Strictly come dancing

Strictly come dancing

Navinda Pachimsawat Vadtanakovint on the trials and tribulations of being a contemporary dancer

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE
Strictly come dancing

Navinda “Lordfai” Pachimsawat Vadtanakovint was beginning an improvisation class at Bangkok Dance Academy in Siam Paragon when one of her students complained that she was tired, hungry and not feeling it. Navinda took the entire class to the supermarket. They bought potato chips, jellies and Pocky biscuits, and went back up to the studio. The class then revolved around snacks, drawing from the structure of where the snacks were located and movements happening around them.

Navinda, 24, started dancing when she was four. Her mother, Wallapa Pachimsawat, and aunts were the first generation of ballet dancers in Thailand. Wallapa founded the Bangkok Dance Academy in 1990, the year Navinda was born. In those early years, Navinda learned ballet, and was exposed to jazz and hip hop; “just like any other kid. It was just a weekend activity”.

She survived the teenage years when her friends began giving up dancing.

“The nature of learning to dance is that you are always critiqued. There are improvements to be made here, there. You should do this here, got to dance this way, got to think that way,” she says. “There isn’t a lot of positive reinforcement and as you are going through puberty, as control of the body and the muscles transformed, I felt like I couldn’t achieve anything the way I wanted.”

It was also in the uneasy teenage years that Navinda realised dancing differentiated her from other people. It made her stand out. She was never that interested in school, never studied particularly hard or wanted to.

“It clicked with me when I was 14 or 15, that I had a strong footing, not because I was a good dancer, but because I was studying dance,” she says. She wanted to be better. She practised harder. And she was doing well.

At the time, Bangkok Dance Academy had just initiated the Soloist Programme, an intensive programme for dancers with potential and who were committed.

“My mother actually started the programme because of my friend, who wanted to pursue dance further. She was looking for more opportunities,” she says. The group of eight students spent between 10 and 15 hours a week dancing.

“It didn’t just prepare us to go study dancing abroad. There are many people who do that and as many as 80% give up because there is so much pressure. You get tired mentally and physically. If I hadn’t joined this programme, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

But by the time she was 16, Navinda was teaching ballet at Bangkok Dance Academy. In 2009, she choreographed her first dance and won the highest aggregate award in the Commonwealth Society of Teachers of Dancing (CSTD) Asia Pacific Dance competition, with participants from 10 countries.

“But I wouldn’t really call it choreographing now. I was drawing on a lot of commercial works, from videos on YouTube and various media. I had no idea about anything beyond that then,” she says.

After high school, Navinda attended the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne for contemporary dance. It was there that she first learned, beyond just how to move, to think about what it meant and how to generate movements.

She remembered going to see Vertical Road by Akram Khan Company and was stunned into silence for the next half-an-hour. She was beginning to see all these possibilities. She says she had thought that

Thailand and Asia were behind in the realm of contemporary dance, but here she was swept away by seeing Indian culture ingrained in the movements. At school, she was in class with people who had never learned ballet, who had never had professional training.

“That really worked to the benefit of some people because they had no ‘body memory’ of classical training in their consciousness,” she explains. Here, it was about forming your own individual movements.

“People think it’s easy, but I was dancing all day every day and then I was writing papers. I remember calling my mum to tell her that if I could make it through this year, I could probably overcome anything,” she recalls. After graduating, she was excited to bring her discovery and knowledge back to Thailand. It wasn’t easy. She felt nobody understood her, not her friends, not her family.

Navinda returned to Australia again, this time for a short workshop called Softlanding, “which basically aids you in landing softly in the tough world of dance”, she explains. “Before that, I was so used to hearing that it is going to be hard that it became a mantra. It is hard. It is hard. Back home, I felt like I always needed assistance. It was paralysing. I wasn’t dancing or exercising like I used to.”

There, she broke down on stage, but her friends who were performing with her improvised — they brought out tissues and lifted her up. There, she was told: “You are not lazy, you are scared.”

When she returned for the second time, she worked with her friends to put together a performance titled Ersatz, choreographed by James Batchelor. She improvised alone for hours, without any music, so she wouldn’t get attached to the meaning of the lyrics. For fun, she danced to Earth, Wind and Fire, Jackson 5 and Ben E. King.

Last year, she earned a scholarship for the prestigious danceWEB programme in Vienna. “Getting the scholarship made me realise that I had something important, that I had the potential. And I knew I made it there myself, not because of my mother’s influence.”

On top of a scholarship from danceWEB, the programme required her to attain more funding — a way to get the artists to become active.

“I wrote essays and letters in Thai. I was typing with my index fingers. I printed pictures. I knew no one would bother reading. I went to the Ministry of Culture Office of Contemporary Art and the Goethe Institute. I received grants and the most important thing was I realised how much opportunity is available in Thailand if you seek it out,” she says.

In Vienna, she enrolled in 30 classes over the course of six weeks. She would bike to see performances in the evening. She saw more than 40 performances, but she now saw them with a more critical eye and selectivity.

She learned to recognise her unique position as a Thai dancer, she wanted to create her own movement language that wasn’t grounded in the West. She saw herself now as a mover and a thinker, not just as a dancer. She saw Thailand as blank canvas that she could not only just paint on, but also fold or cut.

Back in Bangkok again, Navinda is teaching. She has just won a grant from the Australia-Thailand Institute and is putting together a performance this June.

“Body language and movement is the language of the individual,” she says. “Everyone is moving and improvising their body and their ways of living all the time. If I can get in tuned with that, people will see [contemporary dance] as a human thing.”

ATTA, a performance choreographed by Navinda.

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