MOVEMENT NOTATIONS

from Allom! Amatai! Allom! – Photomedia Essays by Yee I-Lann

About the Artist

by Denise Lai

In 1943, a United States postal inspector encountered a document containing a mysterious arrangement of symbols and marks. Suspicious of its contents, he flagged the package as potential espionage. The documents were in fact dance notations mailed from New York City’s Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) to the Hungarian-born choreographer, Rudolf Laban, residing in England. In a contemporary New York Times article reporting the event, its author commented: “That girl dancer writing down funny symbols isn’t a Russian spy, she’s using a strange new invention that may have wide applications”.1

I imagine Yee I-Lann’s Rasa Sayang series eliciting a similar response if it were mailed without context. This “strange new invention” was a series that began after a period of heightened political animosity between East and West Malaysia, during which the embrace, for I-Lann, came to stand in for a body politic in need of reconciliation. Seen individually, the message of these 488 prints of orange, martian arms in embrace is not immediately obvious. Each spells out in various abstracted ways an alphabet within a six-chapter essay, itself dense and filled with poetics. The essay’s title captures its multi-textural quality, chosen by the artist for the way its intonations upon delivery inflect multiple meanings: love, taste, touch, longing, and loss.2 Imbued within each hug of Rasa Sayang are these nuances. The reconciliation, in turn, occurs in the artist’s vision through Borneo.

The practices, individuals, and knowledges of the region form the central conceit of the wider Borneo Heart project, most plainly stated in an eponymous print where a heart collaged over Borneo on a map declares it as the centre of the world. “WE ARE YOUR PUMPIN’ BREATHING, EXHAUSTED, HEART”, its margins proclaim (Fig. 1). Elsewhere, I-Lann has frequently spoken of her belief in East Malaysia as an agent of balance, citing Sabah and Sarawak’s stated role as such in the 1963 treatise that legislated the formation of Malaysia.3

The proposition being made here has larger consequences than a simple rotation of the map; what I-Lann is suggesting is a recentering of Bornean knowledge, which would affect not only our orientation against the other but more broadly how we perceive and navigate our everyday. A microscopic example of this can be found in the curatorial process itself: in the case of Measuring Project, a photographic series inspired by the alternative measurement systems of the Omadal weavers, how does one turn away from standard measurements when laying them out? And how do you do so in a space defined by centimetres and inches, replicated in successive exhibitions and their catalogues? The answers here — admittedly — are largely unresolved. But like the movement notation, the works in ALLOM! AMATAI! ALLOM! serve as challenge, offering new staff lines in the score of our everyday lives that provide a basis for organising movement, vision, and recalibration.

If this exhibition is focused on I-Lann’s more two-dimensional works, it is because they demonstrate the artist working persistently through these challenges. Amongst the large woven works of Borneo Heart, the works on show here are notations of larger explorations, offering a base from which we can begin to unfurl the frameworks that underpin her recent practice in weaving. They act as “movement notations”, or efforts to mark and dictate the complex scaffolding of people, histories, and ideologies that find form elsewhere, in the mats, the museums, and in living communities. And at the centre of these notations is always the body: individuals, their composite parts, or seen in full as a body politic. Art becomes a tool for recentering, for highlighting alternative lens and vision machines that frame the way we look into and be in the world.

Labanotation

The DNB was founded in 1940 by four women: Ann Hutchinson Guest, Eve Gentry, Janey Price, and Helen Priest Rogers, all New Yorkers who had either trained directly under Laban or who sought to popularise his development of a notation system for dance since the late 1920s. Their motivations were primarily to document a fragile tradition transmitted through oral and kinesthetic accounts and re-enactments.4

What Laban and the Bureau endeavoured to achieve was a system that could record objectively the movements and angles of space, limbs, energy, and subtleties of a particular piece (Fig. 2). In other words, how one could translate a three-dimensional, somatic experience onto a two-dimensional page, which in turn could be read, disseminated, and repeated. This was not without pushback from their peers, who perceived dance as too emotional or too immediate to be inscribed: dance is lived, an ensemble of breathwork, energy, and organic tissues. The Bureau, on the other hand, saw the potential of the body to become a series of information in motion.

