by Alfonse Chiu

Inspired by Powers of Ten (1968–1977), the seminal experimental documentary series on scale and perspective written and directed by American industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames, ‘Senses of Ten’ is a digital retrospective and auto-archival initiative focusing on the interdisciplinary works of Singaporean artist, filmmaker, and choreographer Elysa Wendi produced between 2014 and 2024. Situated at the intersection of performance, cinema, and visual art, Wendi’s trans-media practice spans diverse formats and modalities, anchored by her ongoing investigations into the narrative potentials of the corporeal subject as itself a mediated object.

In Wendi’s conceptualisation a form of expanded choreography, projects such as (10×10)×10 (2018–), a durational performance that sees Wendi borrowing ten books each from ten choreographers as part of a process research to locate an intellectual history of choreography; As I Imagine My Body Moving (2022), an auto-ethnographic essay film reflecting on Wendi’s own experiences of negotiating the effects of disability and illnesses on mobility and agency; and Place Listening (2024), an installation that explores how sensorial cues may evoke phantom memories, amongst others; all mark a particular exploration into the body politics of memory, movement, and mediation.

Taking the form of a multi-modal presentation that includes a digital archives, a printed catalogue, and programmatic activations of key projects from the past ten years, ‘Senses of Ten’ gathers, organises, and interprets Wendi’s practice as a form of embodied scholarship in imagining novel possibilities of how a body or bodies can find agency through gestures of remembrance.

by Elysa Wendi

In this archaeology of practice, I have excavated the fragments of a former dancer who has since dissolved into the machinery of image, who learned to choreograph time itself through an alchemical formula of lens and light. The body remembers in layers: muscle memory transforming into visual memory, kinaesthetic knowing translating into cinematic mise-en-scène. I look upon my ten years of creative explorations as an expanded choreography, a gesture or concept that is not merely terminology but a living framework—one that navigates the permeable boundaries between embodiment and machinery, between presence and representation.

Through this process of journeying and experimenting with different manifestations of choreographic expansions, I have finally realised how the nature of my nomadic movements across Southeast Asia from childhood till present day have affected my works and practice. Straddling the amorphous boundaries between borders, languages, and histories, I move from spaces to places, stories to memories, bodies to movements, to become an assemblage of such temporarily impacted times— a spatio-temporal mode where limited periods of great social and emotional intensities ferment and foment creative responses.

Preoccupied with the auto-fictional narratives of bodies and movement, my works manifest through hybrid documentary projects, audio-visual essays, and meta-choreographic rituals where the camera becomes my confessor, my mirror, and my adversary. In those early years of a transitioning practice, I documented everything—the deteriorating body, the amplified ego, the vulnerability of being seen. Months of relentless recording; then, deletion. A digital bonfire of vanities, an act of creative destruction that paradoxically birthed something newer, stranger in hindsight over a decade later.

In that void, I discovered the choreography of the everyday: shadows lengthening across walls, neighbours moving through their domestic routines, trees swaying to the forces of the wind. To bear witness to the movement of the cosmic, I had simply needed a different pair of eyes and a certain death—of my long embodied systems of knowledge. However, this erasure marked not an ending but a metamorphosis; the dancer I once was has dissolved into the image-maker and observer I am becoming, leaving behind fragments and residues of movement, and an insatiable desire for new forms of expression.

Frame by frame, I deconstructed the architecture of visual storytelling, searching for the choreographic impulse within montage, within mise-en-scène, within the very rhythm of cuts and dissolves. The camera was no longer a passive observer but an active collaborator, a partner in my new creation. I contemplate the extended breath of cinematic time where movement unfolds without interruption. Here the duration is made visible, space given weight, bodies allowed to exist in their full complexity within the frame's embrace. The film strip became my score, editing my choreography.

Through the machinery of moving images, I began to explore the philosophical nature of time differently—not as linear progression but as a malleable substance, something that could be stretched, compressed, reversed, repeated beyond the human sense. The filmic apparatus offered a different perspective which live performance could not have provided me in the past: the ability to mould and sculpt time itself. Instead of temporality as mode, I now have temporality as a means at my disposal. However, even in the process of creating cinematic performances or mediated performances, I continued to ponder my identity as a live artist, and how these two modalities could collide and collude to inform my understanding of time and temporality, light and shadow.

During the early stages of exploration, when I first started working with cameras to construct filmic performances, the camera had functioned as merely servers and softwares, pixels and algorithms. Later, I discovered that the digital realm offered a new kind of embodiment—one where the body could be fragmented, multiplied, transformed beyond its physical limitations. In this hybrid space, I learned to choreograph not just bodies but entire universes— light, shadow, space, object, human gestures, all moving in complex orchestration within the cinematic frame. The director as choreographer, the choreographer as universe-maker.

Contemporary theorists spoke of exhausted dance, of the performative turn, of bodies in art spaces traditionally reserved for objects. These conversations provided me with contexts to understand what choreography might become when released from its traditional constraints; to see the body as itself a critical theory, movements as political acts, stillness as revolutionary gestures somehow converged in this period as personal reference points. In doing so, I began to embrace the hybrid nature of this novel labour—neither purely dance nor purely film but something else entirely, something that could only exist in the space between media. This in-betweenness became not a problem to be solved but a productive tension to be explored.

Ten years later, I am neither the dancer I was nor the filmmaker I set out to become, but something else entirely—a practitioner of hybrid forms, a translator between mediums, a choreographer of possibilities not yet imagined. And now, to the next ten years.