Yellowknife (Apr 01/05) - As the first contemporary dance company to visit Yellowknife in quite a while, Battery Opera should make an impact on the city's up and coming dance scene.

Lee Su-Feh and David McIntosh of Battery Opera will perform their work Reptile Diva at NACC next Friday and Saturday. Lee will also lead workshops on Tuesday and Wednesday. - photo courtesy of Battery Opera

Born and raised in Malaysia, dancer Lee Su-Feh was trained in traditional Malay dance as well as contemporary dance and ballet.

But she also practises Chinese martial arts and explores its use in training dance performers.

"In Asia there's a long tradition of incorporating martial arts with dance," she said.

"For me the usefulness of martial arts is in training a functional and efficient body. It's the old saying: to use four ounces to defeat 1,000 pounds."

Dance can be approached as sparring, she said, if you think of the dance partner as the opponent. "It provides an awareness of another body in space."

That other body could be a partner or the audience, or just the space itself. The awareness reveals itself in eye contact and plain intensity.

"We engage the audience directly," she said.

"When we're performing, we're not just an object on the stage."

Lee has never been farther north than Edmonton, so she's excited to meet some Northern performers and learn about aboriginal dances.

"Part of my ongoing interest is the interface of folk traditions and classical traditions and that ongoing dialogue," she said.

"I'm extremely curious to see and talk to other practitioners."

Lee will lead a dance workshop next Tuesday and Wednesday, using the internal style of Chinese martial arts she practises. There's a distinction between external style, the best known of which is Tai Chi, and the internal, though both explore the connection between mind and body.

Towards the end of the workshops, participants will put those principles to the test in dancing and expression.

Though it's technically a dance workshop, Lee said everyone she has taught - the young, the old and even professional dancers - find the exercises equally challenging and accessible.

Friday and Saturday, she and partner David McIntosh will perform the show Reptile Diva, made up of three dance works. Each dancer performs a solo work, then they dance a duet. Lee said her relationship with "A Character of Dubious Morality," her solo piece, has changed over the 15 years she's been performing it.

"When I first made it, I was in my 20s. I had just arrived here, so issues of race and identity were very important to me."

Though these issues continue to be important to her, they're no longer what she focuses on in this dance.

The piece also has a theme of time, age and experience and it's that aspect of the dance she delves into more now that she's nearly 40.

McIntosh's solo piece, Brick, is based on the 10 years he spent working in the construction industry.

Lee said the work is suffused with identity issues - how your work defines you and the tension between getting work done quickly and doing it well.

It also features a "tragic love story," as Lee describes it, where McIntosh's character falls in love with a pig.

The two dancers perform together in a work called The Mystic.

In it a woman with a broom and a man with a punching bag create their own accompanying rhythm.

"It's a study of two people sharing the same space and how they affect each other across that space," she said.