​

a performance installation situating the diasporic body in conversation with the sea. working with breath and the gaze, five performers shift and blur the boundaries between personal and collective narratives in a meditation on (post-)coloniality, lineage and the concept of 'founding'.

​--

sea flights (every one of them landed on a beach like this)

performance
​4 hours

concept / choreography : jee chan
in performance​ ​with : sara cook, marios ento-engkolo
呉家慇 (angel ng ka yan), claricia parinussa
video / dramaturgical assistance : stefan pente
sound : sara cook, 呉家慇 (angel ng ka yan)
light : jazz hutsby

production / technical : neil anderson, ali biggs, amy dawson,
lucy gaizely, kevin murray, neil smith, calum paterson

mentors : rosina bonsu, laura gonzalez, alberta whittle

developed with support from the contemporary performance practice programme at the royal conservatoire of scotland

presented at into the new festival 2019
pearce institute, glasgow
21 march 2019
​

 "... the smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. and later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow’s nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea – which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells – dissolving with pleasure in that breath." -- süskind / das parfum (1985)

" ... he climbed on to the top of this rock and looking across the water he saw that the land on the other side had sand so white that it looked like a sheet of cloth." -- sejarah melayu

​"I walked this morning around the walls and limits of the ancient town of singapore, for such in reality had been the site of our modern settlement. it was bounded to the east by the sea, to the north by a wall, and to the west by a salt creek or inlet of the sea ... the works of singapore were not intended against fire-arms, or an attack by sea; or that if the latter, the inhabitants considered themselves strong in their naval force, and therefore thought any other defences in that quarter superfluous." -- john crawfurd / journal of an embassy from the governer-general of india to the courts of siam and cochin-china (1822).

image credits : stefan pente