作者介紹
作者介紹 River Lin , I-Wen CHANG , Cheng-Ting CHEN , Betty Yi-Chun CHEN , Enoch CHENG , Xin CHENG , Cheng-Hua CHIANG , Chih-Yung Aaron CHEditor-in-Chief: River LINAuthors: I-Wen CHANG, Cheng-Ting CHEN, Betty Yi-Chun CHEN, Enoch CHENG, Xin CHENG, Cheng-Hua CHIANG, Chih-Yung Aaron CHIU, Ling-Chih CHOW, Freda FIALA, Nicole HAITZINGER, Xuemei HAN, Rosemary HINDE, Ding-Yun HUANG, Danielle KHLEANG, Tsung-Hsin LEE, Helly MINARTI, Nanako NAKAJIMA, Jessica OLIVIERI, Hsuan TANG, Cristina SANCHEZ-KOZYREVA, Anador WALSH, Po-Wei WANG *Listed in alphabetical order of surname.Translators: (Mandarin Chinese to English) Elliott Y.N. ChEUNG, Johnny KO, Elizabeth LEE, River LIN, Stephen MA, Cheryl ROBBINS; (English to Mandarin Chinese) Tai-Jung YU, Yen-Ing CHEN
試閱文字
推薦序 : Foreword/ What’s in a Name?
John TAIN
Unlike the visual arts, the performing arts has always enjoyed a much more ephemeral existence. While a painting or a sculpture generally enjoys a stable existence once completed, a piece of theater, dance, or music occupies space only during the course of a certain duration of time. Once over, it continues to exist, but only in the mind of its viewers and participants.
And yet, somewhat improbably, something lasting seems to have taken hold with the founding of Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance at the Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC) by artist and curator River Lin. ADAM – as the annual event is popularly and affectionately known among the larger community – has managed to foster a wide-ranging network of artists and programmers from across the Asia Pacific region, and beyond, over its five annual iterations despite its being dedicated to the ephemeral arts. This is no mean feat, as by the time of its founding in 2017, the field was already thick with festivals, professional meetings, culture industry markets, and other forms of gatherings that, since the 1990s, have encouraged the growth of performing arts networks across Asia and fostered a more tightly interconnected performing arts scene around the world.
If ADAM has proven to have staying power, and to be more than just a face in the crowd, it is partly because it has distinguished itself as an opportunity, not just for networking among industry professionals, but also for artists to meet one another and to spend sustained time together in the workshopping of ideas and in-progress pieces. Thus, as it took place in August 2018 (which was when I experienced it in person), the formal meetings were preceded by Artist Lab, in which a number of creators got to know one another, partly by making, thinking, and just living together for the couple of weeks of the residence. The meetings were also bookended by several presentations by the participating artists, in which they could showcase collaboratively developed pieces, often of startling freshness and inventiveness, especially considering that they were produced in a short amount of time. This emphasis on artist development is also what has sustained ADAM and allowed it to persevere in the face of the immobility imposed by the pandemic. Shedding the more meeting-related functions of its first iterations, the event honed in on serving as a platform for artistic fertilization, with the 2021 ‘meeting’ re-imagined as three separate in-person and on-line modules spread throughout the year.
This emphasis on process and ideas underscores one of ADAM’s unique strengths, alluded to by its reference to ‘contemporary performance.’ That is, aside from its geographical ambitions to bring together Asia, the event spans disciplinary ones as well, moving between the performing arts and the visual arts through the shared but unlike vocabulary of performance. A format that came into its own in the 2000s, performance differs from its predecessor, performance art. Whereas the latter emerged out of the visual arts starting in the late 1960s partly as an outgrowth of happenings and other similar actions, and frequently featured the artist’s own body in a non-art setting, the former takes as its starting point the live experience as a shared commonality between theater, dance, music, and other performing arts. However, while it is now hardly unusual to find choreographers working in an exhibition setting, or visual artists performing on a stage, it is still rare to see practitioners from the different fields working together, as can be found at ADAM. It reflects the increasing convergence between these different genres by adding visual artists to the mix of choreographers, actors, directors, and musicians that it hosts – hardly surprising given Lin himself started in theater before turning to formats more adapted to art spaces. In doing so, it has allowed for the production of new kinds of exchange and discursive shift, one that has been exciting to witness.
