Devotions (Lieb ohn alle Maße)
This presentation is a lecture-demonstration of Devotions: Lieb ohn alle Maße, a performance devised by Wong Yong En and supported by Leia Devadason which set excerpts from J.S. Bach’s Johannespassion to choreography drawn from the language of Odissi dance and abhinaya (storytelling).
Following a debut performance of the work in 2021 at the Esplanade Concourse, Yong En performed Devotions in April 2026 as the culmination of her Associate Artist Residency with the Odissi dance company Chowk Studios. Five years later, we reflect on our artistic process from its beginnings – as an experiment in bringing embodied traditions together – to its evolution with us as artists and scholars in our respective and intersecting paths.
In this lecture-demonstration, we unpack the creative process of our collaborative project, bringing audiences through the musical and textual analysis of our Bach excerpts, and how we mapped this onto an Odissi-trained body (with live demonstrations). Finally we theorise a way to understand this experiment beyond the frame of “intercultural performance” by emphasising the mixed genealogies within the two art forms themselves, amplified and celebrated here as a poetics of relation.
Wong Yong En
Yong En is a singer who moves. She studied at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, completing a Bachelor of Music (B.Mus) in Music and Society and a Second Major in Voice under Alan Bennett. She is also a dancer training in Odissi under Raka Maitra.
She thrives where she can merge her dual training roots in interdisciplinary and collaborative settings. 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) in which she choreographed and danced 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 connects dance studies, aesthetic theory, and queer studies in a theorisation of classical and "counterclassical" Indian dance. In parallel, her creative practice in music and video art explores the ways that labour and cultural inheritance stylises bodies.
Leia's writing has been published by South Asian Dance Intersections and Oxford Public Philosophy (journal articles), Math Paper Press (poetry), and Ethos Books (prose).
University of California (UC), Berkeley