Kuik Swee Boon was the first Asian principal male dancer with Spain’s Compania Nacional de Danza from 2002 to 2007. During his career with the CND, Boon, now Artistic Director of T.H.E. Company, worked mainly with Nacho Duato as well as renowned choreographers like Jiri Kylian, Mats Ek, Ohad Naharin and Wim Vandekeybus. Prior to joining the CND, the Contemporary dancer began his career in 1990 with the Singapore People’s Association Dance Company and Singapore Dance Theatre (SDT).
Excerpts from an interview with Boon in Singapore:
What or who inspired you to dance and what made you choose dance as your career?
My earliest exposure to dance was as a 15-year-old student in Batu Pahat, Malaysia, in late 1980s when I attended a neighbourhood school that had limited resources. The dance club was populated by a group of passionate young dancers. They and our dance instructor Tan Lian Hoe were my earliest role models, artists who persisted in their beliefs and way of life. Imagine being able to find something in your life that gives it its true meaning and focus!
Who were your mentors in Contemporary Dance?
Our dance club instructor Tan Lian Hoe was my earliest mentor. Further on in my career, the greatest influence on me was Nacho Duato, artistic director of Spain’s Compañia Nacional de Danza. To him, practising art was a way of life, as natural as eating and breathing.
Did you train in ballet or any other dance forms?
In the early 1990s, I joined the People’s Association Dance Company in Singapore and we were exposed to various dance forms, including Ballroom, Salsa, Cha-cha, Jazz, Chinese and Indian cultural dances. When I returned to Singapore from Spain, I took a few Hip Hop classes with a commercial dance school.
When did you start your own company?
I started T.H.E Dance Company in 2008, after returning from Spain. I had the choice to remain in Europe or return to Singapore. I knew that the work I wanted to create should reflect my identity and position as an Asian, and relate to an Asian audience. I started choreographing even as a dancer in SDT, and living in Spain provided the greatest impetus for starting T.H.E in order to have my voice heard.
What about financial support to such initiatives?
When we first started out, there was very little financial support. We received a one-year grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore which supported the salaries of the dancers. Our strategy was to apply for commissions from organisations and festivals such as the National Museum of Singapore, the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, and the National University of Singapore in order to reduce the financial burden of creating new works. To resolve the issue of rehearsal space, we relied mainly on friends and favours, tapping studios in the People’s Association and Singapore Chinese Girl’s School, amongst others. Eventually, we secured residencies at the School of the Arts and National University of Singapore before becoming tenants of the Goodman Arts Centre arts housing compound.
What would you call are some of your memorable productions till now?
My first memorable production was “Silence”, which I created in 2007. Restaging it in 2009 was our first large-scale production at the 1942-seater Esplanade Theatre. We were only a year old then and the performance came with high expectations and immense pressure. Most memorable was encountering numerous technical issues, from the lights to the sound malfunctioning. The dancers and I were hands-on in all production aspects, which proved to be a huge challenge when juggling with performing.
The second is “Old Sounds”, the company’s very first commission by the National Museum of Singapore in 2008. The third and most memorable of all was “As It Fades”, one of T.H.E’s landmark works and also one of our largest commissions, by the Singapore Arts Festival 2011. “As It Fades” marked a turning point for the company; the company training was starting to pay off with the dancers arriving at peak condition; financially we were in a stable condition.
In the recent months, we have been touring our repertoire to cities in Poland and South Korea. May 2014 saw the restaging of “As It Fades” in Singapore, and was significant as we took to a mid-sized venue for the first time for an in-house production. The sell-out performance showed us that there was an audience out there hungry for Contemporary Dance. Prior to that, the Esplanade’s Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts commissioned us in February 2014 to create a work titled “The Ordinary Man”.