Now, on the occasion of the opening of the Rem Koolhaas-designed new home of TPAC, ADAM celebrates its fifth anniversary. One can certainly hope that it will enjoy many more anniversaries to come. And, just as Adam was the first of his kind, let’s hope that ADAM presages the coming of a whole new generation of programs like it.
–
John Tain
John Tain is Head of Research at Asia Art Archive. Previously, he was a curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. His recent curatorial projects include Translations, Expansions in documenta fifteen (2022), Art Schools of Asia (2021-22), Crafting Communities (2020), Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA, 2019-20).
試閱文字
自序 : Introduction
River LIN
Curator of ADAM
This book is based on the exchanges, research and practices undertaken by artists from across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond who have worked with performance as a medium, form and method during the 2017-2021 editions of ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance). It proposes or questions work-in-progress modes of knowledge production in the glocal context of contemporary performance. This publication documents the trajectory of ADAM, and further expands the discursive process for the problematique related to issues such as geopolitics, community and social engagement, cross-cultural studies, and interdisciplinary art. As the curator of ADAM, my work is to continuously explore and stir these speculations with artists, and stage how they choreograph, sculpt, concoct and circulate their thoughts and findings performatively.
Through a point-line-plane approach, Networked Bodies: The Culture and Ecosystem of Contemporary Performance looks at the performance process in three aspects: the individual practices of artists, collaborations between artists, and the art ecosystem. This composition presents how contemporary art, society and culture have intertwined into an intricate network (alas, this publication explores only a part of it).
The first chapter, “The Artist’s Bodies and Research,” examines the creative research and development behind live works and actions of performance, dance, theatre, new media and visual artists. The specific histories, social progresses and contemporary cosmoses connected to the inner recesses of their bodies enlighten us on how the body can be used as a language and instrument of fieldwork, as well as how artistic research is replete with process-oriented performativity. “Working Collaboratively in Transcultural Practices,” meanwhile, is a collection of artists’ firsthand experiences of collaborations and back-and-forth dialogues. The various exchanges and reflections between them catalyze experimental discourses of cross-cultural practices beyond theoretical frameworks. The third chapter, “Mapping the Art Ecosystem”, depicts the intersections of the artist community, contemporary society and the institutional realm in the 21st century context. It charts where we are presently and stimulates our understanding of how different hues of cultural and art practitioners have together colored the ecosystem, including all the contributors to this book: artists, curators, academics, art critics, producers, members of cultural institutions and the like.
There is, however, no single understanding or consensus of ‘Asia as method’ in these networked bodies. The way a piece is situated and associated with other pieces in the same or another chapter of this publication suggests how discourses could be questioned, rather than being installed. It invites readers and arts practitioners to reflexively rethink about ‘who’ is perceiving and rehearsing the notions of ‘Asia,’ ‘inter-Asianness’ and ‘contemporaneity’ – for ‘what,’ from ‘where’ and ‘how’ – as well as what cultural imaginations have arguably been articulated or withdrawn amidst it all.
ADAM was initiated in a bid to build a cultural infrastructure that is open-minded and heterogeneous, as well as to seek a decentralized and non-binary discourse on contemporary performance culture through the research and practices of artists. As a publication that transforms on-site happenings, making-of processes and echoes into knowledge production, this book also responds to the social and arts ecosystem impacted by COVID-19. With the opening of Taipei Performing Arts Center in 2022, ADAM continues to investigate the networks and bodies of Asian and global contemporary art and performance through this book.
–
River Lin
River Lin is a Paris-based Taiwanese performance artist working across dance, visual art and queer culture contexts through making, researching and curating. His work has been presented by international institutions including Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipations, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), M+ (Hong Kong), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) and Taipei Fine Arts Museum among others. Since 2017, he has directed ADAM with and by Taipei Performing Arts Center. He has also recently co-curated festivals in Austria, Indonesia and Australia. Lin is a Shortlisted Artist for the 2022 Live Art Prize in Europe.
