#DANCELESS Complex 2026 Exhibition Living Traces: Choreographing Traditions
10 – 16.06.2026 11am – 6pm
1a space, Cattle Depot Artist Village
Living Traces: Choreographing Traditions
Living Traces: Choreographing Traditions gathers sketches, objects, videos and research fragments accumulated over the two-year process by three commissioned choreographers of #DANCELESS Complex 2026 — Chan Wai Lok, Albert Garcia and Norhaizad Adam — transforming Cattle Depot Artist Village’s 1a space into an open studio “in the midst of creation”. Extending the festival theme “Tradition in Our Times,” the exhibition juxtaposes field notes, ritual artefacts, handwritten procedures, personal notebooks and rehearsal remnants from residencies in Shunde, Melbourne, Taipei, Singapore and Hong Kong, unfolding a map woven from bodily memory, community stories and cross-cultural thinking. Visitors encounter firefly investigations drawn from Mai Po wetlands and migrant routes, ritual props where faith and fantasies of fortune entangle, image archives tracing the flicker of fireflies and trajectories of displacement, as well as movement scores and desire notes emerging from an old Malay manuscript and embodied sexuality. These “living traces” are neither finished works nor neutral documents, but midway annotations left by artists as they travel between cities, meet others and look back at their own cultures, keeping open a set of questions: What kinds of aesthetics and traditions have we inherited, and how, in the instability of the present, might we touch, question and reinvent traditions we can call our own?
Within the same space, live performances of Chan Wai Lok’s The Golden and the Fortunate and Albert Garcia’s The Bug Is on Fire: First Ignitions activate the displayed materials, allowing ritual objects, images and documents to be reanimated through bodily expression and rigorous dramaturgy in real time. As performance, installation and writing overlap, audiences witness how the exhibited artefacts are called upon, translated and rearranged inside choreographic scores. A dedicated “Live Writing” corner, curated by scholar-editor Emilie Choi as the second section of the publication Choreographing Across Cities, invites three observers to write and converse on site during the festival, turning the production of text into another visible, sensorial layer of live performance alongside the exhibition and the stage.
Exhibition Details
10 – 16.06.2026 11am – 6pm
1a space, Cattle Depot Artist Village
Free Admission