As the earlier anecdote attests, like any language, “Labanotation” (as it has come to be known) requires one’s rigorous study and understanding of its principles for legibility.5 It begins, like a music score, with staff lines. These lines run vertically, with the centremost line representing the dancer’s spine. Steps (movements with weight) and gestures (movements without weight) are designated corresponding symbols, with either side of the central spine indicating which side of the body the movement was taking place. Read from the bottom upwards, a complete notation would describe: direction, the body part in movement, the level of movement, and the length of time required to do so. These documents ask for movement beyond the page, for readers to locate the central spine from which they can begin to reassemble their instructions through the body.

ALLOM! AMATAI! ALLOM!

What does a comparison to the movement notation teach us about the works in this exhibition? It offers, first of all, an example of the will to document, even when the subject seems to evade the sign. As the enduring (albeit fraught) legacy of movement notations attests, despite the illusive quality of its subject, there is still value in working through these tensions. The “literature” that emerged out of the work of DNB has catalysed a vast range of restagings and recontextualisation of historic dances till today6; it opened up a possibility for a type of reading that demands action from the body, requiring us to shift our practice away from intellectual work (primarily located in male-dominated forums) to movement and praxis. It is worth mentioning too how these developments evidence the historic role that women have played in persisting through these challenges. In the case of the Labanotation system, four women were able to evolve Laban’s self-described “masculine” pursuit for their own objectives in a field dominated by male choreographers, through a mastery of a notational system.7

Just like the movement notation, it begins by recognising a centre. In Measuring Project, I-Lann found her central principle whilst working with the weaver community of Pulau Omadal, who shared with her a unique measuring system that not only exposed a practice long defined by a universal metrology, but one that also took the woman’s body as the locus of resistance.

In the Omadal tradition, measurements for a mat are defined by the footsteps of the principal weaver. Beginning at one corner, the first step is accompanied by the exclamation, Allom! (“Life!), followed by “Amatai! (“Death!”) upon the next. The process continues along the edges of the mat as the principal weaver (always a woman) counts her steps, with the caveat that the mat must end with an Allom. Like the movement notation, activity is anchored by a body part, from which accompanying activities further up the body — shouts, rhythm, and forward motion — set the ritual in motion. In contrast to the objectifying precision of centimetres and inches, here is a measuring system filled with alchemical symbolism that draws into itself the cycle of life, diaphragmatic projection, the body and all its susceptibilities to alteration (for example, one’s swelling of the foot in the heat).

Discarding her ruler to embrace the tradition of matmaking was a catalyst to double down on a practice already concerned with spaces and visioning machines that produced power. An important ancestor to this pursuit was her 2009 series, Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II (Fig. 3). Appropriating an ethnographic photograph by John Lamprey of the “Malayan Male”, she places herself in the composition as an audience to a cutout of his silhouette. These works can be considered as a kind of founding gesture that marks her first serious endeavour to unpack the complicity of her medium, as an invasive evidentiary tool for anthropological inquiry. And as her use of symbolic objects in Picturing Power (2013) would later testify, non-human actors like the table were crucial participants in the colonial spaces where claims to land and subjects were fabricated through imagery (Fig. 4). Sitting with Chapters 1 to 7 of Measuring Project means watching as these ideas change shape and slot themselves into her final proclamation for the mat.

