Asia Dance Channel

Chiang Mai University Art Centre and Patravadi Theatre, Bangkok
By Pawit Mahasarinand

Keen concepts highlight the Japanese-Thai collaboration Kokashita.

Exciting as they may sound in the first place, intercultural dance and theatre collaborations, fuelled by grants from cultural organisations and ministries of culture, oftentimes result in aesthetic mishmash. Frequently, many talented artists, and then the producers, or the funders, say the focus is on each artist's learning process not the work that's presented to the public at the end, or as if we audiences do not matter as much. That is not the case, though, for Kokashita (literally "the space beneath elevated rail tracks and roads"), billed as "a humorous take on the two cultures".

Produced by Festival/Tokyo with support from Japan Foundation, the project started in late 2008 when director and choreographer Shigehiro Ide held an audition and conducted workshops in Bangkok. For six weeks before the premiere at Festival/Tokyo 2009, the Japanese performers and their Thai counterparts spent time together in Tokyo to develop the piece. The team got together again and made some adjustments before the performances in Thailand this year. That is to say, with all the support, Ide and members of his company Idevian Crew have had ample time not only to conduct research in both Tokyo and Bangkok but also to get to know and to make full use of their new collaborators, the Thai performers. And that has contributed to the memorable Kokashita I saw in Bangkok.

Ide has been known for his ability, and creativity, in making new dance vocabulary from everyday gestures, and here he drew from what he saw and experienced in the streets of Bangkok and Tokyo. But that's not to say that his choreography is either mundane or pedestrian. Instead, it both serves as a bridge, a stronger one perhaps, to the audience who may not be familiar with breaking the codes of modern dance, and explores the broader scope of contemporary dance and its interrelationship with theatre.

Ide also deserves much credit for blending his bi-national performers into one unified ensemble, given the fact that they have various performing arts backgrounds, and it's very difficult to differentiate the five Thais from the five Japanese.

Another signature of Ide's is his unique sense of humour, and this was obvious in the scene when a Thai guru gave a special intensive course of the world-famous Thai massage to a Japanese man--totally body-breaking for him and jaw-breaking for us.

Obviously, as Ide prioritised his performers' characters, some of them are not as well trained in, and whose physique is not as perfectly groomed for, dance as the others, but again, dance is not gymnastics, and in the right combinations we can overlook technical brilliance for intriguing characterisation and dramatic messages, sometimes.

As a stage work, contemporary dance is not complete without design elements, and Kokashita’s set, costume, lighting, and sound designs are both vibrant and keenly support one another in addition to the dance movements and the stories the performers are telling.

Given the merit of the work, the one performance at Chiang Mai University Art Centre on January 24 and another at Patravadi Theatre the following Friday were obviously too few, in comparison to six performances in Tokyo last year. The wider public seemed to have known little about the work and its unique style and was not highly enthusiastic about it. But that's probably another problem of contemporary arts appreciation in this country. We've been putting our efforts on training the next generation of artists so much that we forget that they cannot have a career without audiences who understand and appreciate what they do.

Meanwhile, the Japan Foundation continues to support contemporary arts and intercultural collaboration.