Valerie

32 years old, Singapore

What makes life worth living?
I believe life must be spent pursing what makes us feel the most alive. With both my parents diagnosed with end-stage cancer when I was at a relatively young age, it is this understanding of the fragility and brevity of life that propels my artistic endeavours. #youonlydieonce Dancing is a full-bore, visceral, three-dimensional live telling that has perhaps little to do with being productive but everything to do with being alive.

Art, I believe, has the power to open up possibilities, offer new perspectives, challenge our assumptions, show us the richness of life and help us answer questions like “what makes life worth living?”. It is this question that drives my work and own artistic pursuit.

The mysteries of the human body deeply fascinate me. I am enthralled by its potential to communicate in ways that eludes words or other mediums, a language that we cannot seem to define but know it all the same. It is bodily knowledge that I am most curious about, the inherent wisdom, sensitivities, and its interaction with other bodies in space. As Meg Foley describes, people “have bodies when they eat, have sex, and exercise. In between those islands of excess, we are passengers in our bodies, burying sensation with distraction, drugs, and vanity.” We seem to escape from our bodies when we do not need to use them. I hope to explore the 24-hour lived body to reclaim the sensation of becoming alive once more, to un-numb and reacquaint ourselves that which lives deep inside us – our fragility and empathy, touch and what makes us human, I want my dance to offer the unmediated body, a physicality that is present, accountable, and unplugged. In a culture that values information over sensing, I wish to explore and hoard the body’s knowingness, the connectivity that has no wires – and share it with other human beings, that they too may experience that.