2025 TAF: LAPSE

7.7 (Mon) 12:00 TPAC Member pre-sale
7.14 (Mon) 12:00 Tickets can be purchased

The prelude performance begins at 14:30 at the outdoor in front of the Taipei Performing Arts Center (across from Jiantan Station).

“A quiet and thunderous journey” - Dance Informa

Rooted in her Javanese heritage, Melati Suryodarmo explores ‘vital lapse’ as a concept of collective potential emerging from chaos. Rather than viewing chaos as disorder, she perceives it as a space of transition - a moment of instability where new meanings arise. LAPSE, her new stage work, delves into colonial histories, spiritual disconnections and contemporary societal shifts.

The natural landscape under colonial influence is Melati’s central focus. In specific, she critiques the Mooi Indie (a Dutch term meaning 'Beautiful Indies') style which is a colonial-era genre of painting that depicted Indonesia as an idyllic and passive paradise and reinforced a detached understanding of nature by erasing prevailing socio-political realities, thus rendering the landscape as an aestheticised commodity, rather than lived and sacred spaces. A sculptural set takes centre stage in LAPSE - a gigantic aluminum- wrapped mountain that embodies the colonization of landscape both physically and ideologically.

Here, Western and Eastern perspectives are juxtaposed: while the West frames nature as something to be conquered and extracted, Javanese philosophy regards mountains as a territory for pilgrimage and transcendence. A sacred site, once central to cultural and spiritual life, is reframed here within a colonial-capitalist narrative.

LAPSE also explores the significance of human-animal hybridity in Javanese mythology, seen in figures such as the Garuda and Ganesha, that function as liminal symbols that bridge earthly and spiritual realms. Javanese tradition, which embraces ambiguity and alterity, has however lost its potency since colonialism disrupted cosmological beliefs and vernacular practices, fragmenting the ways that people interact with nature, and also how they perceive their own heritage.

Ambivalence sits at the heart of LAPSE, where disorientation creates new possibilities in our contemporary society that is undergoing rapid urbanization, digital acceleration and ecological crises that contribute to a growing sense of alienation. In creating the performance, Melati does not propose to resolve the fractures of the past but instead makes space for them - transforming ‘lapse’ from an absence into a presence, from chaos into a force of vitalism.

©photo credit: Michael Pham for Asia TOPA, Arts Centre Melbourne 2025