Guofeng

Curiosity, collaboration and being carried by the wind

Written by Elisa Chan | Photography by Phua Li Ling

We are in a small elevator heading up to the dance studio at Raeburn Park. Guofeng and his partner, Chiok, are standing close together, and I can’t help but notice how similar they are. Tall and lean, with arms and legs that seem to be made of something lighter than regular flesh and bone. Warm smiles. A disarming sincerity and sweet charisma that draws you in immediately. Together, they are the creative driving force behind Sigma, a contemporary dance collective that they also co-founded.

The studio space appears bigger than it probably is, thanks to the high ceilings and ample daylight spilling in through the windows. It feels like an empty warehouse, but with a fancy sprung floor covered over with a tactile mat.

Guofeng leads the dancers in a warm-up. For half an hour, he gives instructions without pause—a hypnotic stream of words delivered in a calm, soothing cadence that coaxes the dancers’ bodies into wild, sinuous shapes. The directions are specific but not prescriptive, allowing for the dancers’ own interpretation and freedom of movement.

Let the shoulders weigh themselves down… now we peel ourselves off the floor, feeling each part of the spine lifting… finding the spiral in our lower body…

Electronic music pulses away in the background. The dancers are facing each other in a loose circle formation: Matisse’s La Danse brought to life in form and spirit. Their contortions are strange and foreign to my everyday experience of physical movement but also feel startlingly resonant, as if a lost memory is being returned to me. 

This might just be a quiet warm-up before rehearsals begin, but I’m surprisingly touched by what I’m seeing. I’m the modern disembodied woman meeting her primordial embodied self. 

Today’s rehearsal will be a long one, as they usually are. The dancers will be here from 2pm to 10pm—voluntary hours on a Saturday—which seems like an extraordinary level of commitment and stamina. It is also a sweet harkening back to how it all began, 14 years ago. 

“After graduation from NTU, we were thinking, why shouldn’t we continue dancing,” Guofeng says. He’s referring to his group of friends from NTU’s contemporary dance club. “So we would meet on weekends—dance for 12 hours on Saturday, go have supper, then come back the next day and dance another 12 hours. It was our escape, maybe, from our day jobs during the rest of the week.”

This informal dance collective comprising Guofeng, Chiok and their friends eventually became Sigma.

The warm-up is over and rehearsals begin. Chiok and Guofeng squat on one side of the room, intently watching three dancers as they slide their way across the floor like loosely interconnected human tumbleweeds. “It’s like you’re the first child, second child, third child,” Chiok says, pointing to each dancer in turn. “You have different personalities… third child shouldn’t take the lead for too long.”

Contemporary dance choreographers are clever with their analogies.

“When you jump off, it’s a bit like how a leaf is carried by the wind,” Chiok says, gently fluttering her hand from Guofeng’s head to his shoulder. “Whooosh… like that. And then the leaf rests… and then again, woooosh. That’s the feeling we want.”

Guofeng explains that this is how the choreography directions tend to look like, in contemporary dance—he calls them movement tasks. “An example of a movement task might be: imagine you are facing a powerful energy, one that you are transfixed by and cannot fully escape…” As Guofeng speaks, he tilts his body backwards stiffly as if he’s being pushed over by something heavy.

It’s all sounding very much like acting directions, to me. Guofeng agrees, saying that there are similarities between contemporary dance and physical theatre training. Instead of dictating every detail of movement to the dancers, the dancers are given the freedom to improvise within the parameters of the task he has designed. It’s a collaboration between choreographer and dancer.

“But you know, there’s a challenge with improvisation: you are always trying to retain the energy and feeling of that original movement when you first experienced it. It’s like first love.” Guofeng smiles.

“There is that special spark there when a dancer does something the first time. And for me, I often feel that the first time they do it, it’s the best. Then you have rehearsals and repeat something so much that it can just become bodies doing movements. You can’t see the person anymore. That’s when it becomes a dreaded task for both me and the dancer.”

