OZASIA.
A Festival of Contemporary Asian Performing, Visual and Literary Arts.
Artistic Director Joseph Mitchell. Adelaide Festival Centre. October 26 – November 11 2018. Bookings: ozasiafestival.com.au or BASS 131 246
Feature preview by Peter Wilkins
South Australia continues to live
up to its name as the trailblazing Festival State. A yearlong programme of
festivals features the Adelaide Festival, including Writers Week and WOMADELAIDE,
the Adelaide Fringe, DreamBIG Children’s Festival, the Adelaide Cabaret
Festival, the Adelaide
International Guitar Festival and
possibly the most innovative, contemporary and unique of these, the OZASIA
Festival.
Now in its twelfth year, the
festival has developed from primarily a showcase of traditional Asian arts to a
kaleidoscopic celebration of contemporary Asian arts from all parts of the
Asian continent. The inspiration of Adelaide Festival Centre CEO and Artistic
Director, Douglas Gautier, and inaugural OzAsia Artistic Director, Jacinta
Thompson, the OzAsia festival has exploded into a vibrant and unique major arts
festival, presenting theatre, music, dance, film, visual arts, food and
community events, and for the first time in 2018 hosting the internationally
acclaimed Jaipur Literature Festival.
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| Joseph Mitchell Artistic Director |
“There was no evidence” current Artistic
Director Joseph Mitchell tells me, “of wide representation of a contemporary
Asian culture that was accessible to an Australian audience, and OzAsia is
Australia’s only major arts festival that looks at contemporary Asian culture.
“Countries like China are
engaging in modern technological advances. Underground cultures are emerging in
Japan. Indonesia is extremely contemporary while drawing on its unique
traditions. They don’t conform to the structure or culture of Western arts. That’s
the vision of the festival. There is an overarching idea of a contemporary
society.”
A central theme identified by
Mitchell is displacement. A number of shows and visual arts events demonstrate
how geo-physics, digital technology, language and cross cultural collaboration
can displace people in both positive and negative ways.
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| Hotel Pro Forma's War Sum Up |
The highly acclaimed Danish
company Hotel Pro Forma epitomizes Mitchell’s vision for this year’s festival
with their contemporary opera War Sum Up.
Danish director Kirsten Delholm in collaboration with composers from
Europe, the UK and South America, the Latvian Radio Choir and Japanese Manga
has staged a libretto that tells the story of three archetypal characters drawn
from Noh theatre tales, The Soldier, The
Warrior and The Spy. The score is
electronic and the choir is miked and the performance is all about effect and
differentiation. “It looks at how you can look across different concepts of
countries and geography and look at how the world and contemporary artists
think in the Twenty-first Century. “I think that’s how we really need to frame
our thinking.” Mitchell says. “Forget about East or West or Contemporary or
Traditional. Think rather, “how do we make art in the 21st. Century
and what is the sphere of influence where great art happens.”
Returning to the theme of
displacement, Mitchell describes Nassim,
presented by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour in association with
London’s Bush Theatre. Nassim is a playwright who has to use English to
communicate, thereby sacrificing his Farsi language to succeed. His mother only
speaks Farsi, forcing the playwright to confront a compelling dilemma – what is
the purpose of his mother tongue and how do we move forward in a world where we
have to displace ourselves from our circumstance to have a global presence?
Award winning choreographer Sidi
Larbi Cherkaoui has been touring his Sadler’s Wells performance of Sutra for ten years and Adelaide audiences
will have the opportunity to see this extraordinary work at the OzAsia
Festival. Larbi spent three months in a Shaolin Temple in China, learning about
the culture and influences of the monks. Inspired to work with them, he created
this vast piece that has become a defining piece of dance in the 21st.
Century. It can be defined as physical theatre, dance or even performance
installation realized by sculptor Anthony Gormley’s design.
With Andropolaroid.1 by Berlin based Japanese choreographer Yui
Kawaguchi we see another artist who, like Larbi, has displaced themselves from
their culture as artists and influences. Her solo dance draws on ballet and
hip-hop in a forest of neon and dazzling light installations, displacing our
traditional concept of dance in a stunning display of body, voice, light, space
and sound.
