Ten years on: Conversation with the artists from SoftMachine: The Return

Rianto is a master of lengger lanang, a dance that expresses gender, body, and construction through a man performing as a woman. He was born in 1981 in Kaliori village in Banyumas Indonesia, and received training in classical Javanese dance and central Javanese folk dance from a young age. Since 2003, Rianto has been living between Indonesia and Tokyo, Japan, where he founded Dewandaru Dance Company to introduce Javanese dance art to Japan. He has collaborated with a number of international choreographers, performance makers and companies.

In early 2017, Rianto joined Akram Khan’s company to take on Akram’s role in the feminist reworking of the Mahabharata, Until The Lions, with which he began touring in 2017. Rianto’s highly acclaimed solo work SoftMachine: Rianto, directed by Choy Ka Fai, continues to be performed throughout Europe and Asia Pacific. Since 2020, Rianto has worked to preserve the dance by establishing Rumah Lengger, a center in Banyumas that trains young dancers in the style; and collaborating with the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) to document the dance using motion capture technology.

Surjit Nongmeikapam is an Imphal-based choreographer and dancer. He is the founder and artistic director of Nachom Arts Foundation. Born in Manipur, he has a B.A. in Choreography and has worked with the Natya Stem Dance Kampni and Natya Maya, Bengaluru, as a contemporary and traditional dancer. He is trained in Kathak, Kalaripayattu, Manipuri dance, contemporary dance and Thang-Ta, a form of martial arts. His notable works include OneVoice, a solo piece shown at Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich in 2013. Surjit is also a co-founder of Arts and Imphal, an upcoming international contemporary arts festival in Imphal, Manipur. Surjit was also a dance therapist at H2H, Human to Humane, Imphal, from 2009 – 2013. He has given awareness and dance workshops to several trauma victims in Manipur.

Surjit has toured and participated in major dance festivals in Switzerland, France, Singapore, Belgium, Japan, USA, Germany, Spain, Portugal, UK and more. He is one of the few dancers and choreographers in Manipur to engage with contemporary dance forms and seek to promote its development beyond the traditional conservative Manipuri culture. He is also an award-winning choreographer: Nerves won the PECDA in 2014 and Folktale in 2016.

Xiao Ke is a performance artist who has been pioneering the pathway for performance art as physical art. She also creates and is a leading figure in contemporary social theatre about the reality of today’s China, while also branching out with other artistic forms that are not limited within the theatre. She won the ZKB Award in Zürcher Theater Spektakel in 2006.

Zhou Zi Han is a performance and audiovisual artist. He keeps moving forward by engaging in comprehensive visual art and live music for theatre performance. His works includes photography, video, contemporary art and sound.

The collaborative works between Xiao Ke and Zi Han involve photography, video, live art and installation that focus on the personal body, exploring the extremities of expression under the public context in China. By restoring the artists’ ideas back into life, their collaboration is to fulfill the life process of the idea itself, that what comes from life vanishes into life. Their works have been invited and shown in different art, dance festivals and theatres in Europe and Asia. They have toured nearly 20 countries in different cities and built up an extensive network to introduce China’s independent theatre art.

Moderator

Kyueun Kim is a theatre and performance scholar whose research engages contemporary art, immersive media and cultural memory. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore and received her PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is currently writing her first book on major VR and immersive performances from Asia over the past decade, examining how artists reconfigure body, site, and memory through technology.