IN CONVERSATION WITH SUEKI YEE
Interview by Shanita Lyn. Photos by Yee Heng Yeh.
When I think of hurdles that may prove most challenging for a professional dancer to overcome, a few come to mind. Injury would be a big one; not having enough funds to pursue opportunities would be another; not having the opportunity to perform in the first place; and dealing with the feeling of not being good enough that all artists must face at some point. Over the past few years, Sueki has faced them all.
I first met Sueki about six years ago, when we were both students at ASWARA (Malaysia’s National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage). Even back then, I admired not just her talent, but also her drive, discipline, outlook, creativity and how genuine she was as a person. I didn’t get to see much of Sueki after I made the decision to switch to a different college, but continued to follow her journey over social media. Over the past few years, my admiration and respect for her has only grown as I’ve watched her overcome one challenge after another. From raising funds to perform her solo piece at a dance festival in Mexico, to undergoing surgery after injuring her ACL, she’s taken it all in her stride and handled it with strength, grace and determination. I caught up with Sueki over Zoom during the recent MCO here in Malaysia to ask her about her journey so far.
Sueki first started dancing at the age of seven, when she enrolled in ballet classes to fulfill her school’s extra-curricular activity requirements. “Honestly, I didn’t choose dance — my dad suggested it,” she laughs. “I had no idea what ballet was, and I was just like, ‘Okay, yeah, whatever.’”
Apart from the occasional hip hop or Chinese traditional dance workshop, ballet would be her only dance discipline for the next five years or so. Then at 12, she joined a movement workshop under Arts-ED, a non-profit organisation which focuses on community- and cultural-based arts education in Penang. For three hours every Saturday and Sunday over the course of three months, she was exposed to a whole new way to look at dance. “We didn’t go there and learn steps,” she explains. “We did things like going into Georgetown, looking at heritage and culture, looking at buildings and their structure, their history, their aesthetic… at twelve, it was a lot for me to take in. I didn’t even know what heritage was!”
But this would prove to be an important turning point for Sueki, who, prior to the workshop, had only understood dance from a strict, structured, syllabus-based ballet perspective. She credits the workshop for helping her break out of the “ballet body.” “I didn’t know before then that dance could be anything, you know? I think it was lucky for me to have encountered that at that point. You have a lot of dancers who have done only one particular style forever, and for them to suddenly go into something else, it’s really hard. Which it was — it was really hard for me. It took me time to get out of that and to be like, ‘Just do anything you want, literally,’ and [realise that] that is still dance.” This would be Sueki’s first exposure to contemporary dance and free movement. A few years later, she began taking formal contemporary classes from Aida Redza and Nancy Ng, whom she met through Arts-ED.
By the time Sueki decided to pursue a dance degree at ASWARA, she was already a highly-trained contemporary and ballet dancer. But studying there would come with its own set of challenges. The year that she joined was the second year the academy began allowing students to enrol directly into the degree program without first taking the diploma, which meant that, straight off the bat, she had a lot of catching up to do. “Going straight into the degree program was a bit of a shock for me, mentally and also for my body. I didn’t have the basics, especially in traditional dance. It was hard for me because before that I’d mainly done contemporary and ballet… It really took quite some time for my mind and body to understand that there are other ways to dance and there are other ways that you need to tap into in order to do traditional dance.” She remembers being very stressed out in her first semester, and spending a lot of time relearning the basics she’d missed out on outside of class. When she started dancing with ASK Dance Company (ADC) during her final year, she was given the opportunity to dive even deeper into traditional dance through performances and teaching classes.
Sueki would go on to spend three years with ADC — one year as an apprentice, two as a full-time dancer. She speaks of her time with the company fondly. “They were very accommodating, very flexible. [Professor Dr] Joseph [Gonzales] really encouraged us to do a lot of other projects as long as they didn’t clash with ADC’s schedule. So I’ve had the opportunity to join a few things.” Among those things was Cuerpo al Descubierto, a contemporary dance festival in Mexico, last year. Sueki considers this experience one of her proudest achievements to date for multiple reasons, the first being that this was the first real solo she’s choreographed for herself.
The idea of creating a solo had been at the back of her mind for a while. But upon graduating, she got busy with her commitments as an ADC dancer and just never found the time. “I always wanted to create a solo… I was interested in choreographing for myself. I’ve choreographed duets, with me and another person; I’ve choreographed for groups; I’d also choreographed a few solos before I went into ASWARA, [but they’re] pieces that I would now set as private on my YouTube so nobody would ever see [them],” she laughs.
