CAN – Connect Asia Now, a part of Esplanade’s da:ns focus 2023, will present two exciting commissions by artists Melati Suryodarmo and Kornkarn Rungsawang. 

Melati’s Lapse and Kornkarn’s Mali Bucha: Dance Offering vastly differ in choreographic expressions, but they intersect in concerns for their immediate communities and burning issues about the world we live in. Melati looks for ways of negotiating chaos and dystopia through collective agreements in local communities while Kornkarn seeks for more active and democratic avenues toward faith and belief. They invite us to reimagine more ideal situations, environments and communities that perhaps could achieve equilibrium, equality and equity. 

Tell us a little about your performances Lapse and Mali Bucha: Dance Offering.

Melati: I'm interested in a situation where something is constantly moving or changing or being in between constant movement. I also am interested in the potential of chaos as routine that is regularly accepted by people, by a community. I focus on how a society accepts failures and how the people deal with them, for example social conditions that are created through modernisation and the modern, including the rules and the law and post-colonial baggage. I'm very interested in how a lapse can put chaos into order organically by collective commitments or agreements.

Kornkarn: (Mali Bucha) is a dance offering that is based on the traditional Thai dance called Rum Kea Bon that literally means dance offering in Thai language. This style of dance connects Thai people’s beliefs in using dance as a way to negotiate with higher beings to make wishes or prayers come true.

In Thailand we believe in higher beings, spirits and gods, and the dancer in the Rum Kea Bon tradition becomes a messenger for the people to send prayers or wishes to higher beings. For this work, Mali Bucha: Dance Offering, I present a new way we can make connections to higher beings through technology as an interface. I use different tools—myself as the dance medium, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies—as interfaces to connect physical, spiritual and digital worlds.

Traditionally, I am an interface as a dancer to help communicate between the people—the devotees—and higher beings. My dance is offered to the higher beings or the gods as prayers and wishes. In Mali Bucha, there are more technological interfaces as I guide the audience between a digital shrine and the physical world using VR headsets.

Both Lapse and Mali Bucha: Dance Offering underwent many stages of creation.

Melati: I started to work on Lapse in 2019 as a dance laboratory project in Solo [Indonesia, where Melati lives] in Institut Plesungan [Melati’s dance studio and workshop]. We had actually planned to tour Lapse in Japan and Taipei but then the pandemic came, and so I collaborated with the online Dance in Asia festival, with Japan’s Nibroll dance company (headed by Mikuni Yanaihara) and Taiwan’s Century Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC, headed by Yao Shu-Fen). We made Lapse into a 30-minute film, but it was not as satisfying as if I had worked on it as a live performance piece.

I am happy that Lapse is now invited for a live performance, working with familiar and new dancers. I'm happy to have this produced by Esplanade as a completely new work, a premiere.

Kornkarn: I started conceptualising an early version of Mali Bucha in 2020 during Thailand’s pandemic lockdown. Many people, including myself, felt we were lost because we couldn’t go out. We prayed and hoped for something better in our lives. We couldn’t see the future, we couldn’t go out. I didn’t know what the future was going to be, how much we might lose and not knowing how long the lockdown would continue. And then we began to connect with people online that made me feel better talking to someone, finding out what’s going on around the world. I wanted to find a way to connect with other people online and find a way to pray or make wishes for the future in a digital world. So, I did the first version of Dance Offering online in 2021.

I continued to develop my research into dance and worship with the online dance research platform [CP]3 headed by Daniel Kok of Dance Nucleus Singapore in 2021. I then presented it as a workshop-in-progress showcase in front of a live audience in 2022 for Dance Nucleus’ presentation called Vector #2, in collaboration with Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay. A further residency this year at the Kinosaki International Arts Center in Japan led to deeper research with Japanese worship, shrines and temples, and meeting people who have a similar relationship as I do with worship.

Could you tell us about your choreographic process for Lapse and Mali Bucha: Dance Offering? What was the process like?

