OzAsia Festival review: Searching Blue
Visceral, elemental, and tenderly human, T.H.E Dance Company entranced OzAsia audiences with a bid for connection through touch.
T.H.E Dance Company’s site-adaptive work, Searching Blue, is a tactile exploration of the human condition. Daring, emotive and genre-bending, this contemporary dance piece beckons you to dissolve into the movement with a shared ferocity and vulnerability as the artists gesture for audiences to seek connection.
Searching Blue is informed by the ‘extended mind thesis’ and Dr Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, using both texts as tools to understand metaphysical connectivity and the importance of recognising the extended self in our environment. In the context of this conceptual piece, the dancers construct new threads of genuine connection with each other within the Festival Plaza site.
Against the backdrop of this public space, five dance artists – dressed in varieties of deep blue – begin in a thawing state, responding to a build-up of guttural vocalisations by Kent Lee, the centrepiece performer and sound artist. The movement escalates as the performers start to summon the audience to join them in a soft and fluid dance.
Through touch and sensitive mimicry, we watch the performers interrogate the nature of kinship. It poses a provocative model for interactive movement, inviting the audience to volunteer and contribute to an emotionally stirring collective experience.
Bound by the interlocking of hands and gaze, the artists and audience participants develop a joyous, trance-like dynamic while a meditative soundtrack flickers in the background.
As noted on the pre-show pamphlet, the company centres the nurturing of human potential throughout all of its projects. Searching Blue is an ode to this ethos, as it demands the audience to engage with the art directly instead of passively. Under the direction of Kuik Swee Boon, T.H.E. Dance Company’s founding director, this piece ultimately offers a love letter to humanity and expression.
Searching Blue wavers between artist-only ensemble pieces and audience participation. During the group articulations, an exceptional musicality and synchronicity between the company’s performers are staged. In a spirited interplay of bodies between scattered trees and a cascading staircase, the show captures a moving image of harmony and oneness with the external.
The show’s final crescendo is rendered with a tender solo by one of the performers, and an accompaniment from the musician and his vibrating instrument. Throaty breathwork can be heard throughout the show, particularly at its conclusion, captivating audiences with its vulnerability.
Searching Blue is visceral, elemental and tenderly human. Inviting audiences to surrender ourselves to the music and be steered on an odyssey of self-discovery and the revelation of fortuitous connections, it’s an incredible experience that will bring you to a sustained state of mutual bliss – even if just for an hour.
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Searching Blue ran from October 23 – 25 as part of OzAsia Festival 2025