In Chapter 1, she introduces her thesis: the mat as an egalitarian, feminist, and non-hierarchical platform for multiple and other realities, and laid above a table, an intervener and dismantler of power (Fig. 5). In one image, a table, on which lays four women (including the artist), connects via shadow cords to a beast looming above, threatening to pull it upwards — literally — from under its legs. In another image, cord-like forms are echoed this time as roots that grow out of the women’s hair, in directional and symbolic opposition, pulling them downward to find stable soils. One thinks of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot once wrote about history and power: “The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots”.8

If tables were once passive furniture in the portrayal of colonial administrative activities in Picturing Power, in Measuring Project they are self-animated objects that hurl themselves across compositions, throwing violent corners to be dodged by their accompanying figures. In Chapter Four, male dancers pose in acrobatic leaps, imitating the shapes of their adjacent tables that stand for instruments of patriarchal and colonial power (Fig. 6). The following chapters introduce figures from I-Lann’s archive — figures and office chairs from Picturing Power, a stateless Bajau Laut woman photographed in 2007, a papaya tree, and self-portraits — as messengers for the mat in an active battle against the tyranny of the table.

It is no wonder that I-Lann enlists the help of dancers to convey the energy of this practice here. Performing in these works are members of the Tagaps Dance Theatre in Sabah. Formed of young natives (in various senses) to Sabah who are trained in traditional dance forms, the Tagaps troupe are frequently hired to perform in events organised by Sabahan government agencies. This promotion of their art form as a tool of statecraft is undone by the dancers’ insistence on the body’s capacity for rebellion; their accompanying repertoire combines their inherited traditions with contemporary urban dance styles, charged with messages of honesty and angst about the lives of youths in Sabah.9 Amongst these textured performances, new subjectivities and identities are produced. Entering the universe of Borneo Heart, the dancers’ bodies become living archives, gesturing through arm movements and facial expressions a tangible and passionate ancestral knowledge that could potentially liberate us from historical circumstance.

What does it mean to understand the body as something that must be continually enacted? And what are its implications for the definition and organisation of knowledge and value within the field of contemporary art and beyond? These are questions that bleed into the concerns of the Rasa Sayang series, where arms wrapped in hugs become alphabets. Though grounded in language, the series’ interest in linguistics does not imply a faith in words: on the contrary, in this series she highlights the opacity of verbal expression as a communicative tool.

It is not by coincidence that some chapters began at times when words did treason to the urgency of those present moments. The origins of the first chapter in 2012 have been described above, but there was also the epilogue in 2021, send me your arms in an embrace, when hugs became charged antidotes for a time marked by separation and isolation (Fig. 7). The rest of her “sentences” wrap and fumble over each other, mimicking the flexions and torsions of their alphabetical arms. They show her scepticism about the possibility of communication through language and about hierarchies of knowledge. Such an approach could be seen as an attempt to turn back to the body for explanation, reducing the flood of emotions that they contain into isolated gestures. These works know their unreadability. I-Lann calls it her most “emo” work.

Attempting to notate the indescribable does not exist independently of colour either, as the series’ blue-and-orange scheme attests. They are complementary colours in their most saturated hues, which meet on these glossy prints to encourage total immersion. A neat optical effect is also produced from their accompaniment, wherein after staring at the works for a period of time, the viewer can reproduce an afterimage immediately after on a blank wall. I-Lann’s intention here was to create a work that could exist as a “state”. It’s intuitive, sensory, trying to understand something, an act of probing something, any and all of what a hug might signal at the moment of embrace. The doubts and afterimages that they leave — unidentifiable bodies that speak unfinished sentences — are there to be shared; the artist and viewer come together as explorers in the writings of these notations.

I-Lann does not deny us the pleasure of reading her notations; she denies us the pleasure of possession, of knowing the subject and thus forgoing this state of curiosity. They remain on the margins of revelation, a state that is frozen as a fragile balancing act in the exhibition’s final essay, Untitled Self-Portrait (Fig. 8). The image narrates the artist’s dance and tussle with the table, compounded by her personal biography and an enduring journey towards the mat. This is particularly potent for I-Lann, who considers herself a product of a decolonisation process: her father was given a British government scholarship to study in New Zealand, where he also met I-Lann’s mother. He was trained to become a first-generation civil servant and thus handed the power of administration — a handover that came with it a host of other powers too.