In the end, good old-fashioned time pressure would be the thing that finally drove her to make it happen. She signed up for Short and Sweet Dance in Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPAC) amidst an already hectic schedule, and spent the next several months stealing every spare moment she could to put the solo together in time. “It was a crazy time for me — I was in Lisbon for five weeks [for the Metamorphosis International Residency], then I came back; I had less than a month for ADC’s iProject, which was staged in DPAC (Damansara Performing Arts Centre); and then directly after that was Short and Sweet. The only time I had [to work] on the solo was during ADC’s rehearsal time. Sometimes when I would take a break, I’d just sort of think about the ideas in my head, try out [some] stuff. A lot of the ‘choreography’ actually happened in my head. The first time that I did the full piece was during the technical run!” She laughs. “I’m not kidding, before that it wasn’t even finished. And then I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I think it’s fine!
“[So] I realise that I actually work well with some sort of time pressure. I’m not saying that it’s healthy, sometimes I can get really stressed out!” she laughs. “But it’s just that sometimes if there’s no time pressure, you overthink it. You have all these second-guesses and you end up not doing anything. And then when you have time pressure you’re just like, ‘Okay, I only have however much time, get your shit together, create something,’ and then you work with it. And I realise I’ve learned how to trust myself a little more in my process, meaning that I’ll go into it and know that in the beginning maybe it’ll be really hard, or I won’t like what I’m creating. But you work with it, and you figure it out. Trusting myself to figure it out is a big part of it.”
Sueki performed the piece, titled But Would You Know if a Fishbowl is Just a Fishbowl?, at Short and Sweet KL 2018, which earned her the Festival Director’s Award. After that, it was time to set her sights on where to perform it next. She staged the piece at Iskarnival in Johor, and also sent it out to three international dance festivals, one of which was Cuerpo al Descubierto. She remembers the experience of applying for these festivals as an exercise in overcoming her own self-doubt. “When I was looking for opportunities on where I could stage this work, I felt that it was a bit ambitious, because I didn’t know how good the work was. I mean, like, you know, I like it, but…” she laughs. “It’s hard to tell! There are times when you look at it and you’re like, ‘Ah! Okay, not bad,’ and then there are times when you look at it and you’re like, ‘...really?’” She admits that this is something she’s been struggling with lately — doubting herself before anyone else does. In the end, the act of sending in the applications itself was important for her to dispel her fear of failure and rejection. “You [tend to] think if someone rejects you it’s because you’re not good enough, but sometimes you’re just not what they’re looking for. It doesn’t mean that I’ve failed as a dancer or as an artist… There are so many amazing people and artists, and I think really being fine with not getting accepted is really important.”
So she sent out the applications — and got rejected twice. When she finally received her invite from Cuerpo al Descubierto, she thought it was going to be another rejection letter. It sure started out sounding like one: “In the beginning it was like, ‘Thank you for your application, we have been receiving more applications this year which means that we can’t accommodate that many performances.’ So I was already like, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, another rejection.’ And then I went to the next paragraph and it said ‘congratulations’! I remember being like, ‘...what?’ I was so excited.”
Once she’d gotten accepted, it was a matter of figuring out how she was going to get there. “I had two main concerns: one was funds, another was my schedule, because I was still with ADC,” she says. Of the two, the latter was more of a concern to her. ADC was gearing up for a big concert at the time, and she had already committed to a project with Dance in ASIA in Indonesia which overlapped with the dates of Cuerpo al Descubierto. But she was confident that she could make it work somehow. “Strangely, I think I felt like anything was possible. Because when I sent out the applications I honestly did not expect anything to happen. So it made me realise that so many things are possible, and there are ways of making things happen. You just have to find out how.” Thankfully, ADC was supportive of the opportunity and excused her from the concert, and she managed to figure out timing with the Dance in ASIA organisers. “So what happened was, I went to Indonesia for about ten days, I flew back, slept, and the next day I went to the airport and went to Mexico. It was nuts! But very exciting.” Sueki cheerfully blames her hunger for new experiences for her crazy schedule. “I think I tend to be quite greedy, in the sense that I wanna do everything! If it’s possible, I want to do it, you know? Which was really what happened at that time. I just didn’t want to pass up either of those opportunities.”
