Bernice Lee, and her son originated at Goodman Arts Center in Singapore,
and was later performed in Vientiane with significant variation. When Faye
and I shared our work at SCOPE, there was interest in the ways in which
we were thinking about how the contract of the performer differs greatly
when that performer is a child. This may be further highlighted by her son’s
2019 staging of an original performance, Scooter Dance, in which he choreographed
alongside Faye but ultimately chose not to perform, but rather
to play on scooters with his friends on the day of the performance, due to
several factors such as audience members whose invitation Faye had not discussed
with him prior. As an artist who enjoys making with her son, Scooter
Dance caused Faye to realise that the nature of this creative and maternal
relation is an evolving one, in which her son’s independence and shifting interests
will shift when, how, and what they make together. When I asked Faye
how she would feel if her son was not as keen to collaborate on performing
with her as he used to be in his current stage of life, she responded that she
did not feel impatient for him to desire to do so again, and that in the meantime
she was excited to grow many different sides of practice alongside him.
She also noted that while her son’s growing independence contributes to his
decisions to participate and perform, his prior participation in works such as
Baby Bear Mama Bear did not necessarily correlate to greater agency than in
non-participation of Scooter Dance. Faye also said of her son that he is “still
very in his body and in his movement, but he is also doing a lot of creating
outside of movement like writing books.” His creativity and expressivity in
other areas also inspires Faye, and they continue to collaborate.
For Faye and Bernice’s 2019 performance Letters Come Alive, Faye
and her Rolypoly Family team were working on movements together with
Bernice and Faye working on the structure and text. Her son came in to
participate when the letters were made and scenes were in progress, and
would join whenever there were new scenes to be workshopped. Faye noted
that he influenced the work by way of his own playing and interaction with
the work. For instance, he would make a shape that's different from what the
adult performers did, and they would possibly incorporate it in place of their
original idea. Faye wrote in her notes to me: “He has a sense of affinity with
the work, wanting to play with the cards, have a set for himself, take the work
to his school, etc. I think this is because he has had many opportunities to
enjoy the work and have the freedom to interact with it the way he wants to.”
She also shared that her son’s responses such as his laughter, eager physical
participation and rapt attention gave them confidence as they were making
the work, and gave them practice as to how to perform the work in the pres-
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