Opened in 1779, the Museum Fridericianum was the world’s first museum conceived for the public and has been the main location of the “documenta” the renown art exhibition founded in 1955.

The Thai artists are Alisa Chunchue, Arin Rungjang, Ekachai Eksaroj, Harit Srikhao, Kanich Khajornsri, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Nuttapon Sawasdee, Paphonsak Laor, Pratchaya Phinthong, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sakarin Krueon, and Somboon Hormtientong. Pichaya Aime Suphavanij is the curator.

The exhibition, which has been organised in collaboration with the Kasseler Kunstverein, configures man and his relationship with his changing surroundings through a culture of thoughts and dialogues embedded in the artworks.

It pulls together a quirky collection of communications that fall through the cracks of everyday life as different communities and ideologies emerge. The idea is that at the point where languages malfunction, the absurdity of situations occurs.

“Absurdity in Paradise” plays with the paradox of Thailand as a paradisiacal place of yearnings. With video and media works, photographs and spacious installations, the 14 Thai artists illuminate the fracture points of presentday Thailand.

In addition to renowned artists such as Arin, Pratchaya and Korakrit, the exhibition also features up-and-coming youngsters Nuttapon, Alisa Chunchue and Harit. In doing so, internationally acclaimed works stand alongside new works created especially for the Kasseler Kunstverein.

The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm and the exhibition continues through October 31.

Find out more at http://www.Bacc.or.th and http://www.KasselerKunstverein.de.

Considered one of the most influential illustrators and artists in the modern history of Thailand, Hem was affectionately referred to as Kru Hem (teacher Hem) by many top artists and was popular for his illustrations for the cover of 10-satang pulp novels.

Hem lived in a period when electricity was not widely accessible and Thai society was generally agricultural. Farmers’ nights were lit mostly by torches and lamps. The fear of darkness is closely tied with superstitious beliefs and urban legends of the time, which allowed the society to imagine and view things in a different perspective. This, in a way, obstructed logical perception, in which rationality and reason were replaced with ghosts and demons.

Translating this to contemporary life, Pattana discovered that in modern day Bangkok, there are still corners in the city hidden behind the shadows created by light from electricity and neon lamps. These dark corners inspire one’s imagination in a different manner but Pattana could still sense the mysterious aura from Hem’s illustrations in these real life environments.

In an attempt to capture the essence of Hem’s drawings of everyday life, he recontextualises these compositions and translates them into scenarios where our lives are lit by electronics and gadgets instead. Reconstructing these scenes with friends and actors, the artist would play the role of a protagonist.

Pattana’s previous series of works explored notions of beauty through destruction as showcased in his 2014 solo exhibition, “The Overlapping of Beauty and Truth” shown at Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand in 2005.

Richard Koh Projects is a pop-up space set-up this year under Richard Koh Fine Art, which has been in operation since 2005 and is regarded as a pioneer in introducing Asian contemporary art to Malaysia and the region. Promoting an adventurous roster of emerging and established artists, the gallery regularly mounts exhibitions locally and abroad.

Richard Koh Projects is at Unit A, third floor of N22 Art Warehouse on Narathiwas Rajanakarin Road Soi 22, Bangkok.

For details, call (02) 037 6944 or visit http://www.RkFineArt.com.

 Using botox, beta-blockers and the stillness of the night, Graham Short produces miniature engravings like nobody else.

Often dubbed “the world’s smallest engraver”, he hand-carves phrases and symbols onto the tiniest of surfaces, from pinheads to the edge of a razor blade.

Selling for increasingly large sums, the master craftsman goes to “ridiculous lengths” to achieve the required precision.

Short takes beta-blockers to slow his heartbeat to get the steadiest possible hand, and injects his eyelids with Botox to relax their muscles.

The 72-year-old works from midnight to dawn to minimise vibrations from outside.

“I know it’s a bit extreme… I’m so obsessed with it,” he says in his home-studio in the suburbs of Birmingham, central England. “I don’t think anybody else would go to these lengths.”

He claims he’s the only person doing miniature engraving and says “that’s what drives me on”.

