“WHY IS it important to have an international theatre festival for young audiences?” This might seem like a silly question – kids, after all, deserve to have their imagination stimulated – yet it was also the major topic up for discussion at the forum hosted by the biannual Bangkok International Children Theatre Festival 2018 (BICTFest) last week at Chulalongkorn University.

On hand to give an answer to this and other questions were two representatives of renowned and well-established international festivals around the world, namely Fiona Ferguson, creative development director of the “Edinburgh International Children Festival”, formerly known as Imaginate, and Hisashi Shimoyama, general producer of the “ricca ricca *festa” from Okinawa in Japan. They were joined by Luanne Poh, artistic director of “100 and 100 more Festivals” of The Artground in Singapore and Adjjima Na Patalung, director of the BICT Festival in Thailand.

Despite being rather new – this is only the second edition of BICTfest –and still medium in terms of size, Adjjima stresses its importance in focusing attention that young audiences need creative and artistic performances to develop.

“These children are tomorrow’s adults so it’s vital that instil in them an appreciation of the arts. Live performance allows the audience to engage and share their feelings. The details and surroundings arouse and shape these young minds and allow the children to grow up as more complete human beings,” she says.

“They also learn about the cultural differences in the world. I believe and hope that we will see more people eager to experience this type of theatrical art.”

The Edinburgh International Children Festival is the role model of the successful festival. Inaugurated in 1989 and already preparing for its 30th anniversary next year, the festival has experienced plenty of challenges over the years.

“Putting together any festival is difficult,” Ferguson says. “There are always problems in securing funding and finding quality works including those made in the home country.

“But children’s festivals are even more challenging. It’s the same here as everywhere: adults who haven’t seen high-quality works for children, whether theatre or dance, tend to have a real misconception of the standard. Making a good work needs skill and support, as well as recognition. Next year will be our 30th festival and we are relying on those skills, which are affected by government policy, how much money they have for theatre and how much value they put on the art. These are the main challenges,” she adds.

“In Scotland, we are exceptionally lucky that we have a relatively large number of artists in our population. That’s partly because Imaginate has been around for 29 years. But again, it comes back to the same thing: if you want to turn children’s theatre into a career, you have to be aware that a lot of people will pick adult work because it is more serious art. They don’t see how interesting or hard it is to create an artistic work for a two-year-old.

And, Ferguson adds, because artists have to focus much harder on creating a work for a young audience than for an adult one, it’s really good training.

“For example, if you making a dance piece for six and seven year-olds, then you cannot go into the performance without thinking about the audience and what the response is going to be. Some adult artists don’t think about the audience but instead only look at the hook they want to see. The adult audience tends to be polite; even if they don’t like it, they will sit in silence. They will talk to friends about how they feel after the show. Children aren’t like that. You can feel the response immediately; if they are bored, they start fidgeting, playing with things and talking with friends. If they are enjoying it, you can feel their engagement in the work immediately and that’s very gratifying. Artists can still produce the work that they want to make and be driven by their artistic aims, but they also need to think about the audience,” she notes.

Japan’s “ricca ricca *festa”, an international theatre festival for young audiences, was launched in Okinawa back in 1994. Organised jointly across several towns on the island, it was the very first international performing arts festival for families in Asia.

It’s based on the belief in “nuchigusui”, an Okinawan word that means “medicine for life” or “medicine for long living”. This is no ordinary medicine though, but a nutrient for the heart, and so the festival strives to deliver quality performances that enrich the experience of art.

Shimoyama says that one of the key ingredients for success is giving children the opportunity to participate in the show. “Every year the schools organise a show on their premises because they recognise the importance of theatre for children. The festival also organises workshops for children so that they can be part of the show. Many artists try to understand the child’s world by lowering themselves and looking at things from the same eye level as the children and not from the top down. In short, these artists are seeing society from children’s perspectives,” he explains.

Although Japan certainly has more artists wanting to create performances for adults than for youngsters, a new movement has been launched as part of the festival’s mission to be the hub of TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences) in Asia. The aim is to cultivate creative activities by participating in the festival, which presents high-quality productions for children and young people from all over the world, and also actively organises symposiums, workshops, networking programmes as well as international co-productions.

Ferguson adds that children’s theatre is not just entertainment.

“As the festival organiser, we try not influence the artist but we are always looking for works that don’t preach about, say, gender or immigration. But we are interested in works that talk about such topics in artistic ways. A good work tells the story not by confronting people but as something that stimulates conversation by a teacher or parent in the classroom or at home.”

