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Traces of a Corporeal Archive: Choy Ka Fai + The SoftMachine Project

Michelle Lim 1

1Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Since 2012, the Berlin-based Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai has been working on the SoftMachine project, a work that comprises a growing archive of interviews with more than 80 contemporary dance choreographers from Asia and several performance works made in collaboration with his subjects. The SoftMachine project began with a simple questioning of the oft-held European notion of a monolithic “sia”and has since developed into a critical and transcultural mapping of intersections between traditional and contemporary dance histories from Asia. In this paper, I will examine Choy’s collaborations with dancer-choreographers Surjit Nongmeikapam (India) and Rianto(Indonesia), arguing that the folding of traditional/local dance movements into new performance works has created an alternate archive of dance and performance with the body as repository, one that is simultaneously historicizing while contemporanizing. I briefly discuss the significance of Choy’s project in the aftermath of the banning of state funding for performance art in Singapore from 1994 to 2004.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.