WORKS

CURRENT MAJOR SEASON INTERNATIONAL SITE-SPECIFIC STUDIO SERIES YOUNG PEOPLE OTHERS

ARTS FISSION’s Studio Series was initiated in 2003. Originally called The Garden Affairs Series, it provides a laboratory space for ARTS FISSION to interact with artists of different disciplines. It aims to germinate new ideas through experimentation and share the process of creative findings in an informal studio setting. The series also serves to cultivate audience appreciation and understanding towards contemporary arts through intimate exchange and dialogue with the working artists.

The Garden Affairs Series was stopped when ARTS FISSION’s Garden Studios had to be closed for renovation. The series continued in 2015 with The Sandbox, an intimate dance performance to open the newly renovated studio.

The Sandbox is devised as a creative space for ideas and possibilities – it is the alternative platform for the ARTS FISSION dancers to articulate their own personal dance ideas and share their creative process of performance making with a small audience.

Akin to the childhood experience of playing with sands and building sandcastles, the temporal nature of sand allows flexibility, changes and free play.

The Sandbox enables the ARTS FISSION dancers to become thinking dancers who are engaged with the world and the everyday, and who connect and extract material from the environment, architecture, people, and culture into their own dance expressions.

THE SANDBOX

23 & 24 April 2015 | ARTS FISSION's Garden Studio

This intimate performance-sketch is the result of ARTS FISSION dancers’ latest cultural research in Chiang Rai, Thailand led by company artistic director Angela Liong.

The research is part of ARTS FISSION’s ongoing exploration for vernacular dance vocabulary under the initiative New Asian Dance Immersion Project.

The 24 solar terms serve as seasonal markers of the year in traditional East Asian lunisolar calendars for the agrarian societies.
Using the seasonal markers to establish a movement grid, the dancers were able to create their own personal impression of what subtle seasonal changes mean to urban living in the 21 century.