I ask Guofeng how he comes up with his ideas for a dance piece.

“I stay tuned in to my curiosity. I make it a practice to question, and wonder. Why things are the way they are, why people end up doing certain things. I’m interested to find out what are the internal or external influences that lead us to make a single choice in life. In a sense, we are all choreographing our own lives all the time.”

The more we talk, the more I’m starting to have a better sense of what contemporary dance might be, at least from Guofeng’s perspective. For all its apparent abstract and—let’s be frank—sometimes bemusing qualities, I find it helpful to think of contemporary dance as an artistic enactment of our lived experience, but with underlying motivations and inner workings revealed. In this way, it’s not unlike any other art form that invites us to look beneath the surface of what we think we know; a kind of physical story-telling that has the ability to go surgically deep. 

And so it’s perhaps no surprise that a lot of background work is involved in the creative process.

“Once I’ve settled on a topic, I start researching it—looking at everything from written articles to video footage, and paying attention to all kinds of details, like physical gestures and how people articulate when they speak. And I think about how all this might translate into dance.”

Research is a vital component of Guofeng’s choreography, and I appreciate that this is how his work achieves its depth of meaning. Some dance pieces require more research than others, but it’s clear that Guofeng puts in a good amount of thoughtful groundwork. I’m sure personality has a role to play in this too—he’s a contemplative guy.

A current work-in-progress, titled “Soft Archives”, is inspired by rather obscure writings by Walter Benjamin, describing 19th-century Paris from the lens of a drifter who records down his observations of the city in non-linear fashion.

“I didn’t read the whole book, that wasn’t necessary… but that’s an example of what research can look like. What I’m borrowing from the book is this idea that you can get a sense of a place from a constellation of moments, rather than a straight narration. So we are choreographing this dance in separate segments which we might arrange differently each time we perform it. It will be modular in that way.”

I wonder if it ever bothers him if the audience doesn’t quite get what the performance is about. How much does the audience figure into his creative process?

“In dance, there are three parties: the choreographer, the dancers, and the audience. It’s up to the choreographer to decide how much weight to give to each of these when they’re creating something—who are they doing it for? For me, I try to consider all three.

“I value the audience, and their energy. In fact, I see the audience as a partner, not a judge.”

This is an astonishing statement, when everything in our Singaporean upbringing primes us to believe otherwise: that our work is always being judged, graded and rated by the people who consume it.

Guofeng explains what he means by audience partnership. “For example, I bring the audience in as a stakeholder for Streams Where Deer Drink.” This is a performance that Guofeng co-choreographed, which has been running since 2024. “We put on the show almost every month, so there’s an opportunity to receive feedback from the audience after every performance, and then immediately tweak things for the next show. We get to respond in real time, almost. It’s an evolving work.”

How did he come to this idea that the audience is on their side, rather than a judge? Guofeng considers this for a moment, and then gives an example of how his feelings started to shift.

“I remember that there was one show which got reviewed quite… harshly, by a critic. It made me uncomfortable for a while. But later on, we read the audience feedback forms and realised that their experience had been completely different! It was really surprising, and I realised that actually, the audience is capable of much more than we give them credit for sometimes.”

This feeling of being “in it together” with the audience is evident in the way many of Sigma’s performances take place without a formal stage and seating arrangement. Streams Where Deer Drink is a roving performance that takes place on the grounds of Raeburn Park, and there is no artificial separation between the dancers and the audience.

“Proximity is important, if you are trying to reach people. Bringing the audience in as a partner feels like the completing of a circle; we are not doing this work alone.”

I’m getting a taste of how powerful proximity can be. Sharing this studio space with the dancers and watching them twist their bodies into shapes which are at once other-wordly and also gut-wrenchingly human, I too have a sense of being drawn into their vortex, despite myself. There is a kind of energy here that is hard to describe in words. Perhaps, a dance would do better.

Find Sigma on Instagram at @sigmacontemporarydance