“It made me realise that so many things are possible, and there are ways of making things happen. You just have to find out how.””
In fact, she only started thinking about funding after she’d figured out her schedule and confirmed her attendance with the festival director. “I was like, ‘You know what, I’m gonna make this happen no matter what,’” she explains. “[So] I just told her yes, and then I tried to figure out [the rest] later.” At that time, it was kind of an awkward period for arts funding — applications for the previous cycle had already closed, and the next one had not yet opened. Someone suggested crowdfunding, but Sueki was hesitant. “I thought a long time about it, honestly. I mean, I’m all for crowdfunding, and I think it’s really great, because people do want to support certain things. [But] I think in Malaysia it’s not as popular to crowdfund for things. And generally it was just this idea of, ‘Who would want to fund me?’ or that people would be like, ‘Why should I fund you? You’re not that great, you’re not that important.’” For a while, she struggled with the feeling of self-doubt and whether she was really worth people’s money.
In the end, she decided to go for it, thinking it was the best solution at that point. “I honestly didn’t know whether people would [donate]. But I was really surprised by the response.” She received an outpouring of support from fellow artists, teachers she’s had in the past, even people she’d briefly encountered through work but didn’t know all that well. “It made me realise that sometimes you don’t know who has been following your journey. It was quite amazing to see who donated. I was sort of overwhelmed.”
As you may have guessed by now, the crowdfunding campaign was a success, and Sueki arrived in Mexico as the festival was already underway. She performed her piece on the third day after she got there, and spent the rest of the festival watching other performers and participating in workshops. Despite the jetlag and the language barrier, she had an amazing time. “It was very, very exciting. I was very lucky that the whole festival was very nice. It’s not a super huge festival. The whole team was quite close-knitted, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish but those who could would always translate for me, and we would go for dinner together… So it was really nice.”
Participating in Cuerpo al Descubierto marked a milestone in Sueki’s dance career, as she had never performed her own work on an international stage before. “Before Cuerpo al Descubierto, I hadn’t really brought my work elsewhere. In all the things that I had participated in overseas, it was always someone else’s work, as someone else’s dancer. It’s definitely very different, when it’s your creation and you feel like it’s a big part of who you are.” Though Sueki doesn’t consider herself as someone with low self-esteem, she admits that a little validation never hurts. “For someone to see your work and say, ‘We want this for our festival,’ it’s just really amazing. So I think that in itself is the main point of why it felt like a big achievement for me.” It also made a huge difference to her, seeing a dream that she’d had for a long time finally come true. “[Creating a solo] was one of those things where you’re like, ‘Oh, won’t it be nice if this happens.’ But then it happens! And I remember when I was in Mexico I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is literally what I dreamt of.’ And now you’re here doing it! It was very empowering.”
Just a few months later, though, Sueki would find herself facing one of the most challenging periods in her dance career so far. “I was performing in China last year, in late May [2019]. I was performing for three days, nine shows… so it was fairly intense. After the three days, there was a cast party for the festival. So people were drinking and dancing — I was going nuts, really just throwing myself [everywhere]. And then it felt like someone hit the back of my knee with something hard, like a stick. And I remember my knee just buckled in.” She decided to sit out the dancing for the rest of the night, but her knee still felt unstable on the walk back to their hotel. What she found confusing was the lack of pain, which led her to believe that it couldn’t be anything that serious. She even managed to squeeze in a hike at Hwasan with her fellow dancers. “Because we planned to do that after the festival, and I was so excited to go, and it was beautiful. Even now, I have no regrets [about] going, but, you know, not necessarily the smartest option,” she laughs.
When she got back to Malaysia a few days later, her knee had swelled up and she couldn’t walk without limping. She visited a couple of doctors who told her that if she wanted to be on the safe side she could get an MRI scan, but they didn’t think it was anything serious. She was advised to rest, and sent home with painkillers and anti-inflammatory pills. Over the next few days, the swelling and pain subsided, but the strange unstable feeling persisted. After talking to a friend who had torn his ACL and experienced the same symptoms, she realised that to put her mind at ease, she would need to get the scan. “And the experience is, like, seared in my mind: I’ll always remember the moment of the doctor showing me... He put my scan on this lightbox thing, and he was pointing at it, and he was like, ‘Do you see? This is your bone, this is your bone… Do you see this space here between your knee? Yeah, you see there’s nothing right? That’s supposed to be your ligament.’ I was like, ‘...So it’s a ligament tear?’”
