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Victoria Finlay

OF all types of legacy, the one that Janek Schergen inherited from Singaporean choreographer Choo San Goh must be one of the most emotionally taxing.

  Ever since Goh died in 1986, Schergen has - by the terms of the will that made him the only person who can teach any of the 33 Goh ballets - been forced every day to remember every detail of his friend's artistic creations, his movements, his idiosyncracies.

  It has left him little time to go through all the necessary stages of grieving for the man, his closest friend, who died of AIDS at the age of 39.

  'It still hurts every day,' admitted the Swedish-born American, who had been Goh's ballet master at Washington Ballet for many years.

  Schergen, who is usually the artistic director of the Nashville Ballet company, has spent the past few weeks in the territory preparing for the Hong Kong Ballet and Singapore Dance Company joint presentation Ghost. In Memoriam. Goh, performed for the Asian Arts Festival this weekend.

  He has been here on many previous occasions, often teaching Unknown Territory, which is one of the three ballets in the programme.

  Schergen has also been teaching the local dancers a Goh piece that is new for Hong Kong called In the Glow of the Night which reverses the usual cliche where darkness is used as a metaphor of death by telling the story of a woman's life through the stages of night. The twilight is her youth; midnight is her middle life, and as dawn comes she approaches death with a final pas de deux, as if the arrival of light takes away her strength, Scheren explained.

  'It isn't a dark vision, it's just cyclical. And it is fun. Between 11 and midnight the woman is in New York City, dancing with six men, full of energy.'   'Teaching' Goh's pieces means not only showing the steps, it also involves teaching his Tai Chi-style mnemonics. So a step forward as the dancer's hand moves slowly upwards is not just that but it is 'picking up gold dust and letting it run through your hands'.

  'Choo San always thought of the dancers first - and his movements are ones that the dancers can really feel and internalise,' said Schergen who was always responsible for making Goh's choreographic dreams appear on stage.

  'We always said that he was an orchid and I was a philodendron, or he was the architect and I was the carpenter.

  'He wanted everything special; I had to fill in the details, make things happen after he had the big ideas.'   'He could be a very infuriating individual,' Schergen remembered.

  'Sometimes he used to yell, but it was when he was quiet that was the worst. He'd go quiet, resigned: his dissapproval could really be painful.'   To complete the triple bill, the Singaporean dancers have brought over another Goh ballet, Birds of Paradise, which Schergen describes as 'sexy and passionate'.

  The Sinapore Dance Company was formed after Goh's death by his older sister Goh Soo Khim, who, with two of Choo San's other 10 siblings, had become the first dancers within their otherwise very traditional Singaporean Chinese family.

  'Choo San wasn't really allowed to dance at first - his parents thought that three dancers in the family was enough,' Schergen said.

  But later, having taken after-school classes from his sister, and with a degree in bio-chemistry under his belt, Goh took up ballet full-time.

  His parents accepted his decision graciously, Schergen said, as 20 years later they accepted his disease 'with grace and generosity'.

  'Choo San had been very afraid that they would reject him, but they showed him that they loved him and they ignored those parts of him that they couldn't love,' said Schergen, who said he had been made welcome by Goh's family, as they all tried to come to terms with his death.

  'After he died I left Washington, and stayed away for a long time. But I came back to take on the challenge of teaching his ballets.' 



Dancing in the footsteps of Goh