May 2019, Larantuka
Peer Gynts in Larantuka
Peer Gynts in Larantuka, the first phase of Multitude of Peer Gynts project was held for two weeks from June 23rd to July 6th, 2019, in East Flores, Indonesia. The first phase was about collective research and exchanges on the issue of fear and anxiety within the context of mobility and immobility of the contemporary world, using Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as the dramaturgical platform. Within two weeks, all the key artist-collaborator of the project from Teater Garasi-Indonesia, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, came together in East Flores to have some field trips to several social-cultural sites around the island and also to have a collaboration with 10 East Flores artists. As a result of the two-week collective research and exchanges, we managed to create a work-in-progress presentation that we performed on the beach, in Larantuka’s city park, East Flores, on July 6th, 2019. Peer Gynts in Larantuka was supported by the Japan Foundation-Asia Center, East Flores local government, Indonesian Agency for Creative Economy (BEKRAF), and Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture.
June 2019, Tokyo
Peer Gynts – Asylum’s Dreams
The second phase of the project was completed in Tokyo, from August 23rd to September 6th, 2019. As expected in our modular approach at the back of this project, the project’s two-week workshop in Tokyo, held in Morishita Studio of the Saison Foundation, had provided us with a fully concentrated time and space to work with only the core collaborators of the project, exploring the key parts of our interpretation of Peer Gynt. In the workshop, we managed to explore the notion of New-Empires and Modern Institutions by looking closer at the Act IV of Peer Gynt’s original text, which will continue to serve as the key components in the development of the work. At the end of our two weeks workshop, we also managed to create a workin-progress presentation in front of the select audiences (critics, fellow theater artists, and programmers) in Morishita studio on September 6th, 2013. The engagement with the selected audience of the work-in-progress presentation, and the follow up formal and informal discussions, while MULTITUDE OF PEER GYNTS – PROGRESS REPORT 2 expected in the planning of the project, had helped us to navigate to map out different areas, topics, questions, and reactions. Some of these areas and topics were located beyond our projection, illuminating a few sites that we then decided to explore in the future. While we approach each stage of the project as a respective modular component, we cherish the fact that each encounter site (Larantuka and Tokyo) continue to surprise us. The MPG phase in Tokyo was supported by the Japan Foundation-Asia Center, Indonesian Agency for Creative Economy (BEKRAF), and the Saison Foundation.
September 2019, Shizuoka
Peer Gynts – Asylum’s Dreams
The third phase of the project in 2019 was taking placed in Shizuoka city, Japan. The MPG phase in Shizuoka is the first phase of the realization of the Ibsen Scholarship 2019 support for this project. As the Shizuoka phase is the culmination phase of the project in 2019, this time, it took a longer time than the two previous phases. From October 16th to November 4th, the Shizuoka phase started with more than 2 weeks workshop, held in Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC), where all the core artistscollaborators of the project also had a collaborative process with 6 performing artists from SPAC, to create the first complete theater performance of the project: “Peer Gynts – Asylum’s Dreams.” The piece, the Shizuoka version of the project, was performed in the main stage of SPAC, Shizuoka Arts Theater, from November 5th until 19, 2019, in front of Shizuoka high school students on the weekday’s shows and the general public on the weekend. The hybridization between the Larantuka’s findings and Tokyo’s findings, as well as the presence of our new collaborators from Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, allow us to build a more cohesive world for the productions. All the three phases of the project in 2019 had strengthened our believe in our modular approach as well as the more dynamics relationship between performance making and the specificity of its context, location, as well as the audience where the project took place. The work in progress approach allows the performance making as a knowledge-production laboratory to grow with the public. The overall project of Multitude Peer Gynts will continue to apply and expand our modular approach as we travel back to Indonesia in 2020 and as we plan to embark to Vietnam and Sri Lanka in 2021. The phase in Shizuoka was also a co-production between Teater Garasi/ Garasi Performance Institute and Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC), supported by Japan Foundation-Asia Center, Agency for Cultural Affairs (Government of Japan through the Japan Arts Council, Japan Foundation for Regional Art-Activities) and Indonesian Agency for Creative Economy.
