Cruising: Traveling Tongues

In Cruising 2024, co-directors of annual international performing arts festival Kyoto Experiment, Yoko Kawasaki, Yuya Tsukahara and Juliet Knapp will work with theater director Jang-Chi, theater director Lee Ming-Chen, performer Ness Roque and novelist Wen Yu-Ju. The group will conduct research in Kyoto and Taipei through the lens of food which can evoke, define, deviate from and mix various social and cultural identities. Food is often used as a representation of national identity however this research aims to dive deep into personal memories and ultra-local contexts in Japan and Taiwan, as well as more broadly within Asia, in the hope of uncovering unnoticed or unseen historical and cultural particularities and perspectives that will eventually be transformed into performance.

Kyoto Experiment
Kyoto Experiment is a performing arts festival held in Kyoto since 2010. Dedicated to producing and presenting experimental performing arts—both from Japan and overseas— the festival aims to explore and create new dialogues and values in society. Featuring experimental works that move freely between genres such as theater, dance, music and fine art, the festival hopes to open up new possibilities through the creations, experiences, and ideas that emerge from such a diverse combination.

Guest Curator *Listed in alphabetical order of last name.

Yoko Kawasaki
Performing Arts Producer / Kyoto Experiment Co-director. After working as an art coordinator for Kyoto Art Center, she was a fellow for the Program of Overseas Study by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan and studied at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. She has been involved as production coordinator at Kyoto Experiment since 2011 and is co-director since 2020. In 2024 she was awarded the 74th Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.

Juliet Knapp
Kyoto Experiment Co-director. Born in Fukuoka. Graduated Oxford University with a BA in English Literature and Language. From 2015-2017 she worked as communications manager and project manager for music and performance at Ryoji Ikeda Studio. She has been involved as a member of the PR team at Kyoto Experiment since 2017 and is co-director since 2020.

Yuya Tsukahara
Kyoto Experiment Co-director. After graduating with a master’s degree in Aesthetics and Art Studies from Kwansei Gakuin University, he joined NPO DANCEBOX as a volunteer and later became a staff member. In 2006, he began activities as a member of the performance group contact Gonzo. In 2020, he received the Best staff award at the Yomiuri Theater Awards for his scenography and choreography in the theater work Pratthana – A Portrait of Possession. Since 2020 he is also a part-time lecturer at the Department of Sculpture at Kyoto City University of Arts.

Artist *Listed in alphabetical order of last name.

Lee Ming-Chen, Taiwan
Working in theater production, performance, graphic art.Since 2009, he has created and published performances under the name of Style Lab. At the same time, he has been invited to cooperate, co-create, and consult as a personal director. The fields of his cooperation work are diversified,including contemporary theater, performing arts, visual arts, sound and audiovisual arts, etc.His works focus on the cognitive texts and magical performances/narratives of the experience scene, as well as their relationship with people and the interaction of the performance. He actively tries creative approaches in various fields mostly through collective improvisation. He draws materials from life situations and daily life, focusing on the ambiguity and its synesthesia, and using theater art as a medium and creative method. Recently he has more performing arts regarding language produced by art and contemporary techniques, as well as the contemporary Taiwanese identity perception and mixed culture/reality.

Jang-Chi, Japan
The Tokyo-based Jang-Chi directs and conceives performances. He founded the artist group OLTA in 2009. He has developed humorous and provocative works through negotiating the systems of visual/performing arts and sociological/folklore fieldwork. With a focus on the collective acts that visible in communities and the communication that unfolds there, he explores questions about the creative act and, by extension, primordial human desire, sensation, and aspiration. His work reconfigures and restages past voices, records, folk tales, work songs, movements, incidents, and so on, dealing with urban planning during modernization, industrial structures, society and history that cannot be applied uniformly across race and gender, and repeated structures. OLTA have presented their work at various venues and events, including YPAM Direction (Yokohama, 2021/2022/2023), ROHM Theatre Kyoto (Kyoto, 2020/2024), Lilith Performance Studio (Sweden, 2015), and Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival (South Korea, 2014). Their notable works were exhibited nationwide, including at the Aomori Museum of Art (2019), Busan Biennale (2016), and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2014). Since 2022, he is a Fellow of the Saison Foundation (Tokyo / JP).

