Every two years, Jitti Chompee puts on his festival director's hat. The dancer-choreographer and founder of 18 Monkeys Dance Theatre founded Unfolding Kafka Festival in 2015. In its first year, the festival featured four performances, one installation and a workshop. This year, the performing arts portion of the festival has doubled in number.
Jitti tells us how he chose this year's productions and gives recommendations to contemporary performance novices.
How is this year's performance programme different from last year?
The first year was about the folding and unfolding of the body and objects. I got the idea for the theme when I saw Isabelle Schad and Laurent Goldring's piece Der Bau and Yoko Seyama's origami installation The Silence Of Insects. This year, we included the themes of gender identity and animals to our original theme. I wasn't looking for productions that directly translate Franz Kafka's works onto the stage. I also chose small productions. They are more suitable for Thailand at the moment because there's a lack of venues and subsidies for Thai artists. I chose these works so they can inspire people here.
Could you recommend a few shows in the festival for those who are not familiar with contemporary dance or performance?
Jitti Chompee. Jitti Chompee
I recommend Holistic Strata by Hiroaki Umeda. He's a digital media and sound designer, but his work is very much like dance, except he's not a dancer. Children will enjoy it. It's beautiful, but I like it for its minimalism and musicality. It's also charming because he's not a dancer, but the way he moves is very natural.
Another one I recommend is NO-Body by Roni Chadash, which will be performed at The Rose Hotel. It's super creative. You don't see the performer's head at all, and she performs in a tiny space. The way she designs the body in relation to the space is very beautiful.
I also want to recommend Satoshi Kudo's Bio-Erosion for those who do physical theatre. This is their world premier. Kudo's background is in gymnastics and martial arts. He sees beauty in the way people move when they're struggling, like when someone's trying to help a person who's falling. He uses those moments to create his work, and it's really beautiful. It's also very simple and minimal -- just an empty space and the twin sisters Anna and Berit Einemo Froysland who are dancers.
In which direction do you want the festival to take in the future?
I want to eventually be able to invite producers to meet the artists in our festival and maybe take their work somewhere else. Do I want the festival to be bigger? I think its current size is perfect. It's already a lot of work because our team is still small. I want the festival to eventually start collecting information about the artworks that are inspired by Kafka. I got all these applications from countries I had never heard of. I want to know how artists in different countries are interpreting Kafka's works.
"Unfolding Kafka Festival" runs from Friday to Nov 22 in Bangkok and from Nov 24–25 in Chiang Mai at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum. Visit unfoldingkafkafestival.com.