November 2020, Yogyakarta
UrFear: Huhu and the Multitude of Peer Gynts
Due to the global pandemic restriction in 2020, we conducted the project on a specifically structured website (http://www.urfearmpg.net/), staging 11 modular works as a performance network from October 31 until November 30. in 2021, the project arrived in Colombo and Ho Chi Minh City, where we initiated exchange workshops with new collaborators from the two cities and produced 6 network-performances, titled Urfear; Transit Sri Lanka and Vietnam (https://urfearmpg.net/transit21) Titled “Huhu and The Multitude of Peer Gynts”, the project in Jakarta-Yogyakarta in 2020 is the fourth site of our intercultural performance series, following the first series of workshops, work-in-progress in Larantuka, Tokyo, and –also the world premiere performance– in Shizuoka. The particular experience of the virtual version in 2020 confirmed the more expanded potentiality of our modular approach. As we sought to navigate an alternative way to conduct a theatre collaboration in the time of the pandemic, our experience with the approach last year has been precious, a testimony of the fluidity of these modular works to move toward various performatic mediums and forms.
The further development of the “modular approach” to explore the various precarious realities across the Global South at the core of the Multitude of Peer Gynts project –especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic situation–has opened broader, more in-depth works. On a practical level, the approach allowed all of our collaborators to research and create their work individually from their own respective safe-place and/or collaboratively by following a proper health procedure. On the more methodological level, the modular allowed each individual artist to go deeper into their respective particular issues while maintaining connection by locating each issue as a part of a more extensive network of ideas across the various places of the Global South (East Flores, Tokyo, Bugis, Papua, Yogyakarta, Jakarta, and Colombo).
The network of ideas was aptly translated on the web-stage online platform, where we staged all of the individual modular works. Each modular work was placed within the more extensive network through a dedicated, scheduled, and specifically structured interactive website (http://www.urfearmpg.net/). Furthermore, due to how these works were located under a different configuration of works –a constellation– each work also actively engaged in diverse and continuous meaning-making processes on each performance day. The web-based platform also allowed us to invite visitors (spectators) to follow diverse paths to experience these individual works as connected work.
June 2021, Srilanka & Vietnam
UrFear: Huhu and the Multitude of Peer Gynts
In January 2021, the project started to develop new working paths in Vietnam and Sri Lanka by forming cultural exchange initiatives with various young artists from the respective locations. By February 2021, informed by how the pandemic crisis was managed in Indonesia, we began to anticipate the possibility that we would need to have an alternative plan. Following preliminary research and a series of discussions with a wide group of young performance and theatre artists from the two respective sites, the project began its weekly workshop in Vietnam in March 2021 and Sri Lanka in April 2021. By April, it was clear that it would be difficult to tour and perform the latest development of our work at the three locations (Colombo, Ho Chi Minh, or Yogyakarta) between June – August. In May, however, along with our new peers from the two locations, we managed to collectively and collaboratively design both the shape of the creative workshop in June and July, producing three new modular works in Vietnam and three in Sri Lanka.
UrFear: Transit Sri Lanka and Vietnam is the outcome of our work in 2021. Explored, discussed, and performed during the heights of the pandemic in Southeast Asia and South Asia, this was probably the most heightened situation where all the collaborators literally had to struggle with “fear/anxiety” and extreme “immobility” on daily basis. At the same time, the project itself managed to serve as a social infrastructure, a concrete transnational family, for all its collaborators. Consisting of various artists and perspectives from Vietnam and Sri Lanka, the project continues to explore the potentiality of modular experimentations. The website (https://urfearmpg.net/transit21, a part of urfearmpg.net universe) stages its findings: various work-in-progress pieces and its forking paths. The performance premiered online on August 24-26, 2021, with a public discussion session on August 27, 2021. The web-stage (https://urfearmpg.net/transit21) is still available online before its final relocation to our open-for-public archive/museum website, where we archive all our performance works from 2019 to 2021.