TPAM Direction

I would like to look at the work of “dancers” in my program. Within the strict bindings of choreography, or in a highly improvisational structure with some given rules, how do the dancers make “moments of dance” happen? Those moments, created by the dancers who have chosen this art as profession for their life, are to be appreciated. The choreographers construct and deconstruct their philosophy and methodology of inducing the “moment of becoming dance”, and repeat the process through their body. Then, at the present, how do they perceive the world through their body? This program shows the works of Pichet Kulunchun and Mika Kurosawa, choreographers who, based in Thailand and Japan respectively, have been creating new contexts of dance free from any conventional idea or methodology. At the same time, can they be free from the proposition that dance can be useful for society, and from the reasons why they dance?. I would like to examine how dance can be free from meanings and personal reasons, or in other words, how dance can be just dance. The two works I present this year are the ones that I firmly believe stand on the point where the two above-mentioned ideas cross.

For the last two years as I have been working on the subject of “extension of the definition of theater and its limit”, I have come to ask how a theater can make theater art grow. But this point of view, I have realized, is missing in today’s theater. How can a theater restore its function as a common place for all people to gather freely again? Can we truly share the essence of the art of theater with the audience within this rigid frame of the conventional theater that divides “watcher” and “watchee”? In my proposal at last year’s TPAM Direction program, the space where works were exhibited functioned as a salon where theater and life merged, and I thought that’s something theater should be like. History of the place provides the base of the play, and people who live there are the actors and the audience at the same time. Only in such a space is it possible that theater can be within the life of people. My choice for this program this year is a unit of two who are professional critics/editors. The drive of their work is in their strong interest in the land, and the lives of the people who live there. I believe their approach is capable of opening the theater up even wider to the public where theater can form more diverse relationship with the audience.

Southeast Asia – a geographically compact but culturally dense region – is formed over a century-long experience of colonization, nationalism, military dictatorship, urbanization and neo-liberalisation. This history of epistemological violence has produced a rich offspring of contemporary practices that address the dislocations of place and self. From this edition onward, TPAM will identify artists and works that capture the inheritance of a chequered past and the realities of the complex present. Through the lens of contemporary independent artists, we will experience the multiple iterations and mobility of identity that arise inevitably from the transcultural processes of constructing bodies, gestures and languages.

The triptychal works of Eisa Jocson (Philippines) and Melati Suryadarmo (Indonesia / Germany) offer readings into female performativity as their bodies shift from one cultural space into another, creating embodiments and affects that are deep and also unstable. Eisa Jocson moves her professional pole dance practice into an artistic milieu and disavows her own image, then attempts to incarnate as a macho dancer from the subcultural Manila club, and finally grafts her body into a ‘japayuki’ entertainer from the Philippines working in the Japanese salaryman bar. Melati Suryadarmo subjects her body into a regime of repetition in EXERGIE – butter dance and then a durational performance of I LOVE YOU, chronicling her displacement from Indonesia to Germany, and returning to a ritual body where self-possession is re-examined in ‘Borrowed’.

For Eko Supriyanto (Indonesia), it was a journey of discovery from central Java to remote Jailolo to encounter the youths of a marine paradise that is also a conflict zone of religious dogmas. Investing time and dialogue into a relationship – both artistic and personal – with his new ‘community’, Eko negotiates many layers of differences to create Cry Jailolo, a work that addresses ethics of ‘collaboration’ between ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’, and what is politically at stake in performance today.