Interview: Wency Lam on Roots

Can you please introduce yourself and your work, Roots?

Hi, my name is Wency, I am the choreographer/director of Roots, a dance theatre performance created by myself with the dancers. It’s an evening double bill - the first work is called (Overseas) and the second one is called Is Any Body Home?

Chapter one is (Overseas). The use of brackets in the title is really important - if you want to know more, you can Google ‘British National (Overseas)’. The second chapter is called Is Any Body Home?. It's about dual heritage, identity, migration, home, belonging. So it's actually about relationships - the relationship with a place, relationships with people, and relationship with yourself

What do you think will interest people about Roots?

In Roots, I'm just using movement as the medium for storytelling. Because we're using movement instead of text, it becomes abstract and opens up space for the audience to connect to the piece, to interpret the piece. If you're someone who enjoys some kind of ambiguity and freedom to connect to the artwork however you want, you will enjoy Roots.

What personal connections do you and your dancers have to the work?

This piece started with my own experience, it's very much connected to the political situation in Hong Kong. But actually, interestingly enough, none of the performers are from Hong Kong. This idea of migration, its a transformation process that I think everyone has experienced before. All of the dancers would find their own way to connect to the piece.

You come from all over the place - Canada, Hong Kong, now London. How does that affect your work?

I really like how you phrased it, “all over the place”. In Roots, it's a lot about body parts and limbs being fragmented and disjointed. And it's the feeling of not knowing how I can become one. It's the feeling of having many different things going on. They might sometimes contradict each other, go against each other. But at the same time, all of those chaos is part of me. And I think it's part of you, too, because I think everyone embodies chaos.

Could you share some insights into the creation process? Any exercises or explorations that stand out to you?

There's one that I remember right now, and it's to do with the prop limbs that we're working with. So we have the amazing visual artist Liana Li who made these very realistic prop limbs. We found different ways to work with the limbs - at first, the most intuitive way was to just hold them and move them around. Afterwards we tried placing the limb in a specific position and have the body move around the limb instead. Immediately, the relationship between this moving body and the limb changes, because now you're accommodating for the limb.

The third variation of the exercise that we did was to imagine that this limb was connected to an actual person. When you imagine there’s this whole other person there, how would you interact with this limb? So once this thing (prop limb) is not just an object, then maybe even before I touch it, I might be checking with the “person” to see if it’s alright. And that changes our response to the limbs a lot.

What do you hope audiences leave with after the show?

I hope that people feel something. Whatever “thing” they feel, as long as they feel something, I’m happy. The work doesn’t have a specific message that I’d like you to get out of it. I just want to connect with people on a human level.

Catch Roots as part of ASSEMBLE Festival 2024 on Tuesday 30th April 2024, 7.30pm. Book your tickets now.