Ness Roque, the Philippines
Born in 1991, Angeles City, Philippines. Ness is an actor, dramaturg and educator. Her practice is anchored by inquiries into transdisciplinary, feminist, and decolonial practices in theater, contemporary performance, and education. Ness is currently pursuing further studies in Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices at the Tokyo University of the Arts under the MEXT Scholarship Grant. She is part of Salikhain Kolektib, an interdisciplinary collective that integrates art, research, education, and community engagement to create collaborative artworks and initiatives throughout the Asia Pacific. www.nessroque.com

Wen Yu-Ju, Taiwan
Born in Taipei in 1980 to Taiwanese parents, Wen Yu-Ju moved to Japan at a young age and grew up in Tokyo. She made her literary debut in 2009 with The Good Luck Song, which won an Honorable Mention at the 33rd Subaru Literary Prize. In 2013, she participated in Port B's theater project Tokyo Heterotopia, writing a story about the lives of Asians in Tokyo. In 2016, she received the Japan Essayist Club Award for Born in Taiwan, Raised in Japanese (published in Taiwan as I Live in Japanese). In 2020, she won the Oda Sakunosuke Prize for The Chirping of ló·-bah-pn̄g. Her novels include The House of Laifu, Airport Time, Forever Young, Banquet and more. Other notable works include Setting Off from 'National Language' and In a Country That Is Not Mine, among many others.

Cruising: The Sea Within

Jogjakarta-based dance curator and dramaturg Helly Minarti with her proposed concept The Sea Within, as part of Cruising, will return to the 2024 Taipei Arts Festival to present a work in progress with artists Watan Tusi, Ginoe, and Sayaka Uehara. This artistic project explores the idea of the sea within us, as a way of anchoring the unanchored realms surrounding the notion of island and archipelago. It intends to tread on the possibilities of landing and oceaning as a method; as a way to imagine the ever-floating seaways with its ebbs and flows of the tides and waves that transcend the usual geopolitical framework of seeing and experiencing the‘world’.

Inspired by the Icelandic word innsæi [read: in-saa-ee], which is translated into ‘the sea within’, the word also connotes the borderless nature of our inner world, a constantly moving space of vision, feelings, and imagination that go beyond the literals. Within its linguistic origin, both meanings evoke the complex realms surrounding the ideas (and realities) of the island and archipelago that are at the center of inquiry for this project. Together, we turn our gaze to Oceania in search of a connection between past and present to our respective contexts beyond the familiar border of nation-states. Thus, we deliberately inch away from the complex rendition of “Asia”, which has been echoing in the field of performing arts for some time, discovering a subversive way of exploring a certain trope that is close to us and yet, so foreign.

Guest Curator *Listed in alphabetical order of last name.
Helly Minarti
Helly Minarti (Jakarta/Yogyakarta - Indonesia) works as an independent curator whose last curatorial project (2018-2021), Jejak-旅Tabi Exchange: Wandering Contemporary Asian Performance (jejak-tabi.org), focuses on unfolding the complexities of contexts and connections among certain cities in Asia in terms of identifying and understanding each diverse-, singular artistic practice at work. This particular experience/encounter informed her to expand the exploration, from cities-bounded onto the realm of island/archipelago by creating a space for inquiry - as articulated in the curatorial project of The Sea Within - which initial one-month residency-based research was presented as the inaugural Cruising edition of Taipei Arts Festival. After almost a year working remotely as a group, the one year project proves to be barely scratching the surface, so Helly hopes for the possibilities to pursue it further through different spaces and articulations.

Artist:
Ginoe (the Philippines)
Ginoe (Leyte/Makati, Manila- the Philippines) also known as Hubineer in online spaces (b. 1995) is a poet, artist, graphic designer, printmaker and community organizer, born in Leyte island of Visayas archipelago, and currently based in Makati in Manila, the Philippines. They work with found objects, scanography, textile, painting, drawing and printmaking to come up with their visual and conceptual assemblages. Ginoe’s works are hinged on the material culture of their locality (books, printed ephemera, personal archives, residue of consumption, folk religious objects) and transmutes them to form works that are tinged with cheeky defiance.

Artist:
Watan Tusi (Taiwan)
Watan Tusi, is a Truku descendant from Swasal village. Tai originates from the Truku language meaning “to see or to observe” hinting to Watan’s gaze and contemplation towards traditional indigenous culture. The question Watan Tusi asks himself: “What could indigenous music and dance be more apart from traditional ceremonies and touristic performances?” After spending two years in field research of the movement of foot scripts on the land in daily life, Watan Tusi documented over 60 “Foot Scripts”. New physical and dance forms are evolved from the deconstruction and reconstruction process in every creation. The works of TAI Body Theatre are inspired by indigenous literature, body and music, as well as the status of indigenous people, environmental conflicts, and related issues.

Artist:
Sayaka Uehara (Japan)
Sayaka Uehara (Tomigusuku City, Okinawa/Tokyo - Japan) Born in Okinawa in 1993. She exhibited White Seasons in 2016. The project attempted to capture the landscapes of Okinawa as an extension of someone’s life, rather than a symbolic interpretation of the existing image of “Okinawa” created by the market of consumption. In 2019, she held the exhibition The Others, a series that inherits the works from the White Seasons at two venues in Tokyo and Okinawa. In 2020, she received the 36th Higashikawa New Photographer Award from the Higashikawa Award which is renowned as the Town of Photography in Japan, for the work The Others. In 2022, the continuing series was published as a photo book Sleeping Tree from AKAAKA.

*Artists are listed in alphabetical order of the last name.

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