Guqin music through motion

COULD dancers do more than just move to music, but use their bodies and movement to make the music instead?

An experiment with Singapore composer Joyce Beetuan Koh, RAW Moves artistic director Ricky Sim and instrument-systems engineer Felix Leuschner explores new roles of dance and movement.

Sounding Body could have been just a piece of work with dancers, sensors fixed to them, to play an original guqin (a Chinese string instrument) score. Instead, the collaborators decided to push the limits further by getting the dancers to actually make sounds like a guqin, with only their movements so that they also create their own music. Koh gave the dancers 12 traditional guqin scores to familiarise themselves with the sounds. They also showed the dancers some guqin characteristics like how each finger has a technique of playing the seven-string instrument so it produces a unique sound character. Explains Koh. "Bright, prolonged or even scratchy, the solo qin allows for a wide range of sounds to be created," she adds.