Choy Ka Fai: SoftMachine: The Return

Lees in het Nederlands

A decade after their first encounter, two Asian artists reunite. Through a blend of dance, documentary, and monologue, Surjit (India) and Rianto (Indonesia) explore how their bodies and homelands have evolved. From political resilience in India to the complexities of gender in Indonesia: SoftMachine: The Return is an honest, radical self-portrait. It captures a generation growing old together while redefining the future of Asian contemporary dance.

SoftMachine: The Return is a project that weaves together a decade of choreographic experiments through the critical lens of five Asian artists: Rianto (Indonesia), Surjit Nongmeikapam (India), Xiao Ke x Zihan (China), and Yuya Tsukahara (Japan). This performance manifests as a multidisciplinary experience, incorporating dance, lecture, demonstration, and documentary. The presentation at SPRING features two solo performative experiences, each reflecting on the artist’s unique biography and practice. Rianto offers an intimate portrait of his search for love within the spectrum of dance, gender, and tradition in Indonesia, while Surjit Nongmeikapam narrates a journey from the marginal to the political, encapsulated in a dance of resilience that transcends Manipur’s history of ethnic conflicts.

As a whole, the project desires a return to the body—to think together about dance and beyond—while negotiating its own archive to generate relevant dialogues on contemporary dance in Asia. Artistic director Choy Ka Fai reflects on this decade-long journey: “As collaborators and friends, I feel the desire to question our dance practices. How can we grow old, think, and play together? When we first gathered as an informal collective in 2012, we were young and ambitious, seeking to resist the norm and embrace radical alterity. Perhaps we have remained radical in our own pathways, and it is now time to dance together—beyond reminiscence—to propose new futures for the landscape of contemporary dance in Asia.”

Originally initiated in 2012 as an independent survey of the choreographic landscape in Asia, SoftMachine responded to the persistence of exoticism in cultural production. Since its 2015 premiere, the project has toured internationally with more than 60 shows.