試閱文字
內文 : The Archive and Repertoire of Butoh: Takao Kawaguchi’s About Kazuo Ohno
Nanako NAKAJIMA
Archive fever
Known for its shocking, contorted body gestures and dedication to breaking taboos, Butoh is a contemporary art form that draws on both Euro-American and native Japanese sources. Butoh originated from new dance movements presented in the late 1950s, in the works of two founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, both of whom rejected contemporary Japanese modern dance’s strict adherence to Western styles. Hijikata called this movement Ankoku Butoh, meaning dance of darkness or blackness, until he passed away in 1986.
Butoh is difficult to define, and its definition is highly controversial. In terms of its theory and practice, Hijikata’s ideas were so influential that they are regarded as the source of all Butoh practice. One critic has explained that nudity, shaved heads, white-plaster makeup, and transvestism are considered essential elements of Butoh; however, Hijikata believed that Butoh consisted of a peculiarly Japanese quality of physical action and that it emphasized the spiritual climate of Asia, especially that of Japan. Whether one accepts his essentialism or not, a tentative understanding of Butoh is that it is an innovative attitude toward the body in dance that does not produce the shaped body.
After the Butoh legend Kazuo Ohno passed away in 2010, we then heard about the sudden death of his son Yoshito Ohno, in 2020. The legacy of Butoh has now been transformed into a kind of archival knowledge available to the public. Along with the Hijikata Tatsumi archive, the archives of the Ohnos have been published online for free use. The various approaches to Butoh are made possible through this recent effort at sharing materials.
Dancers outside of the Butoh community started experiencing this artform which produced no visibly shaped movement but legitimated the spiritual discipline, and the genre of Butoh embraced the notion of archiving. For a long time, nobody knew what Butoh was. Now everyone inductively knows Butoh from the archival legacy.
The discipline of Butoh is, however, strict. It could become so intense to the limit of physical torture and continuous verbal assaults by masters. This tradition is the rite of passage to becoming a member of the Butoh community. Some still subject newcomers to these rituals. Archiving Butoh, therefore, does not only democratize Butoh for outsiders, it also emancipates insiders from restrictions, freeing them from an age-old curse.
About Kazuo Ohno by Takao Kawaguchi
Takao Kawaguchi clearly states that he has neither learned Butoh nor had a chance to watch Kazuo Ohno on stage. Rather, Kawaguchi established his career in the field of media art performance as a member of the well-known artist collective, Dumb Type, from 1996 to 2008. In his performance titled About Kazuo Ohno – Reliving the Butoh Diva’s Masterpieces, which is a re-enactment of selected works by Butoh legend Kazuo Ohno, Kawaguchi, in collaboration with his dramaturg Naoto Iina and supported by the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio, has literally copied the dances from video recordings of Ohno’s masterpieces, including the film The Portrait of Mr. O (1969, dir. Chiaki Nagano), as well as the performances Admiring La Argentina (1977), My Mother (1981) and The Dead Sea (1985). While Ohno had practiced dance almost his entire life, he only established his own improvisatory style later in his career and became known internationally after his retirement from his day-job. The last three of these works are characteristic of Ohno’s eclectic and willowy Butoh style after he experienced the training backgrounds of modern dance and gymnastics.
Since its premiere in 2013 at Tokyo’s d-Soko Theater, this piece has continuously evolved. I first saw it at the Yokohama BankART Studio NYK, in the program of Kazuo Ohno Festival 2013. Together with the familiar members of the Tokyo experimental dance community, I had the chance to see the original version. At the beginning of the piece, Kawaguchi strangled himself with litter and played with a fan and a mop. The audience were left standing to watch him in the entrance space which was next to the photo exhibition of Ohno. The performance area was not fixed, so Kawaguchi often crossed into the space where we were standing or sitting. What he was doing was not at all a dance to the music, but a series of spontaneous actions: throwing blue sheets at a fan, hanging up banners in the venue, and changing out of his clothes into shreds of blue tarp… This part was a homage to The Portrait of Mr. O, in which Ohno attempted to explore potentials of his performance by carrying out absurd actions.
最佳賣點
最佳賣點 : 21世紀亞洲當代表演於跨文化及跨領域實踐的新視野讀本