Why choreographer Choo-San Goh is so important to the Singapore Ballet

To describe Goh’s brand of choreography, Schergen puts it this way: “There are a lot of dancers who are good technically, but they have no expressive capabilities. There are also dancers with a lot of expressive capabilities, but they’re weak technically. For it to be Choo-San Goh ballet, you have to have both.” According to Schergen, Goh was “very precise” with what he wanted and “very demanding”. “He was very sophisticated in terms of music,” he says, citing his “extreme” musicality; a dancer also needs to be “incredibly musically sensitive”. 

The Singapore Ballet will open the gala on June 21 with a performance of Momentum, which Goh first created in 1979 for the Joffrey II, the Joffrey Ballet’s training arm of younger dancers; it entered the Singapore Ballet’s repertoire in 1992. Set to Prokofiev’s 1st Piano Concerto, the work is an ensemble number with a central pas de deux, praised for its energy, speed and vitalism. “Momentum is the fastest ballet in our entire repertoire,” Schergen says. “You have to understand that it is 45 years old. It looks like it was made yesterday. It’s dramatic. It’s impactful. It’s sophisticated. It’s visually arresting. It’s not the kind of thing that you can go, ‘Well, that was nice.’ You really have a reaction to it.” 

Only in the past few years, however, has the Singapore Ballet turned its gaze back to its spiritual forefather. Schubert Symphony resurfaced in 2015 after being performed last in 1998, while Romeo and Juliet, first staged in 2000, was only restaged in 2011. Momentum itself took a 12 year hiatus from 2004 until it returned to the Singapore stage in 2012.

This has all been under Schergen’s eye, who, as the director of the Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation, is dedicated to keeping Goh’s work alive, and with it, his memory. “If people don’t [remember him], I’ll remind them,” Schergen insists. “The fact that we don’t acknowledge that Singapore produced one of the most prominent choreographers in history—that is on us.”

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The star

Choo-San Goh was born to dance. His three other siblings danced; Soo Nee Goh and Choo Chiat Goh trained at the Royal Ballet in London, with the former setting up the Singapore Ballet Academy, and the latter setting up the Goh Ballet Academy in Vancouver. Soo Khim Goh trained at the Australian Ballet and eventually set up Singapore Dance Theatre. It was Soo Nee who taught him ballet, instilling a lifelong love of dance that could not be shaken off, even after a biochemistry degree from the University of Singapore.

Goh went next to Amsterdam as a dancer at the Dutch National Ballet, where he began choreographing pieces in workshops. His works attracted the attention of Mary Day, who was in the midst of transforming the Washington School of Ballet into a professional company. She offered him the job of resident choreographer in 1976. That was the same year that Schergen, then a dancer at the Pennsylvania Ballet, met him during its tour in Washington, kicking off a tight-knit friendship of exchanged confessions, shared flats, and great care. 

In the years that followed, word of Goh’s powerful choreography spread among the dance world through ballets such as Fives, In the Glow of the Night, and Unknown Territory. The Houston Ballet came calling, as did Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. To free him up to create ballets for these companies across the country, he needed a ballet master to man the ground in Washington—which was when his and Schergen’s professional lives intersect. Schergen had performed Goh’s work before, but the first time he watched a performance was on Goh’s invitation, in the hopes of swaying him to guest teach for the company.

That evening, Schergen saw a full programme of his work, including Variations Sérieuses, which is now one of his favourite pieces. “I felt like there was somebody who had their hand on my chest, pushing back into my seat,” he recalls. “I’ve never forgotten that feeling. I thought those dancers danced with every fibre of their being. I was used to dancers who were technically better than them, but these dancers were every bit as good, if not better in certain ways.”

That was the performance that compelled Schergen to guest teach at the Washington Ballet. At that point, he knew that going to Washington would eventually compel him to leave his dancing career. But it was the "power of what the dancers were doing [that] was so phenomenal, so overwhelming, that I thought I needed to be there with him,” Schergen said in a 2021 interview published on the Singapore Ballet’s YouTube. 

