Reflections on A Somatic Series by Vincent Yong

It was the first ever programme I was assigned to oversee at the Gallery involved, curiously enough, blindfolds. It took place during the first weekend of May. We were at the Rooftop Studios, directly facing the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission by Charles Lim Yi Yong, titled SEA STATE 9: proclamation garden. As the programmer-in-charge, I kept watch over the proceedings as our participants streamed in, one by one, ready to be guided through an experience led by art therapist and award-winning choreographer Vincent Yong.

Everyone took their seats, which were arranged to form a rough circle. I played music from my laptop, to fill the nervous silence between strangers that permeated the room. Before long, it was time.

“I want everyone to shake your hands,” said Vincent to the group. “Shake them,” he said, urging the group on, as they not only shook their hands but their arms too.

“Now stop,” said Vincent, putting his hands on his neck. “Feel your heart racing.”

Having attended two prevoius editions of A Somatic Series now (one in August 2019, dedicated to Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s, and another in December 2019, dedicated to Suddenly Turning Visible: Art and Architecture in Southeast Asia (1969–1989), I was familiar with Vincent’s warm-up routine: after getting his participants to shake their hands, he invites them to rub them together (“Can you feel the heat?” is a common question),  then stretch their arms upwards and sideways. I realised over the course of these editions that Vincent’s ultimate goal isn’t to get his participants’ bodies to move: it’s to get his participants feeling again, to feel what the movements are doing to them on the inside – to reconnect with the currents moving within their bodies.

Somatic movement, for Vincent, is about reclaiming aspects of the self that have either been forgotten or taken for granted. To drive this message home during the May 2019 sessions, Vincent turned to me once the first half of warm-ups was over.

“Can I have the blindfolds please?” he asked.

What unfolded over the rest of the session was so simple it could barely be considered magical, and yet it was, according to some of our participants. Vincent first got them to stand, and then to pair up. Within each pair one participant was blindfolded and the other tasked with the responsibility of being the leader and guiding the blindfolded participant through a series of increasingly challenging movements. Blindfolds would later be swapped, allowing the pair to switch up who gets to lead or be led.

Finally came the in-gallery experience: Vincent brought the group out into the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Gallery, lush and alive with the unique plants found in Charles Lim’s installation. His instructions to everyone were simple: each pair was to make their way freely around the garden. The aim was to have the blindfolded participants experience the installation not with their sight, but by their sense of touch. They were to partake in the beauty of SEA STATE 9: proclamation garden not with their eyes, but with their hands and feet instead — an altogether new and uncommon way of appreciating the visual arts, movement-led and embodied. It would also be an experience largely guided by trust, care and openness.

The pairs set off. Each pair, guided by the participant playing the role of the leader in that moment, moved across the garden slowly and deliberately, carefully making their way past strangers and on the inclined ramps. And because it had rained in the morning, much of the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Gallery was still dripping with moisture that afternoon: plants, benches, columns and pillars. The pairs mostly engrossed themselves with the handling of leaves, stems, fruit, flowers; Vincent would go amongst them and ask if they recognised the plant that they were handling. He’d also ask them to describe the plant by touch, to ask themselves how they could appreciate a thing or an experience not by what they saw, but what they felt.

It was an experience filled with wonder and creativity. A few of the more daring pairs added performative and stylized elements to the way they moved across the garden, while others were more content to stroll and wander. One pair I remember walked towards the Rooftop Studios and stopped, and waited, for seemingly no reason. And then it happened, so quickly one might have failed to catch it altogether: the falling of a droplet of water, from an eave that hung directly overhead. The droplet fell right onto the forehead of the blindfolded participant, causing her and her leader to scream with delight.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, with her blindfold still on. “I didn’t expect that at all.”

Reader, I have to admit: by some magical transference of feeling, I exclaimed in that moment too.