SINGAPORE — SIFA 2015 will be unleashing its dance marathon Open With A Punk Spirit! next month but you’ve actually got another dance marathon that’s taking place right now. RAW Moves’ ongoing 48:00 — which began Friday noon at DECK and ends Sunday noon — sees 12 dance artists performing hour-long pieces one after the other for a full 48 hours.

I don’t think they’ll expect you to watch the entire event at one go (which is basically like watching all of The Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, Star Wars and Harry Potter movies back-to-back) so company artistic director Ricky Sim has previously pointed out a couple of options: You download the programme and check which works (or performers) you’d like to see, or just drop by and see what you get. I opted for the latter and have managed to catch (in part or as a whole) nine pieces.

It’s not the shows per se that’s the most interesting aspect of 48:00. Based on what I caught, it’s more or less hit-and-miss affair, which is perhaps to be expected given the sheer quantity and scope, and the fact that it’s under RAW Moves’ developmental platform (and “choreographic clinic”) Run Another Way, for which Sim had encouraged the artists to explore what they can for their hourly slots.

There was actually very little dancing in what I saw. Sim had mentioned theatre and performance art as creative pegs for the artists. Audience participation and improvisation shaped up to be the most common feature. Neo Hong Chin’s Talk To Me saw her asking for advice on how to talk to people while Sheriden Newman’s Storybook Series — Fairytale saw her acting out an audience-crafted “fairytale” (which was eventually something that had a potato-turned-Pink Power Ranger and a Santa-who-wasn’t-but-was). Lai Weivien’s Eye To Eye also relied on audiences, who engaged in a “staring contest” with her, their respective thoughts on connections made written out later — a work that’s clearly (but likely unintentionally) derivative of Marina Abramovic’s very famous durational performance at MOMA. Consciously incorporating dance was Sufri Juwahir’s fun yet still conceptually solid Listen To The Body, which unfolded as a series of subtle everyday gestures that grew into a choreography riffing off movements and objects offered by a very engaged audience (including sneakers and a water bottle).

Earlier, Chiew Peishan had begun her mammoth task of folding 1,000 paper cranes and also did an introspective work about her father living alone, while Germaine Cheng busied herself mapping the performance space as if it were her room.

The latter two are actually examples of what made 48:00 interesting — I missed both shows and had caught the recorded performances. Aside from the “live” area upstairs, the first floor container space had two screens where you can watch previously recorded works of your choice. That these are placed back-to-back results in the images bleeding into each other, silhouettes crossing into the other’s spatial territory — even as these recorded videos are themselves also a foil to the live performance upstairs (and as if to emphasise this, there’s a live feed shown on a computer console on this level, next to another console where audiences can also interact with the show via Twitter). As 48:00 unfolded slowly upstairs (and the walls filled up with notes and scribbles from the different performers), 48:00 was continuously getting scrunched up downstairs as the works accumulated in its database.

There’s yet another aspect to consider here: The 48:00 performances from midnight until six in the morning were (and will be) streamed live on RAW Moves’ website.

It’s an additional layer to consider. It’s only during that span of time that the event leaps out from the spatial confines of its venue and one can experience a “live” performance from a distance (and comfort of one’s home or wherever you are), whereas you actually have to be physically present at DECK to see all the recorded (and therefore already portable) works — literally a virtual reversal.

I have to point out though that all these live streaming and archived video aspects are primarily good in theory but doesn’t quite work. I checked out the first two shows live streamed post-midnight — incidentally by Lai and Newman, who both came back with other works — and aside from briefly feeling a bit voyeuristic, I didn’t actually get what was happening, limited as I was by the single static camera at one end of the room while the performers were nearer the other end (Newman was doing another story, this time it seemed to be about bananas and a monkey, while Lai’s had something to do with a love letter.)

48:00 is admittedly rough around the edges. Not just in terms of the pieces or the execution but also its very premise. Are hour-long pieces too short or too long? What about the idea of 48 hours? Do these things feel contrived? Probably, probably not. But at the same time, as a framework, it did work (it took a while for audiences to warm up to Sufri Juwahir, for instance, but when they did, the relaxed intimate atmosphere made for a pleasant piece — which got the ball rolling for the succeeding works).

But of course, there’s also the likelihood of things going the other way and you have a piece that overstays its welcome and becomes just plain boring.

Nevertheless, I think 48:00 should be lauded for its ambition. It’s practically a mini-festival and it’s exploring something that’s rarely explored in the somewhat insular local dance scene — it’s dipping its toes in durational experiences and performance art. Its mode of presentation reminded me of performance art fests like Future Of Imagination, which simply roll out piece after piece in a non-conventional and often more relaxed setting where audience members can come and go as they please.

(On a somewhat related note, I also still think it would be cool for da:ns Festival to incorporate performance art, or performance art-related events, in one of its future editions — like in dance, the body *is* its primary tool of expression, after all. I could totally see something like 48:00 working in the Jendela space during the festival.)

48:00 runs until July 19, noon, at DECK, 120A Prinsep Street. Tickets at S$25 from http://48hours.peatix.com or at the venue, and valid throughout the duration of 48:00. You can also catch the live stream during the wee hours at http://www.rawmoves.net/