The Graey Festival is a week-long event where local and international dance and theatre practitioners will present and share ideas in workshops, discussions, video screenings and nightly performances. Currently in its third year, the Graey Festival has been consistently supported the by The Substation and National Arts Council in making Singapore a meeting place for Asian dance and theatre practitioners to exchange, present and even develop ideas. In furthering the Asian agenda, the Graey Festival and The Substation present GRAEY FESTIVAL 2010: VIVISECTION.
There is often a hesitation when it comes to thinking or talking about contemporary dance or performance. It is a diffidence born of either a confusion or a denial. The confusion is that the "contemporary", qua movement, dance or performance, is unstable, emerging and dynamic category and therefore cannot be spoken of in any valid or abiding manner. This is not true; it is in fact a consequence of an even deeper confusion — that of the roles of theory and history in considering the notion "contemporary". The theory of the contemporary must emerge and evolve synchronously with it; the history of it needs time to coalesce.
The other reason why there is hesitation considering the contemporary is that it is flatly denied; particularly by the more established and senior practitioners of traditional dance. They claim either that there is no such thing as the contemporary or that it is not significantly different from their own traditional practices. This sheer refusal to see is of course impervious to any reasoned counter-argument, and the most effective counter is to continuously explore new ways of seeing and speaking of the contemporary in movement, dance and performance. This is precisely what GRAEY FESTIVAL 2010: VIVISECTION will attempt to do.