Indeed, the performance, “The Rice Child” by Thailand’s Crescent Moon Theatre last weekend was a prime example of what Ferguson was explaining. The performance featured various types of arts including puppets, sand drawing, a shadow play through an overhead projector, and singing. Creative director Sineenadh Keitprapai, says the story of WaWa, which reflects the life of migrant children whose parents are labouring in Thailand, sets out to bring the problem closer to Thai children and their environment.

“Teaching young children to get over their differences is not easy,” she says, “In our works for children we have to create provocative thinking but at the same time it mustn’t be aggressive. I’m thrilled to hear my young audience members engaging with the performance and speaking out loud to one of the other characters, Kao, not to bully WaWa or whispering how much they pity her to their mothers. They learn about life of others through these puppeteers.”

THREE MORE DAYS

– The Bangkok International Children Theatre Festival 2018 continues through Sunday at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.

– Find out what’s showing at http://www.BICTFest.com.

NEARLY a decade after his death, a New York retrospective of the rapper, composer, graffiti artist, painter, sculptor and cosmic theorist Rammellzee hopes to reveal to the world his multifaceted, iconoclastic work.

While street art has worked its way into everyone’s living room, and a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat can fetch more that $100 million (B3.1 billion) Rammellzee, although a key figure of 1980s New York, remains – as Sotheby’s put it – “perhaps the greatest street artist you’ve never heard of”.

Like many aspiring artists of his time, a teenage Rammellzee in 1970s Queens, New York, started out spraying on subway trains.

But as time passed, his letters transformed into abstract figures – compositions that by the start of the 1980s could be found in galleries, even Rotterdam’s prestigious Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in 1983.

People look at the art of the conceptual artist, graffiti artist and hip-hop pioneer, Rammellzee at Red Bull Arts New York/ AFP 

He also rapped – and Basquiat produced – his single “Beat Bop,” which would go on to be sampled by the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. Next, he made a stealthy cameo in Jim Jarmusch’s cult film “Stranger Than Paradise”.

But instead of being propelled to the same heights as Basquiat, Rammellzee changed course — inventing the concept of gothic futurism, creating his own mythology based on a manifesto.

In his Tribeca studio, he materialised his creation in the form of the “Letter Racers” – huge letters on skateboards that symbolise the possibility of free language as an emancipation tool.

He also made the “Garbage Gods”. figurines made of recyclables – half the “Recyclers”, and half the “Trashers”.

From the 1990s, Rammellzee would appear in public disguised in futuristic warrior get-up. Until his death from heart disease at 49, he remained in this imaginary world, current trends far from his mind.

People look at the art of the conceptual artist, graffiti artist and hip-hop pioneer, Rammellzee at Red Bull Arts New York/ AFP 

“Our biggest challenge was how to find a way to take such a multi-faceted artist, character, myth and try to create a narrative arch that could convey his intentions,” explains Max Wolf of Red Bull Arts New York, which is hosting the retrospective until August 26.

The pieces come from private collections and Rammellzee’s family.

“The US doesn’t really know a lot of that work, that was created and put into collections in Europe and never seen again,” Wolf adds. “So it was important that we try to forage all that and present it here.”

“He had a purpose. He had a certain body of work that he had to complete, to complete this capsule of gothic futurism. He finished it and he passed away.”

WHILE THAILAND will soon play host to three art biennales– the first ever held here – there remains only one biannual international children’s theatre festival in the country. This clearly proves the lack of support for children’s performing arts, a tool that helps them develop into quality adults, and reminds us of the sad fact that here the focus is on talent shows and competitions.

At the opening ceremony of the second biannual Bangkok International Children’s Theatre Festival on the first floor of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), part of BACC’s seventh annual Performative Art Festival (PAF), last Thursday, audiences saw plenty of logos of cultural and educational partners but few of supporters on the poster backdrop. Despite this, festival director Adjjima Na Patalung, and her team at Arts on Location and Democrazy Theatre Studio have managed to bring in performances, artists, scholars and producers from nine countries.

In just seven days, Kabinet K managed to create a performance worthy to raise the curtain of the BICT Fest at BACC. Photos/Deun Chongmankhong

In her opening speech, Adjjima noted that as the festival puts emphasis on the process, rather than product, the show that we were about to watch was a work developed from a seven-day workshop – hardly the usual curtain raiser for any performing arts festival.