Once complete, often after months of work, his pieces are displayed in a lit case under a microscope, illuminating intricacies invisible to the naked eye.

They are typically bought by art investors with one piece, a collection of works fusing English, Arabic and calligraphy, fetching 200,000 pounds (Bt8.45 million).

He sold an engraving of Queen Elizabeth II’s head on a piece of gold lodged in the eye of a needle to a Scottish dairy farmer for 100,000 pounds.

He also engraved “nothing is impossible” on the sharp edge of a razor blade, which sold for 50,000 pounds to a gallery in northern England.

Short left school aged 15 with no academic qualifications, but got an apprenticeship with an engraving company before starting out on his own.

He spent decades as a stationary engraver for clients including the royal family and department store Harrods.

In his spare time he tried his hand at miniature engraving, first working under two magnifying glasses and now using a microscope.

His first project, carving the Lord’s Prayer onto the head of a two-millimetre-wide gold pin, took decades to complete as he juggled his business and family life.

“When I finished that I couldn’t stop looking at it,” the father-of-two recalled. “It had taken over my whole life.” As traditional engraving work dropped off in the digital age, Short began to devote himself entirely to his miniature craftsmanship.

He has created 48 works over the last 15 years, he estimates, some made to order.

Among the most eye-popping was engraving the word “love” onto a grain of salt, which was then balanced on an eyelash plucked from the eye of the client’s wife.

The customer, a Russian oligarch in London who wanted a novelty Valentine’s Day gift, had made his fortune in the salt mines of Siberia.

Short rose in prominence in Britain after engraving miniature portraits of “Pride and Prejudice” author Jane Austen onto four 5 pound banknotes in 2016.

He gave them away in a Willy Wonka-style treasure hunt, spending the notes randomly across the country.

One of them was later auctioned for 6,000 pounds, while two others were kept by their finders and another remains in circulation.

“I couldn’t believe the interest, to be honest,” he says.

Short repeated the stunt this summer, carving England’s World Cup goal-scoring hero Harry Kane onto six more 5 pound banknotes.

Four are still waiting to be found, another will be presented to the Football Association and he wants to give the sixth to the player himself.

“They’ve asked me to go to a football match in London and present it to him,” Short says.

Short pushes himself to engrave on ever-smaller surfaces, hitting the limits of the human body.

“The smaller I go, the stiller I need to be. I need to be absolutely motionless,” he explains.

He tried meditation and breathing techniques but found them insufficient, so he turned to a regime of exercise – swimming 10,000 metres daily – and beta-blockers.

“When I’m working, I eat them like sweets and I can get my heart rate down to 20 beats a minute,” he explains.

“Then I try to engrave when I’m absolutely dead-still between heartbeats.”

A normal resting heart rate for adults is 60 to 100 beats.

Short injects his eyelids with Botox every three months to ensure there is “no distraction from eye nerves and muscles”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he does not enjoy creating his artworks but revels in the outcome.

“The best part for me is when it’s finished and it’s in the gallery under the microscope and somebody comes in… and they’re absolutely knocked out,” he laughs.

“I absolutely love it, because I know I’ve done something that no-one else can do.”

 Last year, citizens of Japan and Thailand were celebrating the 130th anniversary of our diplomatic relations and, thanks to the Wa Project of the Japan Foundation’s Asia Centre, Thai theatregoers were given a special treat. Globally revered Japanese playwright and director Oriza Hirata staged “Bangkok Notes”, his Thai adaptation of his masterpiece “Tokyo Notes” as the curtain raiser of Bangkok Theatre Festival (BTF) at Chulalongkorn University’s Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts, with an all-Thai cast and a Japanese and Thai production crew. It later picked up IATC Thailand’s top prize.

This year, despite no special reason to celebrate, the treat is even more exciting. Thanks again to the Wa Project and to the additional support of Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture and Saison Foundation, the world premiere of “Pratthana – A Portrait of Possession”, internationally renowned Japanese director Toshiki Okada’s adaptation of Thai SEA Write laureate Uthis Haemamool’s 2017 novel “Rang Khong Pratthana” (“Silhouette of Desire”), was at the same venue last Wednesday, similarly with an all-Thai cast and mixed crew members.

