Choreographer Thanapol Virulhakul is adamant about creating performances that defy the definition of dance. In his "contemporary dance piece" Hipster The King, performers stand in a tableau for most of the show. In Happy Hunting Ground, the choreography consists mostly of jogging up and down the stage.
His latest, The Retreat, one of the three productions selected to be part of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre's Performative Art Festival #7, may come closest to looking like a dance. But don't expect it to be anywhere close to conventional.
Don't let the title fool you either. The choreographer has always been clear about the political nature of his work. The Retreat isn't a safe space created for the audience or the five dancers to escape into. It isn't a space for self-care as the title seems to suggest. The performance is as confrontational and unsafe as it comes for the dancers.
But The Retreat is not a depiction of violence through dance. The performers are actually doing dangerous things to themselves and each other to create an unsafe space and atmosphere. They play with a hot toaster, swing it around, break a cup on the ground, rub their faces and bodies on furniture. They press their bodies closely together, climb on one another, cling to each other in ways that look at once intimate, playful and perilous. They are not there to protect themselves or one another. The Retreat makes dance and theatre unsafe for the body. It keeps the audience well separated from the stage and the fourth wall firmly erected throughout, but it's difficult not to be unsettled by the action onstage or fear that the danger may reach us.
Theatre and the arts have always been a refuge for ideas deemed dangerous by society. When we enter the theatre to watch a play or a dance, however, we take for granted that everyone inside it -- the audience, the performers, the crew -- is protected from physical harm and that there are systems in place to ensure our safety. The Retreat upends that notion. It asks, what happens when the performers, and possibly us, the audience, are in danger during a performance? What happens when a refuge is no more?
A number of Thanapol's past shows interacted with the audience through text projected onto a wall. Words played a crucial role in the way the audience experienced his works. They engaged us in a way that the performers' bodies and the abstract nature of movement can't. And Thanapol could be very clever with the way he used words. They are also his and the audience's safety net.
It's refreshing though to see the choreographer moving away from that format. The Retreat has nothing for us to read during the performance, but the performers' antics eventually become tiresome, their strange behaviour redundant. The sense of danger begins to dissipate halfway through the show, logic ebbs away, and we are left with a piece of structured improvisation.
The Retreat continues until Sunday, Aug 12 at 7.30pm, Studio, 4th floor, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). Tickets are 750 baht for walk-ins, 650 baht for advance payment and 450 baht for advance payment of student and senior tickets. For more information, call 081-441-5718 or visit democrazystudio.com.
