Pichet Kluchun and Myself

In September 2004, I was invited in Bangkok by Singaporean curator Tang Fu Kuen to lead a project. I wondered for a while if I had to accept the invitation or not, and I finally proposed to try to work with a traditional Thai dancer.

I am indeed deeply interested in the extra-occidental performing arts traditions, for both dance and theatre, since the bedazzlement I experienced when I attended a Kabuki performance in Tokyo in 1989. I had similar feelings with Indian traditional dance or with the parade of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival.

Tang Fu Kuen proposed to dancer and choreographer Pichet Klunchun to encounter me during my stay in Bangkok in December of the same year. We met without knowing anything about what could finally result from our meeting. I had just prepared before some questions to ask to this dancer. Personally, I had only a vague idea of what was that traditional Thai dance, and Pichet Klunchun didn’t know my work.

The circumstances of our meeting determined the nature and the form of the result we obtained. The jet lag, the fascination that the city of Bangkok and its inhabitants exerted on me, the monstrous traffic jams which did not permit to do all the rehearsals, the context of the Bangkok Fringe Festival where the piece had to be premiered, led us to present to the audience a kind of theatrical report of our experience.

We happened to produce a kind of theatrical and choreographic documentary on our real situation. The piece puts two artists face to face who know nothing about each other, who have very different aesthetical practices and who both try to know more about the other, and above all about their respective artistic practices, despite the abyssal cultural gap dividing them.

Some very problematic notions such as the euro-centrism, the inter-culturalism, or the cultural globalization, are at stake all along the piece. These notions so delicate to discuss can’t be left apart.

The historical moment doesn’t allow to skip these stakes over.

Jérôme Bel, Seoul, June 1st 2005

11.09.2010: www.jeromebel.fr/