Stepping forward with pride

The curtain finally fell on the 13th edition of the Bangkok Theatre Festival last night but the lights at the Bangkok Art and Culture’s fourth floor studio will only be dimmed for a few days. They’ll be back on from Friday as another stalwart annual treat – the 14th Friends-of-the-Arts Foundation’s International Dance Festival – gets underway.

Both these events are part of BACC’s third annual Performative Art Festival and again underline the centre’s support of performing arts rather than just visual arts.

Asked if the programming of International Dance Festival has improved or developed over the years, festival director Vararom Pachimsawat pauses. “I think it’s not a matter of improving but of focusing more on our goal of being a contemporary dance festival,” she says quietly.

The line-up proves her point: the performances from several countries have been either selected by the foundation’s committee or recommended by foreign embassies.

The opening performance is Esperimenti GDO’s “Per Inciso”, in which songs from the 1960s to today are interpreted through an array of dance genres. The Italian company will perform “Hopera”, an even livelier piece, on Saturday as part of the ongoing Italian Festival.

India’s Rhythmosaic will follow on Sunday with an amalgamation of classical ballet and Kathak in “Swan Lake Visited”. As BACC is closed on Mondays, IDF audiences can rest as well before enjoying a triple bill on November 25, commencing with “Red Apple” by VoDance of Barcelona, which features scenes from 11 memorable films. South Korea’s Ambiguous Dance Company will stage “The Rhythms of Humans” the following day. On November 29, the dance troupe of Kunming University will be on stage, and the stage performances wrap the next day with the return of Maya Dance Company from Singapore with their latest work “Random Chapters”, which is scheduled to premiere at the Solo International Performing Arts Festival next year.

Northern dance fans get to enjoy “The Rhythms of Humans” at Chiang Mai University on November 28. 

Another venue for International Dance Festival this year is Chulalongkorn University’s Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts, where Israel’s “Best Dance Performance of the Year 2013”, namely Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor’s “Two Room Apartment”, gets its Southeast Asia premiere on November 27 and 28, as part of the celebrations marking 60 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Thailand.

I watched the duet, inspired by Liat Dror and Nir Ben-Gal’s 1987 work of the same name, in Tel Aviv a few months after its world premiere in late 2012, and remember thinking at the time how well this piece would travel. Others felt the same and it has since been to New York, San Francisco, Paris, Dusseldorf, Bern, Basel, Bratislava, and Amsterdam and was again performed last weekend in Guangzhou.

“Actually the work is changing slightly all the time. We commit ourselves to the moment, so in those parts of the work that are not so much ‘choreography’ but more ‘behaviour’, we have a lot of freedom to play by the moment. And we do. So for us it always feels fresh, and different,” Sheinfeld and Laor say in an e-mail.

“We want to communicate. We want to touch our audiences and to play with them. In this work we put the audience very close to us on stage [in a theatre-in-the-round format] so that they can feel the energy and become part of it. It's never just a passive public sitting in the dark.”

At Lyon’s Biennale de la danse this September, I met Israeli dance critic Anat Zecharyia and she raved about “Two Room Apartment”, calling it “an honest dance work, moving between a sense of breath and a sense of suffocation”. 

“Its power is in the decision to not give over to passion so quickly,” she continued in her review. “And it successfully escapes the predictable erotic turn, bringing us back to the material body, from which our relationships emerge – to the children that we were, before we needed sexuality to fill the innate emptiness we live in as we grow.”

For her part, Vararom is optimistic about the future perspective of contemporary dance in Thailand, “I think it has a positive future but development will take the form of using many techniques and media in creating the productions. In general, the Thai dance scene still needs more training and good support for its education.

“As one of the organisations that promotes contemporary dance both to the dance artists and audiences in Thailand, IDF is contributing towards that development, she adds.

“We see IDF as a stage for both Thai and international artists, especially in promoting young choreographers. Friends-of-the-Arts Foundation supports four to eight young choreographers each year, not only during IDF but also throughout the year. We organise many performing arts programmes. That’ s really the main objective of IDF these days –to raise funds to support the annual scholarship programme.” 

 

 TICKETS TO THE DANCE

 <The International Dance Festival runs from Friday until December 3 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and Chulalongkorn University’s Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts. It’ll also be held from November 28 to 30 at Chiang Mai University Art Centre.

<Tickets cost from Bt600 to Bt1,800 (students Bt300) at ThaiTicketMajor.

<There are also workshops and masterclasses. For more details, visit www.Dance-Festival.info.