Exploring urban spaces in Soft Archives

Soft Archives, Sigma Contemporary Dance's first production at its new Tanjong Pagar Distripark space, unfolds as a choose-your-own-sequence game.

- Elizabeth Chan

Building on Body History (2024) and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (1982), it imagines the city through bodies in circulation, collision and half-remembered traces.

Upon entering the black box, audiences scan a QR code, encounter six photographs labelled SA1 to SA6, and vote on the order in which they would see them. The scenes are distinct, though motifs recur: contact improvisation, bodies skimming the floor, and shifting duets and trios.

Despite changes in tone, the journey feels continuous, as if the viewer is roaming one layered streetscape, guided by a flaneur figure in a kaftan-like robe of colourful fabric pieces, designed by Audrey Ng, who drifts between sections and quietly stitches them together.

Two sections stand out most strongly for this reviewer: SA1 and SA6. SA1 opens with Singapore's MRT train announcements and the hum of urban urgency. Dancers rush, collide and tumble over one another until the anxious energy gathers into a thrilling unison.