Examining loneliness, choreographer calls for resuming physical contact

Although lockdowns have been necessary, physical contact is critical to human life, said Nir de Volff, choreographer for a show at this year’s Macao Arts Festival (FAM), in an exclusive interview with the Times.

Club Loneliness is the name of the dance play that will be featured at the festival.

De Volff is not a new face in the festival, having choreographed the closing show, “Trust,” for the 26th edition of the festival.

Born and raised in Israel, de Volff founded the dance company Total Brutal in 2007 and currently resides in Berlin.

The inception for this year’s work began in 2019, when de Volff finished that year’s play in Macau. He planted seeds in 2019 and has since seen it grow.

“I dare not say it will bear good and ample fruits, but the scene is developing,” he said.

He wanted to do the dance play earlier than this year, “But then came the coronavirus,” he said, implying  that restrictions forced the work to be suspended.

The past three years accentuated loneliness, the motif of this play, de Volff said. He especially noted that during Covid-19 restrictions, human interaction was virtualized and physical contact was literally impossible.

The restrictions helped him compose a blueprint of this play before arriving in Macau, although it was vague and he “did not know what the actual play would be like.”

Adding to this, his Macau collaborator, Stella Ho of Stella & Artists, said the motifs of love and loneliness are universal. As the producer of this work, she thinks Macau audiences will understand both the show and the motifs.

She said people nowadays have a lot of entertainment, but are not talking to each other. She and de Volff referred to scenes of people sitting at the same dinner table without saying a word with each other.

The duo found the practice of people gathering for meals but making no conversation unappetizing.

“Everybody has at least three messaging platforms but, at the end of the day, there is no physical contact,” de Volff said, as Ho nodded in agreement.

There has always been debate on the power of eastern and western dancers, but there is no such debate within de Volff.

He disagrees that Chinese dancers are less powerful than their western counterparts. Comparing dancers from the two cultures, the choreographer thinks the differences in diversity are obvious.

“Maybe [western dancers] have more diverse experience, styles and emotional or intellectual ideas,” de Volff said. “But it’s hard to say.”

Considering Macau, he thinks it is right to say dancers in Berlin have more diverse experiences. However, when it comes to his productions, the difference is not obvious, because he focuses on breathing. “If you are a living human being, you breathe,” he said.

As breathing provides energy to the entire body, which is crucial to dancers, he developed the Breathing Body Method (BBM). He does not mind the method being compared to conventional and new age philosophies, because the core idea is to energize the body and mind through respiration.

Sometimes, dancers in the show experience difficulties adjusting their breathing patterns, “but this has nothing to do with culture.” he said.

De Volff said cultural differences are becoming vaguer in this era when international communication occurs often and is so simple to access. People – especially those of the younger generations – are very much up to date on the latest trends and news.

Technological advances have also expanded the platforms for dancing. “Young dancers will get more support on social media and video streaming platforms,” de Volff added.

Discussing her collaborations with Total Brutal, Ho said de Volff did not hold back in pushing the limits of local dancers. She said he would test local dancers against his standards in Berlin, so local dancers would see improvements.

“It can be difficult to invite a choreographer who actually helps cultivate improvement in local dancers,” Ho added.

De Volff’s choreographic philosophy relies more on the dancers themselves. He does not normally formulate a full set of dances for performers to follow. Instead, he presents a topic or motif to dancers and allows them to create the dances and movements they consider authentic to the topic or motif. Then, he will provide his opinions on the movements and suggestions on how these movements can be better presented.