New works rock Asian Festival Exchange

EXPECT the works to be "raw", cautioned Kuik Swee Boon, artistic director of the M1 CONTACT Contemporary Dance Festival, referring to two of the five works in last Monday's Asian Festival Exchange (AFX). The performance booklet also listed them as works-in-progress because the collaborators only had a couple of weeks to work on their pieces.

An Episode, which featured Singapore's Zhuo Zihao, and Seon Jeongchan and Lee Younghun from the Seoul Dance Collection, and Naka, by Goh Shou Yi (Singapore) and Kubota Mai (Japan), came off quite well though.

The narratives they sought to portray came through, as did their personalities. Naka, for example, made notable use of a simple plastic- covered structure as a prop. The dancers danced in it at first, before bringing their movements out of the "centre" and from the "inside" to the outside of the cube. Naka is the word for "centre".