Belinda Adam grew up in Medan—a city in the Northern province of Sumatra in Indonesia. She describes it as “a place where multi-ethnicity (Malay, Indian, Chinese, and Batak) seems to happily co-exist among each other in the outside, yet pride and prejudice can still be vividly felt in the core.” Belinda was enrolled in dance class at 3 years old. “Without questioning it further, despite being in an environment with very limited training and facilities offered, I fell in love with movement,” she recalls.
Dance and performance have been a major part of her life since then. “It felt like dance and performance gave me a purpose—to thrive, to exist, to truly learn, to honestly feel, and to share,” she explains. “Growing up in a very tiny community and in a conservative culture where questioning is never introduced and encouraged, dance gave colors to my everyday life— it saved me, and I lost track of time when in it. Dance is a survival kit for me.”
Belinda practiced ballet for 15 years while growing up in Indonesia, although most of her instruction was self-taught. “I learned from one teacher, who pretty much had very limited learning resources back then and shared with us the knowledge she gathered. She is a generous woman, but . . . what worked for her did not necessarily work for my body,” Belinda states. “I beat myself up for always feeling less, not being able to understand that my body craves movement; speaks, curves, explodes in a different way—in its OWN way.” Despite these challenges, she continued dancing and performing. “It is the one thing that gave me the most joy growing up.”
Belinda moved to the United States when she was 18 years old, where she began training in various dance styles that she didn’t know previously existed. She compares the experience of a new country to discovering a box of new fancy chocolates. “You can’t wait to taste all of them. After you tasted it, you learned that some of them doesn’t actually taste like how they look. Some of them you don’t even want to taste at all after taking a closer look.”
She began studying modern dance in a community college in Santa Monica. “I got to approach ballet with a new perspective. I did hip hop, jazz, contemporary, and lyrical in college. I was catching up, soaking and swallowing everything I missed, dipping my hands everywhere I [could] reach.” Her time in Santa Monica allowed her to share the space and learn with people who came from various backgrounds, levels and stories.
Later transitioning to Chapman University, Belinda further developed her dance skills among people who were striving to make dance part of their professional career. She continued training in ballet, modern, contemporary and jazz, but in a filtered, tighter community. “That’s how I found my creative partner, my other half, Talia Moreta. She saved me through dance and more,” she recalls. “Working with her feels like pressing the Enter button [on] your computer, where I get to process, load and make sense of things. Before I met her, I realized that this whole time I have just been typing and typing, doing and doing, [trying to] be better and better. I have been trying so hard to fit into this idea of [the] American dream. She is the first person who held my hand and showed me through her craft and her being that I can create my own dream that is way more meaningful than, and incomparable to, the illusion of the American dream.”
Belinda and Talia founded the Brooklyn-based contemporary dance company Suku Dance Lab. A collaborative laboratory environment used to examine the community, Belinda and Talia study how persons are deeply unique and vastly universal at the same time. “Our work mainly revolves around the topic of culture, racism, immigration, gender and sexual oppression—providing a safe space for marginalized groups to freely express their voice, which is not accepted in society,” Belinda explains. “We aim to create accessible work that can be seen in a wide range of performance settings, creating a world where we can invite the audience to listen to the stories of people who are not always represented in the media, and to unveil the secrets that we are all trying to hide from ourselves. Our works can be uncomfortable, because they exist in a wide range of extreme emotions and they can ask a lot from both our collaborators and audience members. But one thing for sure, it is honest.”
When developing choreography, Belinda explains that she is inspired by her collaborator. “My collaborators inspire my work. I am open to work and collaborate with people from different fields with diverse training and backgrounds. I value [the] collaboration process and the expressive power of each person I work with. Depending on the kind of creative itch I am feeling, I talk to and work with people who have some insights and can relate personally to the matter we are curious to explore and research. Different people have different stories and things to offer; I seek to challenge the conventional perception of creative process. There is no one way; there is no right way and there is no same way. It is different in every process. It is about listening attentively to what the work calls for, what your collaborators have to offer, and where these can all intersect. I believe this will create a richer movement language, something that emerges from the combination of creative language each person masters and the relatability aspects to the matter first hand.”
Belinda recently choreographed and performed a piece called ‘ANIMA’. It was a 5-minute excerpt from a longer premiere that will happen on November 10, 2018 at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn. “Beside it being a very personal piece for me, the performance felt like a firework exploded in slow motion in my body. I felt my body and my mind limitless, invincible, naked, and vulnerable,” she says. “Time did not matter, what the audience [thought] did not matter, how I felt did not matter. It was as if the work and performance took over, and I let it.”
Belinda has also dabbled in film and would like to explore if further. “Film is another very powerful tool of storytelling. Finding ways to involve film into the live performance aspects is something I want to play with,” she says. “Combining film, live cinema, live music, dance, theatre, and three-dimensional immersive audience experience is a playground I want to get my hands dirty on—creating a world or a moment where we can all share an experience together, where we can be free from our own prison and limitations put upon us, and to look at each other for a brief moment and find a part of ourselves in the eyes in front of us.”