The next couple of weeks were a flurry of activity as she went around wrapping things up in KL and making preparations for her move back to Penang, where she would undergo surgery and physiotherapy to mend her torn ACL. Sueki remembers the first few days after her diagnosis as being especially hard. “I would say the first, maybe, 2-3 days I was really depressed. I would cry, like, 7-8 times a day, I’m not even kidding — I would just think of it and I would cry.” Because she knew she wouldn’t be able to dance for several months at least, she was concerned that she would lose everything she’d worked so hard to achieve. “I went into this sort of freaking-out, paranoid mode. Before then, I always felt like I should push myself as much as possible. I think it’s very important to keep working on yourself, as a dancer. Working on it is important to me — working on it everyday is important to me. Because even if I don’t dance for two or three days, I can feel the difference when I come back. So if two, three days is going to make a difference, what about six months, nine months, one year? It was very disheartening to me.” The idea of having to rebuild her career in the performing arts scene after being gone for so long also crossed her mind. “I feel like it’s such a competitive industry. You’re always seeing people out there who are so much better than you and feeling like there’s so much more that you have to work on. And I think [there was] this fear of being sort of left behind or forgotten and having to reestablish yourself — which I don’t think is true now, but did at that point. I was just thinking of worst case scenarios.”
After those initial difficult days, though, her mindset began to shift. “I think there was a very clear point when my mindset changed, and it happened quite fast. You know how some people say everything happens for a reason? I don’t believe in that.” She laughs. “Because I think that sometimes it trivialises our problems a bit. But I think that, for me anyway, it’s important to make that reason, or to find that reason. When you have something bad or something that puts you at a disadvantage, when something like that happens, you use it. You make something out of it. If you can’t change the thing that is happening, then the only control you have is over how you react to it, and the best thing that you can do is to react in a way that benefits you the most. So I remember, on the third or fourth day, I woke up and suddenly I felt sort of determined. And I remember thinking, obviously I can’t reverse time, and I can’t make this go away, I still have to do the surgery. I can’t do anything to stop that, but what I can do is to prepare myself the best for it.” So, in the two weeks between getting the results of her scan and the operation itself, she focused all her energy on “prehab” — on making sure her body was in the best condition possible before undergoing the surgery, so she would heal as fast and well as possible afterward. It must have worked — because though most people would only begin hobbling about with a walker two weeks after an ACL operation, Sueki was given the green light to go home on crutches the very next day.
“If you can’t change the thing that is happening, then the only control you have is over how you react to it, and the best thing that you can do is to react in a way that benefits you the most.”
Nevertheless, the recovery process was not easy. Not being able to move her lower body felt crippling to her in more ways than one. Even though she tried to remind herself that this was inevitable and necessary, it was a painful and frustrating period. Over time, though, she slowly eased herself back into dance. With the help of her physiotherapist and her own determination, she gradually began testing herself and seeing what her body was ready for. “Of course, some people would tell me, ‘Okay, Sueki, I think you’re pushing it,’” she admits, “and maybe I did, a little bit. Sometimes there are moments where I’m like, ‘Did I go too far?’” This experience has forced her to reassess how much is too much and to listen to her body more. “I have a habit, which I’m still trying to fight now, where sometimes I don’t realise that just because I’m okay with something, [it doesn’t mean] my body is okay with it. I always have this ‘push through everything’ kind of mentality, which I think sometimes is good, of course — you need to always push yourself. But there’s a fine line between pushing yourself, and not listening to yourself, or not recognising where you are or what you need.”
However, she was pleasantly surprised to find that she didn’t lose as much of her physical strength and agility as she’d thought she would — in fact, in some ways, it was even better than before. “Because of my limitations in being able to dance, I have been focusing a lot of my training on strengthening or stability work. My physiotherapist was very helpful in providing the kind of exercise that is very important. [When] I couldn’t dance as much, you’re sort of focusing a lot on targeted training. When you do targeted exercise and realise [what your weaknesses are], you can zero in on your weakness and work on it. And when I got back into dance I actually realised some [movements] felt better than before. So even now, as I’m getting back into dancing, I’ve realised how helpful cross-training can be. I think it gives you a more complete understanding of what the movement needs, if that makes sense.”