Later, when we moved to the fourth floor studio, Adjjima introduced the Belgian choreographer Joke Laureyns, who’s part of Ghent-based company Kabinet K. She described the concept of “Horses” as an “intense sharing” rather than a “performance”. The work premiered in 2016 and toured many European cities following five months of creation and rehearsals, and Laureyns applied this intense sharing to six adult and six children performers here in Bangkok.

Forty-five minutes later and most audience members would agree that she was being humble. It was a risk well taken for the festival, and the Thai version of “Horses” didn’t look like a work from a seven-day workshop at all. Centred on the theme of trust through physical movements, professional dancers and children engaged in a variety of movements and at various paces set to original music. It was also proof that to enjoy dance, kids don’t necessarily have to just watch music videos and copy their movements then perform in a dance competition in a department store.

Photos/Deun Chongmankhong

Yet the number of adults in the audience far surpassed the kids at this opening show – perhaps because it was weekday evening –and a boy in front of me fell asleep after 20 minutes, allowing me a full view of the work. I found myself wishing that, since the original version was presented with a live music performance, Thai musicians, composers or sound designers able to work in such a limited time, could have participated in this Thailand-Belgium collaboration, thus adding to the local input.

And since I cannot take my four-legged son to any of BICT Fest’s programmes, I replicated some of the dance movements in our midnight playtime to prove that we also have trust in one another.

But as neither of us are dancers and he weighs 28 kilos, his facial reaction read, “Hey, wouldn’t you rather have a human son instead of me?”

OFF WITH THOSE SMARTPHONES

The “Bangkok International Children’s Theatre Festival 2018” runs through May 27 at BACC (BTS: National Stadium), Chulalongkorn University (BTS: Siam) and Creative Industries (at M Theatre, on New Phetchaburi Road, between Thonglor and Ekamai).

It features performances, workshops, talks and forums.

For more details and ticket reservations, visit http://www.BICTfest.com and Facebook.com/BICTfest, call (081) 441 5718, or email BICTfest@gmail.com.

THERE’S SOMETHING deeply unsettling about navigating through the latest Louise Bourgeois exhibition, an experience that feels like trespassing in the late French-American artist’s psyche.

A five-decade survey that opened last week at the private Glenstone museum in the town of Potomac, Maryland, outside Washington, explores the breadth of deeply autobiographical, sexually-charged creations by this prolific artist, best known for her giant metal spider sculptures displayed around the world.

Traumatised as a child by her philandering father’s infidelities, including with her nanny, Bourgeois took a revenge of sorts with “The Destruction of the Father” (1974), her first large-scale installation.

A red-lit room lined in soft fabric suggests a womb-like bedroom-dining room, but also a crime scene.

“He Disappeared into Complete Silence” (19472005) is a limited edition book of 11 engravings./AFP

Abstract blobs represent children who have rebelled against their overbearing father, murdered him and eaten him up, his body reduced to lamb shoulders and chicken legs cast in soft plaster.

“So he was liquidated … the same way he had liquidated his children,” Bourgeois once said about the piece.

Nothing surprising, really, for someone who said “art is a guarantee of sanity”.

The ferocious aspects of Bourgeois’ femininity are on display in an untitled piece from 1996 that’s a macabre take on a mobile or clothing tree, with fine undergarments hanging from huge bones.

Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ long-time assistant who now leads the Easton Foundation dedicated to her life and work, recalled that the artist kept most of her old clothes – including from her childhood – and used them for her creations.

“Single I”, from 1996, is part of the Bourgeois collection at the Glenstone Museum/ AFP

“Ode a la Bievre” (2002), an embroidered book made of fabric pieces, pays tribute to the tannin-rich river that ran near the Bourgeois family’s tapestry-restoration workshop.

In “Cell (Choisy)” (1990-1993), Bourgeois placed a guillotine in front of a reproduction of her childhood home in hollow pink-yellow marble inside a metal enclosure lined with knocked out windows.

There are architectural qualities to “He Disappeared into Complete Silence”, a book of engravings and letterpress text Bourgeois first made in 1947, seen here in an edition she reworked through 2005.

“Je t’aime” (2005) is a series of 60 double-sided drawings./AFP

Various figures are represented as large, inhuman structures in a world where communication is often problematic.