While I was Waiting from Syria tells the story of a man beaten while
crossing a security checkpoint. His family gather at his bedside in an attempt
to make sense of what has happened. Their ordinary world is turned upside down
as secrets are revealed. Australians generally view Syrian conflict and
migration through the lens of the media. However, as Mitchell points out, there
are people in Damascus going about their ordinary lives. “It’s a place full of
people, not necessarily a horror story on the news. Lots of people choose to
stay in Damascus and are doing what you and I are doing right now.” (We are
enjoying a relaxing lunch in a prominent Canberra restaurant in New Acton.)
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| Secret Love in Peachblossomland |
Secret Love in Peachblossomland is widely regarded as China’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. The
thirty year old drama defines contemporary theatre in China. Two companies are
vying for performance in the same space. One is presenting a traditional memory
play about a couple separated by the Chinese revolution and the geographical
borders of China and Taiwan. The other is a contemporary farce, based on an old
Chinese story and laden with physical comedy and sexual innuendo. Traditional
and contemporary theatre companies struggle to displace each other in a
poignant and funny glimpse of the old and the new in contemporary China.
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| Here Is The Message You Asked For.. |
A more disturbing view of
contemporary displacement within one’s own society is revealed in Here Is The Message You Asked For ..Don’t
Tell Anyone Else;-) The play is an observation about how young people are
choosing to live their lives in their bedroom in digital circumstances rather
than reality. They spend their entire lives displaced from reality, dressed up
as koz vai characters, taking selfies, chatting with friends on video, and
playing with computer games. Their choice is not to engage with the real world
and live their lives digitally.
With so much exciting and
original theatre, music, dance, film and visual arts and literature on offer
over the three weekends of the festival, it may be difficult for audiences to
make a choice. To this end, Mitchell has introduced the Festival Director’s
Pass, which enables people to buy tickets for three shows at a reduced rate of
forty three dollars per performance. “I think what’s important is that people
invest in seeing lots of shows. It encourages people to engage in a festival.”
Last year thirty nine percent of the audience was aged under forty. “We want to
keep pushing a contemporary agenda,” Mitchell says, “but make it accessible.”
A quick glance at the brochure
reveals a plethora of free events. The Jaipur Literature Festival features free
discussions and debates with key writers from diverse Asian nations. Community
events such as the spectacular Moon Lantern Procession and the Lucky Dumpling
Market offer free entry, and there are free art exhibitions at major galleries
and at the Festival Centre. Five women artists from different Asian countries
present five exhibitions that counteract the view that some of the narratives
set up in society are driven by a male perspective on tradition and the
patriarchal structure of the society. In addition to all these free events are
Topeng Dance Workshops and outdoor concerts for young and old alike, all in the
spirit of Mitchell’s vision for community accessibility.
Mitchell’s festival shows that
the artists are not hamstrung by a sense of tradition or expectations of what a
work should be. As he points out Hotel Pro Forma’s work is quite subversive. Hello My Name Is presents a powerful and
moving performance from Timor Leste. Jose Da Costa plays a Timor Leste soldier
attending an international political conference during which he reflects on the
violence of pre Independence days. Using the poetry of Edward Bond, the solo
performance is sure to turn attitudes on
their head. As Mitchell observes, “We have a narrative as the saviour of Timor
Leste. They don’t!”
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| Dancing Grandmothers |
It would be simplistic to regard
OzAsia as an entirely subversive festival, intent on presenting only serious
perspectives on contemporary Asian arts. Dancing
Grandmothers is a jubilant, joyous work, featuring many of the women who
founded modern day Korea, and are now grandmothers. Complete with glitter balls
grooves, Eun-me-Ahn’s own dance company and the dancing grandmothers, audiences
will be seduced by its sheer ebullience. For the younger audiences Polyglot and
Papermoon Puppet Theatre present magical puppetry inspired by the seafaring
history of Java. Jacob Rajan will delight young audiences as chameleon-like he
plays all seventeen characters in Chai
Guru, , the story of a chai-wallah (tea seller) who becomes entranced by
the beautiful singing of a girl at a Bangalore railway station.
“This year we have a suite of
works that are visually very appealing and give the works excitement and a
sense of liveliness.” Mitchell says. “The thing that makes me most proud about
this year is that the artists are not trying to pander to anyone else or any
other form. They are just doing what they want. “
OzAsia audiences are certain to
want it too.