In case our Ministry of Culture and other foreign cultural organisations are interested in following this effective cultural exchange model, it should be noted that both feats are not a one-off, but sustainable projects. Our first exposure to Hirata was his workshop in 2004, and before “Bangkok Notes”, he’d already staged three works here – one with Thai actors. For Okada, that was his globetrotting production of “Five Days in March” with his company chelfitsch at Patravadi Theatre in 2010, when he also conducted a workshop. While developing the “Pratthana” project, he gave a few talks with Uthis and staged “Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich” here. His award-winning collection of short novels “The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed” has also been translated into Thai.

 Photo by Tananop Kanjanawutisit

Spanning the period from 1992 to 2016 and covering three coups d’etat, the play follows a young Thai artist from his adolescent years upcountry, to his tertiary education at a prominent arts university in Bangkok, his professional practices, as well as his sexual relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. The audience found out, for example, that he was named “Khao Sing” (“being possessed”) because he fainted when he was taken into a dark room by his senior students during the new students’ orientation rite. It’s evident that the Japanese director has much respect for his Thai collaborator as the former retains the latter’s words in the play, and employs different staging techniques to interpret them. Indeed, this play sounded more like an edited version than an adaptation of the novel. Okada deftly had each and every member of his cast members take turns performing the protagonist, age-and-gender-blind. Like the original novel itself, the play masterfully juxtaposes, and connects, the individual and the mass, the private and the public, arts and everyday life.

It’s noteworthy that while Thai audience members were given only a programme leaflet, the non-Thai speaking ones were also provided with seven pages of notes on significant names and events mentioned in the play, like Palang Dharma Party and October 13, 2016. This is in addition to the novel translator Sho Fukutomi’s notes on the Thai word “Pratthana” – how its connotation is not only sexual and how it’s linked to the nation-body of Thailand – and it reads like one dramaturg’s notes. As most plays are created for local audiences first and foremost, this extra information is indeed necessary for this specific political example to be universally understood.

Those who frequent contemporary Thai theatre productions know that “Pratthana’s” 11-member cast is a dream ensemble, comprising not only two Silpathorn artists – B-Floor’s co-artistic directors Jarunun Phantachat and Teerawat Mulvilai – but also former recipients of IATC Thailand’s annual acting awards—Sasapin Siriwanij, Thongchai Pimapunsri, Witwisit Hiranyawongkul and Teerawat as well – in addition to other seasoned stage actors. While their force as an ensemble was never in doubt, their capability for handling monologues as the protagonist Khao Sing varied from one to another, and the dialogue parts, no matter how few, seemed to flow more smoothly. Besides, Okada’s works are known and lauded for his performers’ physical movements, which are so dance-like that many of his works have been presented at dance festivals. That could be said for some members of this cast, but not all, as others’ looked more like generic hand gestures accompanying spoken words, and most hadn’t relaxed their lower parts of the body the way chelfitsch performers do.

Photo by Sopanat Somkhanngoen 

Like Khao Sing’s life and Thai politics, scenographer Yuya Tsukahara’s design of white floor and white backdrop was never empty nor dull. It was always filled with movable set props, sound equipment, video projection of close-ups of stage actions and still image projection of Uthis’s paintings – the latter frequently upstaged by others – as well as English and Japanese surtitles. His design also exposed the lighting, sound and video crew at work on stage left and they blended in with the ensemble. And even though politics played a major role in the play, we didn’t get to watch video footage from our infamous political turmoil except for half a second of the Pulitzer prize-winning photo from October 1973. And in this visually dense production, that was indeed smart as spoken words effectively conveyed political messages.

Lighting designer Pornpan Arataveerasid, accordingly, added a more organic look to the black box theatre and left the house lights on throughout the first half of the play, drawing the audience closer to the stage actions.