On one page, a tall figure holds up a smaller one. Bourgeois’ accompanying parable: “Once a man was angry at his wife, he cut her into small pieces, made a stew of her. Then he telephoned to his friends and asked them for a cocktail-and-stew party. They all came and had a good time.”

Glenstone founders Mitch and Emily Rales amassed this varied assemblage of the artist’s works over just a few years.

Having an in-house collection has its advantages. Totem-like wood structures were drilled directly into the floor, as originally intended, rather than fixed on a metal base, as other museums have traditionally done.

Gorovoy calls Glenstone’s holdings of late pieces in particular “unparalleled”. “To take this in-depth trajectory is really significant,” he says.

There’s a series of six hand-coloured etchings, “I Give Everything Away”, that Bourgeois created in 2010, the year she died at age 98.

The elderly artist here made her final goodbyes with messages such as “I am packing my bags” in shaky handwriting alongside large images of people, plants and abstract forms.

After taking this journey, it’s a relief to step out into Glenstone’s carefully manicured landscape of rolling hills, meadows and woodlands, the air filled with birdsong and the sun-tinged fragrance of spring.

“Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment” continues through January 2020, with a temporary closure in September as Glenstone prepares to unveil on October 4 a stunning expansion that will make it America’s biggest private art museum.

Christie’s chalked up $1.79 billion in sales, including every single item from the iconic collection of the late David and Peggy Rockefeller which, for the first time, spread their flagship May sales across two weeks.

Sotheby’s sold $859 million, including $157.2 million for a Modigliani nude — the most expensive lot of the season, after Christie’s last November smashed records by selling a single Leonardo da Vinci for $450.3 million.

“It’s colossal. It really is huge and especially after the dip of 2016,” says Georgina Adam, author of the “Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century.”

“As long as the auction houses have really managed to do their marketing very well and reach a big audience of collectors, the top end of the market is still doing very well,” says Rachel Pownall, a professor of finance at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics.

Christie’s sold the Rockefeller collection for $832.5 million, breaking the previous record for most expensive private collection — that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge which went for $484 million in 2009.

The Rockefellers’ jewels included a $115 million Picasso, the seventh most expensive artwork sold at auction, and new auction records for work by Claude Monet at $84.6 million and Henri Matisse at $80.7 million.

“The Rockefeller did have an influence. Those were very, very good works and they had this really fantastic provenance,” Adam said. “I think that sort of set the scene for the whole week.”

‘Diddy’ wins

The 21st century art market is a global one.

Christie’s said 38 countries and six continents took part in its Post-war and Contemporary Evening Sale, which scored seven world auction records for lesser-known artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell.

Sotheby’s sale of Kerry James Marshall’s “Past Times” for $21.1 million set a record for Marshall and any living African American artist. Rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs was identified as the buyer by Marshall’s dealer.

“There’s more diversity occurring in the market, which is great,” says Pownall. “If you’re finding more diversity in the buyers, then they’re also looking for more diversity in who they’re buying,” she added.

The super-rich invest in art as a status symbol but also to make money, hoping for big returns on their down payment.

The 1917 Modigliani “Nu Couche (sur le cote gauche)” for example, sold for $157.2 million but had been bought by its seller for $26.9 million in 2003.

“People who spend serious money on this generally didn’t become rich by being stupid,” says Jean-Paul Engelen, co-head of 20th-century and contemporary art at the much smaller auction house Phillips.

The US market is still the biggest, but new money from China is moving in and their aggressive bidding helps to push prices up.

Sotheby’s said a quarter of all works sold at its Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale were acquired by Asian private collectors. Christie’s said 40 percent of buyers at its own Modern Evening Sale were from Asia.

Trophy assets

Big names — namely Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh — are the most coveted, giving what Adam calls a “bragging aspect” to acquisitions.

“We have very, very rich people fighting over a few trophy assets, a few what they call ‘blue-chip’ artists,” she told AFP.

A strong market means improving supply, as sellers look to capitalize.

“We see… our clients responding to things that are completely fresh to the market, and that have been owned and loved for many, many years,” said Sara Friedlander, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art in New York.

“There’s tremendous appetite,” acknowledged Simon Shaw, co-head of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s.

But the market as a whole has deviated little over the last 10 years. While the top lots fetch astronomical prices, Adam warns the bottom is falling out of the $50,000-500,000 bracket.

Professional and banker buyers are being priced out, no longer able to afford the art they admire.

“We are seeing is the closure of the mid-market galleries and this is really quite serious,” she warned.