Imagining the future through movement, dance and costume.

What does the future look like? According to student contemporary dance group SMU INDANCITY, it’s a time where humans have evolved in new unimaginable ways, where technology becomes integrated into our lives, and where our relationship with the world around us has irrevocably changed.

Playing last Saturday as part of the annual SMU Arts Fest, SMU INDANCITY’s Beyond Human saw 28 dancers perform a series of numbers that provide a glimpse into that yet-to-be-seen future, thinking up robotic slaves, primal urges, and the rage against the machine that threatens to assimilate us and remove our identity once and for all.

Choreographed by SMU INDANCITY’s artistic director Hong Guofeng and guest choreographer Jieying Nah, Beyond Human showcases a wealth of imagination across its 60-minute runtime. Right from the beginning, we already get a sense of an almost dystopian future, as an AI-generated voiceover announces lighting cues, while a single dancer poses, moves and changes as a spotlight flashes periodically across the stage. We get the sense that some higher power is commanding her movements, always watching, always in control.

This is a theme that follows the remainder of the choreography, where it imagines a post-human world, one where we no longer live in an anthropocene, but subject to the whims of machine overlords or brutal nature. Humans have ceased to become masters over the planet, and instead are competing with so many other entities for the same space, resources and sovereignty.

This is made clear across the vignettes we bear witness to – one particularly memorable moment sees all the dancers forming a circle, walking clockwise and in sync, as if powered by some infernal machinery. At other times, we see them clash, crawl and battle the elements, with a large black cloth that billows out, like waves from an ocean of darkness ensnaring them and drowning them underneath it. And there are other moments wherein we see man as monstrous – figuratively speaking, as they seem to lord over puppet-like androids, represented by dancers moving mechanically and hung from literal chains, where any form of resistance shut down with a strike.

In short, the post-human world is in essence, a cruel one that seems to leave little space for kindness or breathing room, every moment a fight for survival or agency. But not all is bleak, as what seems to happen over the course of the performance is also a look into how man constantly grows to overcome such challenges, transforming into new beings each time and never backing down, a show of resilience and adaptability through evolution. Large group numbers see dancers supporting each other physically, coming together to form larger, heightened structures, as if fused into giants to combat this violent world.

Much of this is represented through the costumes, created by students from LASALLE’s School of Fashion. Seemingly inspired by classic Asian silhouettes and with light, malleable material, these are costumes that are donned after some of these dancers are ‘drowned’ in the ocean, as if they have learnt the art of symbiosis, emerging as new hybrid forms that are able to thrive in our new hostile environment. The costumes are colourful, and seem intentionally designed to be alien and otherworldly, bringing to mind undersea creatures, or mutations, with extra cloth that ebbs and flows with the dancers’ movements.

Fully in line with SMU Arts Fest’s theme of Post, Beyond Human ends up becoming a richly imaginative lens into how drastically our lives might change in the near future. All the fighting aside, the performance metaphorically ends on a note of coexistence and fusion, with two recurring characters, one dressed in blue and the other in an orange-red, finally reuniting at its end. Despite the overarching sense of doom and gloom, it is altogether quite hopeful as it considers our integral ability to forge bonds and connections with everything around us, and that regardless of how much destruction and change the world faces, we find a way to survive, and find new ways of being.

Beyond Human played at Victoria Theatre on 9th September 2023. More information available here

SMU Arts Fest 2023: Post runs till 24th September 2023. Full programme and more information available here