Devotions (Lieb ohn alle Maße)
This lecture-demonstration presents Devotions: Lieb ohn alle Maße, a performance devised by Wong Yong En and supported by Leia Devadason, which sets excerpts from J.S. Bach’s Johannespassion alongside choreography drawn from the language of Odissi dance and abhinaya (storytelling).
First performed in 2021 at the Esplanade Concourse, Devotions was revisited in April 2026 as the culmination of Yong En’s Associate Artist Residency with Odissi dance company Chowk Studios. Five years on, we reflect on the artistic process from its beginnings as an experiment in bringing embodied traditions together to its evolution alongside our respective and intersecting practices as artists and scholars.
Through musical and textual analysis, live demonstrations and discussion of the choreographic process, we unpack how Bach’s excerpts were mapped onto an Odissi-trained body. We then consider how this experiment might be understood beyond the framework of “intercultural performance”, instead foregrounding the mixed genealogies within both art forms as a poetics of relation.
Wong Yong En
Yong En is a singer and dancer whose practice brings together voice, movement and interdisciplinary collaboration. She studied at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, completing a Bachelor of Music in Music and Society with a Second Major in Voice under Alan Bennett. She also trains in Odissi under Raka Maitra. Her interdisciplinary projects include Between Ground and Sky (2023), a song cycle by Tan Tiag Yi in which she performed as a singer and movement artist, and Palindrome (2024), which she choreographed and performed at the Stamford Arts Centre’s A Date With Tradition festival with Open Score Project.
National University of Singapore
Leia Devadason
Leia Devadason is a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation brings together dance studies, aesthetic theory and queer studies to theorise classical and “counterclassical” Indian dance. Her creative practice in music and video art explores how labour and cultural inheritance shape and stylise bodies. Her writing has been published by South Asian Dance Intersections and Oxford Public Philosophy, as well as by Math Paper Press and Ethos Books.
University of California (UC), Berkeley