It was reported that the opening night was full to the capacity and foreign producers and critics, as well as Witwisit’s die-hard Chinese fans, also flew in. The same could not be said for the subsequent five performances, and the play’s running time and subject matter, more serious than our cup of Thai milk tea, might have turned some audiences away; it was only half full on Thursday when I went. And more variation of pace would have made it feel shorter.

Before the performance, a staff member announced that the play had two parts, 90 minutes each plus one 20-minute intermission. That’s only one-third truth: the total time spent there was in fact three hours and 50 minutes, and a few audience members left at the intermission, saying politely, “The air-conditioning was too cold”. Maybe that staff member was portraying either a Thai politician or military officer who just wanted to comfort us that we should always stay calm and keep smiling while we wait for the arrival of democracy in Thailand, no matter when that is.

ON TO THE CITY OF LIGHTS

•   “Pratthana: A Portrait of Possession” will be at the Centre Pompidou in the French capital from December 13 to 16, as part of Festival d’automne a Paris.
•  It will be performed in Thai with French surtitles.
•  For more details and ticket reservations, http://www.festival-automne.com (in French and English).
•  To keep track of this intercultural collaboration, check http://www.Pratthana.net (English, Japanese and Thai).

Brazil’s “queer museum”, forced to close last year after conservatives attacked it for allegedly promoting paedophilia, blasphemy and bestiality, is reopening in the shadow of Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue.

The Queermuseu, which features 200 works by 82 Brazilian artists, originally opened last year in the southern city of Porto Alegre but was forced to close by critics who accused it of attacking Christianity.

The enforced closure sent shockwaves through the artistic community and triggered debate about freedom of expression and a return of censorship, three decades after the end of the military dictatorship that ran the Latin American country from 1964-85.

A crowdfunding campaign raised more than a million reais (Bt8.26 million) allowing it to reopen for a month, with free admission, at the School for Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro’s Parque Lage – a wooded parkland at the foot of the mountain topped by the renowned statue of Christ.

The series of fundraising events included a concert by the legendary musician Caetano Veloso. The curators picked the venue in the park after the city’s Evangelical mayor, Marcelo Crivella, banned the use of Rio’s Arts Museum for the show.

“It is a very important moment for Brazilian democracy, a convincing demonstration that the most progressive sectors of society will not accept censorship,” said curator Gaudencio Fidelis.

“We haven’t seen an act of censorship of this size and severity since the dictatorship,” he said.

In addition artwork, the exhibition features talks on sexual diversity and LGBT rights as well as musical shows by “queer” performers.

The exhibition is almost identical to the one forced to close in Porto Alegre, featuring the same provocative works that scandalised Brazilian conservatives.

They include a portrayal of Jesus as a monkey in the arms of the Virgin Mary, works illustrating sexual practices in the style of traditional Japanese erotic prints and paintings of clothed kids entitled “Gay Children”.

The images, including one of a multi-armed Jesus called “Crossing Jesus Christ Goddess Shiva,” infuriated the right-wing Free Brazil Movement, which lobbied for the show to be shuttered.

The revived exhibition, which opens to the public on Saturday, only admits visitors aged 14 years and over, and carries a warning at the entrance that it contains images of nudity.

“We hope for an enormous number of visitors, but not because of all the controversy. People will see that it was a false premise, a fabricated polemic. Society will be able to see the true nature of the exhibition,” said Fidelis.

The organisers say they are not afraid of new demonstrations by right-wing groups, but just in case, they have employed 20 security guards and installed surveillance cameras.

School of Visual Arts director Fabio Szwarcwald says that so far he has only received a few dozen emails opposing the opening of the exhibition, unlike his colleagues at the Arts Museum, who received hundreds of protests, including death threats.

“We are not worried about possible attacks on the show,” he says. “It’s been very different to what happened at the Arts Museum.”

The Free Brazil Movement, known in Brazil as the MBL and which spearheaded the boycott in Porto Alegre, has said it will remain quiet, since this time the exhibition is privately funded and not using public money to “sexualise children.”

“They’ll be praying for the MBL to do something because if it hadn’t been all the attention we drew to it, no one would have gone to see this garbage,” explains Renan Santos, one of the founders of the movement, which came to prominence in street marches calling for the impeachment of former leftist president Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

“The whole world can go see it naked, if they want,” he adds.