In this image, against the landscape of Mount Kinabalu’s rocky peak, the symbol of the table is denied solid ground, arranged on the composition as a tottering stack variously supported or unbalanced by the artist’s body and other accoutrements. Transplanted from the confines of the colonial office to the extreme altitudes of Sabah, the tables — once symbols for the violence of administration — become aiding tools in an upward reach towards the mat. The mat (here represented by I-Lann’s favourite bedsheet) drapes down from the top of the composition,

Curator Bio

Denise Lai (b. 1997, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is currently an Assistant Curator at A+ Works of Art, for which she frequently works with artists and curators from within the Southeast Asia region. Denise graduated with a B.A. in History of Art from the University of Oxford, and an MA in the History of Design from the V&A Museum/Royal College of Art, London, with a focus on Material Cultures. Denise’s practice is rooted in cross-disciplinary thinking, collaboration and care. For her research into the design of the Malaysian development programme, Wawasan 2020 (“Vision 2020”), she received the Design History Society Virtual Student Award in 2020.

mimicking the topography of the landscape below; it is as if the artist is hinting at some telluric connection between the mat and its earth other, where the mat becomes a conduit for ancestral memory. I imagine the stripes of her bedsheet as staff lines, readying themselves for completion when the artist finally makes her way up the tower.

Documents Of Revelations

The works in ALLOM! AMATAI! ALLOM! participate in a history of notations that propose a moment of rupture in the thinking and representation of knowledge, even when the systems are little known. One has a sense that these possibilities are still being worked out, that we must continue to jostle with the table in order to engage in this conversation about doing things otherwise. We are not dealing here with a colonial past, but rather objects and systems in our contemporary world that retain power by virtue of their proximity to a history of administration and objectification.

I-Lann’s first act in this revaluation is to uncouple their value from quantification, and to explore through living examples of alternative value and linguistic systems how we can apply their principles to an artist’s practice, or (as her works always challenge us to consider) within our everyday. To view these works as movement notations is to ground them in the state that they intend to preserve, as documents of revelations and movements thriving outside the surface of the image, which evade knowing and description. This is a hopeful and powerful proposition.

References

1. Neil Genzlinger, “Ann Hutchinson Guest, Who Fixed Dance on Paper, Dies at 103”, The New York Times, April 15 2022, https://www.nytimes. com/2022/04/15/arts/dance/ann-hutchinsonguest-dead.html (accessed 29 Jan 2023).

2. Pauline Fan, “‘Rasa Sayang’: A sense of love and loss”, Malay Mail, 11 Nov 2014, https:// www.malaymail.com/news/opinion/2014/11/11/ rasa-sayang-a-sense-of-love-and-loss/780511 (accessed 3 Feb 2023).

3. For example: Hinava Media, “Borneo Heart Art Exhibition by Yee I-Lann & Collaborators”, virtual exhibition tour, May 14 2021, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nlbxge1QuI&ab_ channel=HinavaMedia, 00:7:11 to 00:9:16 (accessed 3 Feb 2023).

4. Whitney E. Laemmli, “Paper Dancers: Art as Information in Twentieth-Century America”, Information & Culture, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2017), pp. 1–30.

5. Dance Notation Bureau, “Labanotation Basics”, webpage, http://dancenotation.org/lnbasics/ frame0.html (accessed 5 Feb 2023).

6. For example: Gretchen McLaine, “Labanotation and LMA”, Journal of Dance Education, 20:1 (2020), pp. 44–47.

7. Laemmli, “Paper Dancers”, pp. 12–3.

8. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Preface”, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. xix.

9. @TagapsDanceTheatre, (n.d.), Tagaps Dance Theatre, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/@ TagapsDanceTheatre/videos (accessed 8 Feb 2023).

Title: rasa saying 2014