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Esplanade Presents
da:ns LAB 2025
Produced by Dance Nucleus
Participating Artists: Albert Garcia, jee chan, Sarah Aiken, Sun Phitthaya Phaefuang
Mentor: Daniel Kok
da:ns LAB 2025 brings together four independent artists from across the Asia-Pacific to engage in dialogue around their respective praxes, experimental approaches, and the complexities of navigating artistic production across varied infrastructural and cultural ecologies.
As an outcome of their time in the lab, the artists are presenting a studio sharing within the VECTOR#6 Exhibition of Performance. In addition to unpacking the key impulses behind their current works, they will respond to the curatorial frame of VECTOR#6: The Sound of Intimacy, reflecting on how the relationship between solitude and collectivity shapes artistic encounters today.
Pre-registration is required. Visit VECTOR#6: The Sound of Intimacy for more details.
Advisory:
Rating to be advised.
da:ns LAB 2025 is a component of VECTOR#6’s event experience and can be accessed with a General Admission ticket to VECTOR#6.
There may be some floor seating, or the audience may be asked to move around during the presentation.
Artist Information
Albert Garcia
Albert Garcia, a multidisciplinary artist from Macau with Filipino migrant roots, is based in Taipei. His work explores hybrid identity, survival, and the immigrant experience through performance and multimedia. With a BA in Media Studies (2012) and an MFA in Dance Performance (2017), his practice centers on movement and storytelling. Themes of labor, citizenship, and resilience run through works like Joy, Untitled 2.0, and The Survival Guide. These performances reflect on the past's impact on the present, migration, and identity. Under the theme Survival Guide, Garcia examines coping strategies and the performativity of identity in today’s complex social landscape.
Catch Albert Garcia on 25 Sep, Thu, 5pm.
jee chan
jee chan is an artist and choreographer whose work is concerned with questions surrounding the displaced body and what it can perform. Characterised by hybridity, flux and syncretism, their practice engages with oral histories, ancestral epistemologies and the re-presentation of (auto)biographies, particularly among the contexts of island Southeast Asia. jee graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Performance Practice on scholarship. They are currently a member of the inaugural artistic cohort at the Rose Choreographic School, Sadler’s Wells, London. They live between Singapore and Berlin.
Catch jee chan on 25 Sep, Thu, 4pm.
Sarah Aiken
Sarah Aiken’s solo and collaborative projects explore assemblage, authorship, scale, and the self—probing the roles of performer, audience, subject, and object to frame performance as a space for empathy and exchange. Her choreographic works include Make Your Life Count, Demake/Demaster, Piece (for pieces), and SARAH AIKEN (Tools for Personal Expansion), shown across Australia and internationally. Her video work has featured at MCA Sydney, Gertrude Street Projection Festival, and HIAP Helsinki. Currently, she is developing Body Corp, an assembled choreography of video, image, and object that explores the body as a shifting, multi-species ecology—blurring human and non-human, form and time.
Catch Sarah Aiken on 26 Sep, Fri, 5pm.
Sun Phitthaya Phaefuang
Sun Phitthaya Phaefuang, born in Thailand and raised in Norway, studied dance at KHIO in Oslo before relocating to Asia, where he initiated projects across Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan. A key figure in Thailand’s vogue and ballroom scene, he has walked balls across Asia and Europe and was part of the Houses of Amazon and Labeija. Deeply engaged with LGBTQ subculture and gender performance, Phaefuang blends ballroom aesthetics with Buddhist philosophy. Since 2015, he has researched the intersections of dance, queerness, and spirituality, and after a period of monkhood in 2020, continues to integrate dharma into his artistic practice.
Catch Sun Phitthaya Phaefuang on 26 Sep, Fri, 4pm.
About da:ns LAB
da:ns LAB is presented by the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, produced by Dance Nucleus and curated by Daniel Kok annually. It is a platform that began in 2015 to interrogate choreographic practice and to feature progressive ideas in the performing arts. The objective is to establish a platform for discourse and exchange that can enable independent performance creations in Asia.
The 2025 iteration of da:ns LAB is structured as a mentorship programme, as part of a partnership network with Unlock Dancing Plaza (Hong Kong) and Thinker's Studio (Taiwan). Four creations-in-progress by independent artists in Asia-Pacific are brought together in a working group for peer-to-peer exchange, facilitated by dramaturge Daniel Kok (Singapore).
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