Kar Kah Chan (Malaysia)
Kar Kah, Chan (b.1997) is a Malaysian interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, educator, and director of Marrow Collective. Kar Kah was trained in the background of Chinese classical dance, Chinese ethnic folk dance, and contemporary dance at Beijing Normal University. She founded Marrow Collective which explores the interstices of dance and visual arts in 2018. Kar Kah’s research on local Chinese dance surrounds the ancestral traditions and somatic memories of the Malaysian Chinese community, and their influence on Chinese dance in Malaysia. With later involvement in Chinese Opera and Chinese Martial Arts(Nan Quan), she seeks the commonality between the body movements of these arts and the integration between them in Tanah Melayu. Her works also focus on the Chinese philosophies, oriental body movements, and their integrations between the cultural exchanges in Southeast Asia.
DōNG
(15 mins) – performance
DōNG’, continuous motion of a life-form, a physical object, a centripetal force and movements of the inner dimensions. From our perspective of embodying traditional philosophies to understanding the way of things, there’s always circles, roundness, and curves in the inevitable inertia of thinking patterns in the Chinese culture. What kind of sound would it be? If the way of roundness can surround one’s life. A humming voice, a sharp beat, an overwhelming frequency, a calming sound wave.It’s the sound from the oriental land, that humbles these immovable bodies.
