F-ing Good Provocation Zine (2023) Available now
Review by danceartjournal
Testimonial:
‘As a dance artist with Asian heritage myself, I found solace and hope in the work Jane Chan - and the twenty other artists represented in this provocation - are doing.’ - Sunhi Keller
‘gently thorough’ - Jo Fong
‘Bravo, What a brilliant piece of work, Thank you!’ - Suzy Wilson, Clod Ensemble
Zine available at Library of Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), St Mary’s University, Trinity Laban, LCDS - The Place, University of Sussex
Stockists:
London - Steamroom | Housmans | Centre 151
Newcastle-upon-Tyne - NewBridge Books
Liverpool - News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop
Hong Kong - ACO, WanChai, HK
F-ing Good Provocation phase 2 (2022)
by Jane Chan alongside 8 of 20 artists from phase 1 - an organisational strand, partnering with 6 leading dance organisations (5NPOs), engaging in a year-long series of dialogues, resulting in action plan for each organisation to better centre East and Southeast Asian diasporic community in their buildings, publications, artistic programmes and futures whilst embedding care and accountability.
F-ing Good Provocation phase 1 (2020-21)
by Jane Chan alongside 20 artists
A research and scoping phase resulting in an essay. An anti-racist and anti-oppressive project with an intersectional approach that addresses, recognises, contributes in dismantling the power dynamics within our daily and professional lives and how they manifest in the landscape of movement, dance and body practices through listening to 20 independent artists’ lived experiences who identify as East, Southeast Asian and artists of the East and Southeast Asian diaspora in Britain.
For more details here
Made possible with support from Arts Council England & Dance Art Foundation
Void
Choreography | Jane Chan 陳楨
Music (HK) | Frankie Chan 陳詠俊
Lighting (HK) | Karen Kwong 鄺嘉欣 & Jane Chan 陳楨
Costume (UK) | Izzie Byers
Since 2016, Jane has been collecting personal stories from older adults she met in a variety of communities through movement and dance projects. Inspired by her late grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, Void is an intimate solo dance performance about grief, kindness and being present. A show that explores the uncontrollable physical, mental and circumstantial constraints imposed on individuals who rise above the void.
Void takes us through an emotional journey behind some of these stories. Void explores freedom when confronted with a lack of means and reveals the heart-warming yet heart-breaking realities of life.
Using Chinese classical dance and Kathak, Jane yearns to find her choreographic voice and pays homage to the classical forms.
Void | Double bill by Jane Chan & Sung Im Her | Brunel Arts, Brunel University | UK | 19 Feb 2020
Void | Live Drafts, The Yard Theatre | 8 Oct 2019
Void | Future Fridays: Jane Chan & SungIm Her | Chisenhale Dance Space | 12 Jul 2019
Void part of Project Pink curated by Gigi Coley | Central Saint Martins | 24 Apr 2019
Void | Multimedia Theatre, HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity, Hong Kong | 23 Feb 2019
Void | Resolution, The Place | 11 Jan 2019
Void (work-in-progress) | Fringe Club, Hong Kong | 2 & 3 Feb 2018
‘Chan’s choreographic voice is nuanced and humane’ by Anna Winter
‘Chan maintains the grace, the extension and perfect lines of a classically trained dancer. In that we have the beauty of the paradox - the simultaneous impression of a crumpled old woman and a dancer in control of her craft.’ by Sanjeevini Dutta
The first performance on the first night at the Place’s annual Resolution Festival presented last answers to final things. Vastness itself was address in the response only a solo performance can resolve. Jane Chan’s Void, uncluttered by any article, opens with a visual display of the human, not its predicament, but our condition. In crude parlance she’s got our number - and that number is infinite. From darkness, she appears flowing in white, seated beneath a hovering of light, but somehow she is giving out that encircling dark set round her. The white vapour hovering above, not quite a cloud, is more a suspended ether balancing with the human waiting below. In double reflection, before the first movement of this body supple in its rigor, we are known to ourselves. Here glows a radiance she will simultaneously animate and eliminate with her physical grace. We watch as she both enacts and erases the courage and dignity which impelled this work’s creation.
Visits to an infirm grandmother impelled this response to all those in hospital; to all those sheeted and swaddled in white. That was but the place of departure, she arrives with a work of hands which are the evening’s real illuminations. Their classically informed gestures developed more personal character in space than I have ever witnessed on any stage. Ever evolving, turning out and in, rounding in angles, flowing to heart and out again, we witness the human struggle with the Absolute which never takes notice. Oh but we do of these addresses to empty space by this silent kathak of hands refusing to cease thought their singing fingers are unheard, unanswered and unseen. Though the body rises and falls, though three times the light extends but cannot be walked into, though all that surrounds can neither be grasped nor whipped away nor foreshortened, the audience is left saturated and astounded by nothing. -Void - Jon Seymour