Melati: I apply butoh, that I trained in, in my dance labs to guide the dancers to discover their own inner world. I [invite] the dancers to go deeper into their own personal memories inside the body so that the movement that is created cumulates to choreography. It is not just technical choreography. In order to do that, the dancers should develop their inner worlds—I think [of it] as a long story, a long journey to dialogue between the internal organs and the non-physical elements of our body. Then, memory will be triggered and the body will have the freedom of movement. I also like to take into consideration the element of time in the body. The relationship between the body and time is very sensitive. Whenever the body starts to move, it has to consider the situation of space and inner time of the body, like the breathing and delivery of physical energy.

Kornkarn: Mainly in Mali Bucha, I focus on the Thai folk-dance movements called rabam. It is a dance that is linked to the community’s way of life.

I used many animal gestures and movements dance for this work. However, I do not only develop physical choreography—I have to be aware of how physical choreography works in the digital world too, and to understand the workings of digital avatars. Mali Bucha is about how I combine my dance language with avatar/digital language. I use Thai folk-dance very precisely when I do the dance offering personally, but the digital world gives new meaning to my traditional dance.

Themes of faith and belief run through Lapse and Mali Bucha: Dance Offering. What are some of your own beliefs?

Melati: I believe in the constant change of our human condition. I believe in the cosmos, in nature—hukum alam [Indonesian, laws of nature]. We actually all live in a kind of temporary state. 

Kornkarn: Dance for me is about communication and I use dance to communicate with my community and my society. I want to say that we have hope. We will not give up. Hope is very important to me because when I am unsure or insecure, I have hope and I have belief. Hope and belief help to steady me when I am unsure about things.

What are your concerns and worries in your community?

Melati: I'm worried about the unsuitable systems imposed on society for the sake of change. There's not enough opportunity for the society to reflect on their local ways of living. I hope for a more local way of thinking—to share our way of being a society where we can change in an organic fashion.

Melati: We need children to understand that we have our own ways of making sense of climate change—for instance, preserving the environment. 

I live in a village [Solo] that is changing. It used to be a farming village with padi fields but now that has changed to be inhabited by factory workers. Farmers are selling rice fields, taking huge bank mortgages, and suffering from debt repayments. Yet, the houses in my neighbourhood are also getting bigger as everyone is competing to have huge houses. It is all about economic growth!

Kornkarn: When you go to the temple and the temple becomes very popular, more people will go to that temple—it becomes even more powerful because there are more people contributing to it by making offerings, buying talismans, or donating money. I don't say temples are good or bad, but [physical] temples, at the very least, are important for the people, not just for the sake of having temples, but for the benefit of the people.

People around the world always have to negotiate and achieve economic equality and environmental balance. When you go to temples in Thailand, the devotees make a lot of offerings—we burn a lot of things like incense and paper offerings, we actually create waste, garbage. When I created the digital shrine from the beginning, I realised it’s good for the environment—there is less waste.

Thailand also just had its elections in May 2023. It has been four months since, but we still cannot have the government we actually want. Suddenly, the prime minister and the government are decided by a higher power. I do not agree with the way the government was formed—not by majority [vote]. The first thing that the new government promised to do was to give 10,000 baht (approximately USD279) to each Thai person. There are 71.6 million Thai people. Can you imagine how much money the government is giving away? The money can be given to needy Thais, for the very sick, for the very poor communities. So, they buy us [over] and make us just wait for money. It’s about money and nothing else.

Dance artists always develop and reshape how they make dance. What is your dance practice like at present?

Melati: My passion is to translate life situations and performance art into choreography so that the visuality and the body should be present. When I create a dance piece, I consider simultaneously visuals and sounds as well as the performing bodies and objects on stage. But for me, the action—the ‘happening’ in the space—is what is most important part of my choreography.

Kornkarn: Right now, I am really enjoying playing with technology, to be connected to new things and new ways of thinking. It provides new responses to my physical dance techniques in exploring my traditional dance background. 

Catch Lapse and Mali Bucha: Dance Offering happening from 13–15 Oct 2023 as part of CAN – Connect Asia Now, a part of Esplanade’s da:ns focus 2023.