T.H.E Dance Company is one of Singapore’s most eminent contemporary dance company founded by Artistic Director Kuik Swee Boon in 2008. The company focuses on fusing Asian and local identities with Western dance techniques to create works that are influenced by contemporary and societal issues. In 2018, they celebrated their 10th anniversary with a publication to chronicle their journey over the past decade.
The Company wanted to present their story from the perspective of the people that make the Company but in an objective manner. The reason for this paradoxical approach was because, in their opinion, the story of T.H.E Dance Company is a shared one, and no single person’s narrative could comprehensively encapsulate the story of the Company. Although this approach was one that made sense, it was a huge challenge to capture it in both the design and aesthetics of the publication as well as the writing.
For the design, this was first established through the use of a predominantly neutral colour palette which was complemented with a single bright red pop of colour. The red provided a contrast but also expresses, in a subdued way, a celebratory aspect. The use of a Grotesque san-serif typeface also supported the neutral colour scheme.
Perhaps the idea can be seen, most significantly, on the cover where the titles of all the performances the Company has ever put up were blind embossed onto the white soft cover of the book while the names of all the performers—both present and past—were debossed onto a greyboard half slip cover. When viewed as a whole, the dancers and the performances, though complete on their own, are also the parts that form the Company as a singular whole. With the emboss and deboss effects, the dancers and performances also appear to play off each other as a sort of a binary.
A staggered layout was used throughout the book design to represent the meandering journey that the Company took. Pull-quotes and images were inserted into the continuous text blocks as a way of subtly hint at the various hiccups, incidents, happy accidents and successes that popped up along the way.