Still, no amount of targeted exercise would satisfy Sueki’s need to get back into dancing and creating movements. Just three months after her operation, she jumped on the opportunity to perform again when a friend of hers reached out to her to create a site-specific dance piece for SPACE EXHIBITION, a visual arts exhibition at Loft 29 in Penang. Though she wasn’t back to full form just yet, she felt comfortable enough in her ability to dance by then to say yes to the project. “And honestly at that point I think I was just so excited to be able to work on something again, to conceptualise something, to think artistically. So I told her I would figure out a way, and I did.”
She also took advantage of her downtime to try her hand at a different form of stagecraft — acting. She auditioned for a role in a production under Project Unscripted, an independent theatre group based in Penang. She got the part and threw herself gladly into rehearsals for the next several weeks. “Again, for me it’s just so important to keep learning new things. But I do believe that dance and theatre are very closely related in terms of expression. There’s so much common ground that I thought it would be helpful for me, and I just thought it would be really fun. And it was! I’ve learnt a lot and I would definitely try acting again if I were given the opportunity.”
“There is space for art no matter what kind of conditions you’re in... One of the questions that I’ve been asking myself the most is, ‘If I can’t do this thing, what are the other ways that I can do it?’”
Sadly, her enthusiasm was cut short before the production made it to the stage. The Malaysian government announced that it would be implementing the Movement Control Order (MCO) to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic just a week before the show’s premiere. This also meant that other projects she had lined up for later in the year, including projects in Taiwan and Japan, were thrown into uncertainty as well. For Sueki, who was just starting to get back into the swing of things, this news was incredibly frustrating. “On one hand I feel like I was just, in a way, almost getting back to normal, and I was so excited. And then suddenly everything is cancelled, postponed, delayed to next year, don’t know whether it’s happening… I remember, like, one day before our MCO started, I sort of mentally broke down a little bit, because I felt like I was just getting back into it and now I can’t.” However, she feels her experience dealing with her ACL injury has equipped her to handle this new development better. “I do feel like my whole experience with my ACL has made me sort of mentally capable of adapting, and finding out that there is space for art no matter what kind of conditions you’re in. I think I have a lot more patience, for example. Throughout my ACL, one of the questions that I’ve been asking myself the most is, ‘If I can’t do this thing, what are the other ways that I can do it?’”
As it turns out, there are plenty. It seems that Sueki has had some sort of personal project or long-distance collaboration to share on her Instagram every day throughout this MCO. I ask her if being confined to her home has had a marked effect on her creativity. “Honestly, I don’t know whether I have been consciously thinking about it differently,” she says. “Maybe it’s simply because everyone is so excited to do so many things now that it became almost like a collective brainstorming of artists all over the world. People are just bouncing off ideas, coming up with new platforms or structures, and I think everybody’s creativity is just sort of feeding off that.” She also credits the sudden abundance of free time, and the mental space that comes with it, as being conducive to creativity and exploring ideas that she otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. “Now it’s just like, ‘Okay, you have all this time, what do you want to do?’”
After listening to Sueki’s account of her journey thus far, I ask her if she has a specific approach or philosophy she turns to when faced with challenges and limitations. “I think I was fairly lucky — I don’t think that there was anything really huge that stood in my way,” she answers, as if none of the challenges she’s just spoken about are that big of a deal. Instead, she mentions the slight resistance she faced from her parents when she first told them she wanted to pursue a dance degree. Even then, she believes the resistance was a good thing, as it only strengthened her conviction about dedicating her life to dance. “I think, in a way, it was almost helpful. And I say this because it really made me question whether I really wanted it, or why I wanted it. If you want something and someone just hands it to you, then you’re like, okay, cool.” She laughs. “But if you want something, and someone says, ‘Really? Are you sure?’ When you have some kind of resistance, then it’s a test of how much you really want it. And I think realising the extent of how much I wanted it really helped me later on.” Sueki gives her time at ASWARA as an example — whenever she was stressed, she would remind herself of why she wanted to be exactly where she was. “Because you’ve made it so clear to yourself, you [would be] so determined that even when things got hard, you’d remember why you wanted it in the first place. I think I wouldn’t have had the same determination if my parents had been like, ‘Yeah, go for it, whatever, we support you,’ you know?”
