“Multitude of Peer Gynts” (working tittle) is an inquiry-based performance on “fear/anxiety” and “im/mobility” in contemporary Asia. Consists of inter-Asian performance makers from Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, this contemporary theater collaboration departs from a rereading of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.
Initiated by Yudi Ahmad Tajudin (director) and Ugoran Prasad (dramaturg) from Teater Garasi, Indonesia, the project is devised through a series of collaborative workshops with Takao Kawaguchi (performance artist-dancer-choreographer), Micari (actor, mover) and Yasuhiro Morinaga (sound artist-music composer) from Japan, Venuri Perera (chorographer-dancer) from Sri Lanka, and other artists from Vietnam and Indonesia.
The performance will be premiered in Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) – Japan, in November 2019. In 2020 and beyond, the project will be performed in Jakarta-Indonesia and elsewhere.
“Multitude of Peer Gynts” first encounters Peer Gynt as an anxious subject who, midway in the story, somewhat forced to exile abroad and experience the marching world, the world that is full of surprises and adventures as much as fear and anxiety. Viewing him as a portrait of a modern subject, as he restlessly drifts his role in as much as his dream of the world, we find him scouring the globe, waking up in transits, meeting strangers, avoiding strangers, becoming strangers. In transit(s), a multitude of travelers mirroring one another; where are all these drifters heading to? Where are all these Peer Gynts heading to? What are they running from? What are we running from? Where is home? How is home?
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Tell me about your jetlag. Tell me about the purpose(s) of your visit. Write down your emergency contact.
On Asia as theatre: working in the performance field, having experienced both its potentiality as well as its precarity, we find that Asia is a valid category of theatre praxis. The project is conscious with the existing history of Inter-Asian intercultural performances as its closest historical interlocutor, a trajectory that we seek to learn from, reconsider, and revise. At the same time, rather than synthesizing and mixing many different “traditions” to create a stage production of a culturally hybrid form, the project seeks to look closer at Asia as a living, an ongoing sites of encounters and a part of global history. We are more interested to understand how Asian subjects struggle with the ongoing global history, along with its politics and economic capital circulation.
The map of the inquiry: The aim was not to stage an Asian Peer Gynt, that we know for sure. We seek to make a theatre that is based on exploring the state of encounters and movement across Asia from the viewpoint of flaneurs, drifters, and exiles just like Peer Gynt(s) as well as the viewpoint of immobile subjects who are structured to remain in places that desire immutability; places that Peer Gynt(s) calls home.
From such a framework, this project is also intended to become a hub of thinking around movement, mobility, and globalization, especially from the Global South viewpoint. As we are focusing on the story of people who have desires or being forced to travel we find it necessary also to understand those who seek to remain immobile and to preserve space and time as immutable.
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