Dance
Mavin Khoo
ActionBase Studio

Arriving at Mavin Khoo’s performance as part of the International Festival of the Arts organised by ActionBase with the support of the Malta Arts Fund was a committed act in itself. The site of the studio was described ambivalently, creating an aura of remoteness.

People interested in attending any of the festival’s events were informed of transport that would pick us up from behind Verdala Palace walls some minutes before the performance was scheduled to begin.

The sense of pilgrimage created to get there was most appropriate considering the sacred, intimate and humanely inspiring performance we were there to witness.

Mr Khoo is well known now to the Maltese audience, especially those following the dance scene. His performance Chandra Luna which he performed together with his dance company some six years ago at the Manoel Theatre was one of the most poetic performances I have ever seen. He returned to the Manoel to perform a more classical form of Indian dance, Bharata Natyam, and has since been back on several occasions giving workshops and performance demonstrations.

He is now a faculty member of the Dance Studies Department at the University of Malta. A large crowd therefore gathered to watch his performance in Buskett.

As we were invited to walk to the designated performance space, we heard the classical sounds of southern India drawing us in. The space we entered resonated of the sacred. Mr Khoo sat crossed-legged with a book open before him.

Pushkala Gopal, producing live vocals, sat to one side and percussionist Bhavani Shankar on the other. Mavin introduced the evening’s performance as being his opportunity to share a rarely performed form of Indian dance known as the abhinaya, a word which he said technically should include all performance modes since it means communication.

Mr Khoo informed us that the evening would be a challenging one for the audience. As a dance form, abhinaya is performed sitting down, with the performer giving physical expression with his upper body, face and eyes, to the poetry that he reads from in front of him.

Thus the form of the evening was set up, as the audience was invited to share in an evening of performed poetry in its fullest, most physical sense; that would be interlaced with explanatory comments from Mr Khoo himself. The intimacy of the evening would be created through the direct mode in which Mr Khoo, sitting at close distance to the audience, would address us, as well as through the constant way in which the three performers communicated organically, breathing life into the poetry.

More significantly, the intimacy was created through the immediacy of Mr Khoo’s presence as he gave form to the emotions carried by the characters represented in the classical poetry. With flexibility and fluidity he became an embodied storyteller, shifting across the multiple characters’ emotions. The intricacy of his facial expression and gestures breathed emotion into stories of love, eroticism and spirituality. In being so in touch with a broad spectrum of universal light and darkness, Mr Khoo homed into the fullness of his humanity.

The climax of this was in the last piece he performed, a piece he described as being reserved for the more mature of performers. It told of a woman mourning the loss of her lover’s love. A power cut necessitated the performers to continue without amplification and in limited candle light, making the evening even more intimate.

The intensity of the pain ex-pressed in his rendering of the piece could come only from a place that has experienced loss. Mr Khoo described the form as spiritual because to reach God, one must be in touch with the fullness of humanity. The performance was also deeply and experientially spiritual in the way that Mr Khoo embodied an androgynous state that is fluidly in touch with femininity, masculinity and the space in between; in the way that he touched on the depths of human experience; in the way that he took the poetry to a space-in-between by embodying the written text, thus taking it from the book to the audience. The intimacy and the communication of such deeply felt human emotions made the experience one of communion.