As she mentioned earlier, she also feels that limits play a role in sparking creativity. Does she believe, then, that limits are a necessary part of life? What does she feel we should and should not put limits on? She chooses her words carefully. “I don’t think you should put limits on anything,” she says, slowly and deliberately, “but limits will be put onto you, if that makes sense. You will already receive enough limits without you having to put any limits [on yourself]. Of course, as an artist, if you wanna challenge yourself, you can play with all kinds of limits. So playing with limits is definitely an option in pushing yourself to be creative. But in general, as a whole, I don’t think you need to [set] limits.”
To give an example, she references a collaboration she worked on recently with Lim Jing, an installation artist, for KongsiKL. “One of the points that we brought up and that I played with in my structured improvisation was that a lot of these restrictions — where do they come from? Like, sometimes we don’t do something because we think that we can’t, or we shouldn’t, even if nobody explicitly tells you that you can’t do that. I’m not trying to encourage crime, or rule breaking,” she says hurriedly, “but the next step is that when someone tells you you can’t do that, it’s ultimately still up to you whether you want to do it. And of course if you do it you have to be prepared for the consequences that you may face, [but] I still feel very much that the choice is ultimately up to you.
“And we mentioned this term, ‘self-imposed restrictions,’” she continues. “We believe a lot of restrictions are self-imposed. So the next time you think that you can’t, why do you think you can’t? Is it because someone told you? Is it because you are already imposing these judgments on yourself? Because a lot of times you think, ‘I shouldn’t do this, I shouldn’t do that,’ because you think someone will get mad, because you think that society will not approve, you think that it will not end well. But a lot of this is you creating judgments or second-guesses already, before realising maybe nothing is really stopping you.
In conclusion, she says, “The main thing that you shouldn’t put a limit on is — for me, anyway — experimenting. I think just this idea of allowing yourself to experiment, allowing yourself to fail sometimes, as a consequence of that experiment. For me, this experimenting, or this playing, or this curiosity, or this ‘be hungry’ [thing], is just such an essential part to keep growing and keep learning and keep finding out what matters to you, either as an artist or as a person. So keep experimenting. If you’re not comfortable with it, don’t be afraid of it because by experimenting with it, even if you fail, you will have become more comfortable with it. And that helps, that always helps. So, not limiting the possibilities of yourself. And constantly revising the idea of yourself. I believe everyone has this sort of image or idea of how you would describe yourself, but you need to realise that this can change. And if you’re aware of this then you can actively make changes, because you realise you’re gonna change anyway, right? So you can take control of this change, and decide how you want to change.”
“Keep experimenting. If you’re not comfortable with it, don’t be afraid of it because even if you fail, you will have become more comfortable with it. And that helps, that always helps.”
BRAZEN QUESTIONS
At the end of each interview, we ask our guests a series of BRAZEN questions about what inspires them, in the hope that you will be inspired, too.
What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning?
“I think I just want to experience stuff, if that makes sense. I would say dancing, but then that’s not always true — sometimes I don’t feel like dancing. Sometimes I wanna eat and watch TV or walk in the rain. So I think I really like sensations and experiencing stuff, whatever that may be and whatever I may feel like doing that day. And just this desire to experience and to feel things. It’s hard to explain too, because sometimes — you know, you’re not necessarily always enthusiastic about life, right? Sometimes you’re just not. But I think the scariest thing would be to not feel anything. If I’m upset, if I’m angry, if I feel moved in some way then I still feel human, and for me that’s fine — I can work with anger, I can work with frustration, I can work with sadness. But if I don’t feel anything, I don’t know how to deal with that.”
Who inspires you?
“Maybe it’s cliche, but I would say my mum. I think she’s one of the most inherently creative people that I know. And what I mean by inherently creative is her approach of always figuring out a way to do something. She just has a lot of curiosity in trying things out. For her it really doesn’t matter if she’s doing it the ‘right way.’ She retired at the end of last year, so she started experimenting more with baking and cooking and other projects. And she would hardly ever follow a recipe. She would always just be like, ‘Oh, I think this would go well with this,’ kind of thing. And she also started taking dance classes two years ago, at 54. Taking up dance at the age of 54, for me, is like, amazing. Which, again, is very inspiring for me.