Goh only got bigger. Configurations was commissioned by superstar dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the American Ballet Theatre; Romeo and Juliet, his only full-length ballet set to Prokofiev’s sweeping score, was created for the Boston Ballet in 1984. He created works for the Joffrey Ballet and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; he crossed the Atlantic to create for the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, and the Royal Danish Ballet. His star was on the rise—until it got cut short. 

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The custodian

In 1987, Goh passed away in his Manhattan home of viral colitis, a complication from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). He had just been awarded the Cultural Medallion. He was only 39. 

There were few people closer than Schergen who could execute Goh’s final wishes. Before his death, Goh trusted him to guide the direction of a foundation that would be set up in his name, the Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation. It would disburse grants to young dancers and choreographers and preserve his work. Schergen was also involved in the early discussions with Goh Soo Khim (Goh’s sister) and Anthony Then to set up the Singapore Dance Theatre, which was to use Goh’s body of work as its foundation.

Eventually, however, the Singapore Dance Theatre ceased to perform Goh’s work to make way for new choreographers. His name was forgotten for a while, save for a few people who remembered the value of his work. Not Schergen, who became the company’s associate artistic director in 2007, then artistic director in 2008. “Singapore is about the future, not about anything in the past, and he passed away 37 years ago,” he comments. “So it's not of interest. I think that’s a terrible mistake, and that's one of the reasons that I want his ballets in front of everybody.”

One by one, Schergen has brought back Goh’s ballets to the Singapore stage after a prolonged absence. In 2021, he started an archival project that involved teaching the dancers ten of Goh’s ballets and recording them in the studio; the resulting video is accompanied by his notes on the ballet’s staging, lighting, cultural context, and history. 

But a video will never replace a teacher—especially one who was in the room when they were created. “That’s why I've been carrying that burden for a long while now,” Schergen says of being the caretaker of Goh’s ballets. The truth, he confesses, is that he’s getting tired. Schergen is perhaps the only one who can bring Goh’s ballets back to the stage, and the task is both daunting and “tinged with [the] sadness” of a dear friend long gone. But part of the reason why Schergen keeps going is to keep the ballets alive with his company in Singapore. “I don’t want them outside. I want them here with these dancers. Because this is Singapore, this is the Singapore Ballet,” he says. 

The dancers want to dance the ballets too. According to Schergen, the Singaporean dancers all report that it feels different dancing Goh’s choreography, “knowing that [it is] the heritage of the company”. “It’s incredibly important because they’re touching something in the past that made it possible,” he says. “Had Choo-San not been who he was, they might not have had their careers.”

Keeping the memory alive

There is a plaque outside the Choo-San Goh Studio at the Singapore Ballet’s headquarters in Bugis+. Goh’s name is emblazoned on it, as is the name of his foundation. Underneath that reads the line, “Sponsored by Janek Schergen”. “I paid for that dedication,” Schergen tells me. 

Throughout our conversation Schergen has made true on his promise to talk about Goh as much as possible. We detour to some of his most cherished memories with him—even the squabbles, such as the time Schergen told Goh that his original ending of Unknown Territory was wrong, or the time when Goh snapped at Schergen in the middle of a dispute, “I wish you would just listen to what I say and obey me.” (That situation was resolved with a quick phone call and the teasing banter of friends.) “I didn’t tell him anything that he didn’t already know, but he needed someone to reassure him,” he says. “That was my role.” 

For the Kennedy Centre to honour Goh on such an international stage means “a relief and happiness” to Schergen, that “someone’s saying, ‘This man was very important’.” “The elephant in the room that nobody mentions is that one of the reasons Choo-San has been relegated to a minor character in history is because his life was taken by the AIDS crisis,” Schergen says. The impact of the AIDS epidemic—which reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, when Goh passed—cannot be understated. Because AIDS had spread largely among queer communities, people with AIDS were stigmatised and left with little institutional help, perpetuating a silence around Goh’s name to the present day. “So to see him rise again … it makes me happy,” Schergen says.

“You know, he was a tremendous person. A pain in the butt. He was a very difficult friend. He was very arrogant, very demanding. Very. But I don’t regret that at all. We were beyond the boundaries of friends. It was a privilege and an honour to have him as my best friend.”

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