Dendi Madiya (Indonesia)

Tomohiko Kyogoku (Japan)

Director’s Comment on Q & APAF

Our creative process started from sharing my own dance and theater experience with the performers. After that, each performer took turns being the role of the director, the critic, and the performer; each day, the director would produce a short work, which was reviewed by the critic, and the piece was improved and re-performed in response to the critique given. I also conducted one-to-one interviews with each participant, asking the same set of questions. Through this approach, I wanted to consider the latent systemic power dynamics at play in the creative process. If human life itself is inherently violent, where and in what ways does it exist? Through the exploration of this question, we were able to generate new ones beyond the theme of violence. Valuable insight is not found in the answer, but rather in the act of questioning. This was the realization that I came to through this APAF workshop.

Issa Manalo Lopez (The Philippines)

Director’s Comment on Wo(E)man

When do you draw the line?
W(E) contemplate the notion of the FEMALE BODY as a site of “Violent” – how the woman is not allowed to take up space and negotiate the geography of what is accessible to “her”, not allowed to own and freely mobilize their bodies, not allowed to escape and challenge the male gaze.
The performance examines the body politics of Gender and Patriarchy as socio-political constructs and how it creates the complex intersections embedded in the real and the everyday. Through a multi-vocal approach, the performance maps a contemporary definition of “the woman” ‒ as energy, as wife, a transgender, a person belonging to a cultural minority. In this body to body negotiation we attempt to locate our own positioning. How are we complicit in perpetuating violence ‒ direct or indirect, organized or inorganized, actual or potential?

Cast