“And I knew that she sent us for dance classes not because she’s some kind of ‘dance mum’ — she didn’t want to pressure us — but for her it was just… art was important, and she would much rather send us for dance, painting and music rather than tuition. So we never went for any tuition classes, because she was like, ‘You’re already in school for how many hours a day, you don’t need to study more.’ I really appreciate that, because a lot of my friends’ parents didn’t have that kind of mindset, and they were pressured to study a lot. And my mum was just like, ‘Go out! Play!’ And she would bring us on nature walks, and we would keep insects, and we would keep tadpoles and let them grow into frogs... I feel like she’s just so open and free-spirited, and curious like a child, like, ‘What can we do?’ I feel like I’ve sort of inherited that from her also.”
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
“I think this is something that a lot of teachers and people have said, so it’s not exactly a ‘quote,’ but I remember this is something that Professor Dr Joseph [Gonzales] used to say which resonated a lot with me, and I still feel it today. And it’s very simple — it’s just, ‘Be hungry.’ As in to be hungry for knowledge, be hungry for experience, be hungry for more. To never be just, ‘Okay, yeah, I’m pretty okay where I am,’ you know? Which is fine, depending on what you’re going for. But for me, and I think especially as an artist, it’s important to be hungry. Not necessarily for fame or wealth or success, but to try out more stuff, to learn new things. Otherwise you become complacent, or you become stagnant, and I think it’s really dangerous because then your art may cease to hold excitement for you. [It’s] important for me to keep on creating, keep on thinking, keep on doing as much as I can to keep myself excited.”
What is your idea of the fullest version of yourself?
“I think the most ideal state or condition that I want to be [in] is to be honest with myself and my work. And by this I mean [to] keep researching, keep questioning, to keep delving deeper into my work or my art. One thing that I have been thinking about is why we do some things. Sometimes I can’t explain why I do something, but I try to question it anyway. And I try to be honest with myself in that sometimes, if I don’t know, then I don’t know, and I try to be okay with that… not pretending that I have all the answers or that I know everything. Just being honest with myself about the state or the condition, or my intentions in doing something.
“And I think especially with something like being honest or being truthful, it keeps changing — as you grow and you change, and that’s normal. So constantly having to revise what is truest to you where you are, and hopefully resonating with yourself and what you’re doing. So maybe right now I’m interested in ‘this,’ and I keep working on it. Maybe two years later, five years later, twenty years later, I have changed and that is not my focus anymore. And then I would have to find out what my new ‘truth’ is. Big philosophical question, but yes.”
When do you feel truly alive?
“I have three answers. One is when I’m dancing. Especially when I’m performing, but not always. There are certain days where even in rehearsals, even when I’m just dancing for my own training, some days you just feel so connected — your mind, your spirit, your body. And you just feel so there and you feel like… you know? Like, “This is my life.” So I think that’s one.
“The second one is when I’m travelling. I haven’t travelled a lot, but I have been lucky enough to travel a little bit, especially because of dance — dance has taken me more places than I otherwise would have had the opportunity to go to. I think because I’m just very curious by nature. When I was a kid, one of my favourite things to happen to me was, if I fall asleep in the car, and I wake up, and I look out of the window and I don’t know where we are. And then I’d just feel this excitement. It sounds weird when I say it like that. But it’s true! And even now, I think there’s this thing about being in an unfamiliar place. It just feels very exciting to me. So I think travelling is of course one of the obvious ways where you can put yourself in a new situation. And I just feel very alive and very excited and very inspired.
“And my third is not really an answer but… I think there are also moments when you almost feel… I don’t wanna say ‘enlightened,’ but you just feel so content. And you feel like nothing can touch you, almost. You feel like as long as you have yourself, nothing bad can touch you. I’ve had a few of these moments, and they’re usually very... insignificant. One of the strongest ones was when I was in Form 6, and I was walking to school. And it was kind of cold, and the wind blew, and the leaves were swirling around, and then I just stopped for a moment, and stood there for five minutes because it just felt so wonderful. And I couldn’t tell why, you know? No reason, just felt really, really good. So yeah, weird, random moments like this. And you just feel so… aware of everything at the same time. You look at everything, and you feel like you’re looking at everything anew. And then you try to keep that feeling, you try to remember that feeling because you know it will pass. It’s really hard to pinpoint it...It’s just good to have them. I always feel like there’s so much more that I want to do, there’s so much more that I want to achieve or I expect myself to be. But in that moment it’s just like, this is perfect, like a perfect moment. And you’re just so content with everything... Yeah, maybe it’s all about balance.”
