Performed at
Bangkok Theater Festival 2015, Bangkok Art and Culture Center
International Dance Festival 2015, Bangkok Art and Culture Center
Dancing in Place 2016, Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
"Amplitude" means the maximum of a wave
we meditate walking. we see a source of energy in the body, that buzzy feeling.
even when you are at rest, sleeping. the inner self is still working to keep you alive. that heat like the heat in the center of the earth.
no matter how cold/immobile/unchanging the crust seems to appear, the middle of the earth is red hot, active and buzzing.
The process at our rehearsals:
we concentrate our mind to our normal/most regular and mundane action of walking (we separate the action and awareness of walking and thinking/getting distracted by all the banal things like environmental sounds, an accidental audience, our own worries/self-consciousness, unanswered emails etc. in other words, whatever happens we let it happens, acknowledge it and start to put different things in different boxes.
In physics, we say "most happenings in the universe is a perturbation(=wave) from equilibrium." so is life. "Amplitude: Freedom of the Soul" operate on the premise that life is a dance. it already is. mind-body is a duality. it's our task as performers in Amplitude to observe, to ride on and amplify this energy to free ourselves from limitations--physical, mental, and perhaps the most brutal, social. all by the simple yet challenging act of observing and listening.
The dance techniques of "Spine party" are thus developed in this process. We source our movement by listening to the spinal mechanics, the "temple" or "cathedral" of the nervous system and skeletal support. We inquire into the cavities and the liquid body inside us for music. We allow these sound to echo in this internal space so that our body become an instrument, a perceptive one that responds acutely to each other and our environment. Our existence emanates and create space..to become free. The only way we can survive in this demanding world.
Pre-show note for "Amplitude: Freedom of the Soul"
Published by Nitipat Ong Pholchai
Amplitude: reflections before Bangkok Theater Festival 2015....written on Fri 6 Nov 2015 before the premiere at BACC
Last week, i've just had a great conversation with Kris Sanguanpiyapand and Barry Bell about my new piece "Amplitude" which will premiere this weekend. Kris asked me good questions like whether I think we SHOULD have freedom? what is physics? why i think dance (that i enjoy) for me is physics and physics is beautiful (this statement doesn't apply to the kind of "representational" dances though, tbh).
It's fair to say that my new work not so didactic or telling...that I want you to think this or that way (despite my strong belief about this subject matter).
"Freedom" for me is knowledge and openness to knowledge. it's about the ability to recognize possibilities, including the possibility that your worldview might be limited, that familiar things can exist in other dimensions. Why don't you try thinking/living in those dimensions?
We are born with freedom since birth. The law of nature provides you so much to live off from. But things (mostly man-made and artificial, like society, your schooling, stuffs on TVs/commercials...including your parents which are products of your grandparents and so on) collude to tell you no no no...no you can't do this you can't do that. this is inappropriate...blah blah...all without giving you a reason why or the reasons don't make sense but the consequence of not following the status quo is enough to make you insecure/uncomfortable to be yourself, really be yourself. And you were given no tools to think for yourself either. This piece is about noticing/discovering those tools, fine-tuning them, using them to full capacity, then keeping them in a box for later use. you are the "master" of those tools...instead of being mere "tools"...
In "Amplitude," we perform like we play. we play like it's our nature. and our nature is in itself a performance.
(you may then ask what is "performance"? Some may disagree with me and think rather that it's an opportunity for the performers/director to "show-off" their skills, techniques, aesthetics, accomplishment blah blah. But at the end of the day, it's your choice!)
Published by Nitipat Ong Pholchai · June 30, 2016 · Paderborn, Germany
Amplitude: freedom of the soul (2015)
This project continues to relive in jam situations (that's also where the idea was derived)...for me most recently at CFKL (contact festival Kuala Lumpur) 2016...in bits and pieces during underscore weekend and deeply during the jam on the final nights. Here would be a possible synopsis of it....
Only in places of unknowns are we the most free. When our conditioning are anything but frames of references...out of many many many frames of references. Conditioning are no more restrictions; they are the doors we just come from...in a room full of doors to open into.
Mind and body makes no distinction; and in fact you could have just intuited that it has been the mind-body all along. While riding the amplitude of the waves, we notice connections. Dots become lines, lines become planes, planes become networks. You hover above it and that becomes a universe in and of itself--the dot. And maybe there is another universe or multiverses somewhere, together, besides, on top and inside this universe-dot. But does it matter? We keep on making choices and trying to relate. We just resonate in this, these, that and those...waves.