ISAAC HOU is one of Taipei’s best-known street artists, famous for his mesmerising acrobatics using a giant spinning hoop.

The 37-year-old Taiwanese American is a master of the metal cyr wheel, whirling himself around while stretched out inside the ring.

He performs on stage and television but still busks, drawing crowds in various spots around Taiwan’s capital, mainly in the shopping district of Xinyi.

Hou, who also practises the Brazilian dance-like martial art capoeira, as well as ballet, jazz and tango to balance his body, says he finds street performing liberating.

Taiwanese American street artist Isaac Hou performs with a cyr wheel in Taipei. /AFP

“The reason I wanted to become a street performer is because I saw it as a job without an unpleasant boss, having a great deal of freedom, a way to travel,” Hou says.

After high school, Hou travelled around the world doing odd jobs and learned kung fu at the Shaolin temple in China, going on to hone his acrobatic skills at circus performance schools in Denmark and Russia.

He turned to the cyr wheel as an alternative to torch juggling, which he had started to do for a living.

Hou practises with a crystal ball at the Ta An Sport Centre in Taipei. /AFP

“I wanted to get away from doing fire so I wouldn’t have problems with the police chasing me around,” says Hou, who is married to Polish-Canadian dance teacher Magdalena Zieba.

But the freedom he finds as a street artist also has its complications.

“It’s hard to maintain a good schedule for a long period of time. When you have too much free time it’s easy to get distracted,” he explains.

When Hou starts losing his way, he says the key is to just keep going.

“I guess what works for me is to keep putting one foot in front of the next, to keep doing something even if it seems pointless, to try to go out and do things and see people.”

CREATED DURING a one-month-residence at the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in Singapore with dramaturg Lim How-Ngean, and premiered as part of “The Durian’s” annual da:ns festival in late 2011, Pichet Klunchun Dance Company’s “Black and White” was inspired by the mural paintings of the “Ramakien”, the Thai version of the Indian epic “Ramayana”.

Trained in the classical Thai masked dance theatre known as khon, Silpathorn artist Pichet Klunchun notes that there are many patterns of fights between monkeys and demons in those paintings, while there are only four in khon performance.

“Black and White” strikes a fine balance between the good and the evil, the traditional and the modern./Photo: Thirawat Aungsittipoonporn

As for the catchy title and the work’s content, Pichet, as political as always, also tries to show that sometimes the two opposing sides need to support each other in their fights and that the black and white can occasionally, or even eventually, become grey.

Pichet regards “Black and White” as the second milestone in his company’s history. His solo work “I Am a Demon”, which explains to the international world of dance what khon means for him as much as what he wants to do with it, he considers the first.

After the acclaimed world premiere in the island state about which I wrote that it struck a fine balance between both good and evil and traditional and modern, “Black and White” was seen in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

The Thailand premiere at Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts two years later was also met with critical acclaim.

 Photo/Weerana Talodsuk

Critic Amitha Amranand, a founding member of International Association of Theatre Critics’ (IATC) Thailand Centre, wrote, “We finally got to see Pichet’s choreographic prowess and potential being pushed and explored”. A few months later, the work was championed with IATC Thailand award for the year’s best movement-based performance.

A work commonly regarded as “groundbreaking modernisation of khon”, “Black and White” is also a study case for Thai dance scholar Sun Tawalwongsri’s master’s degree dissertation at the University of London.

Photo/ Luo YiChun

In the meantime, the work continued its travels to Belgium and later the Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting (TPAM) in Yokohama as well as Beijing and Shanghai.

Equally memorable as its choreography and messages are the design elements, thanks to an international team made up of Thai mask and costume designer Anuthep Potchprasart, Japanese lighting designer Miura Asako and Chinese composer Wu Na, who’s always present onstage behind her guqin, the seven-stringed ancient instrument.

After all these performances, Pichet notes that there’s one important political message many members of the audience, perhaps being astounded by the choreography and other production elements, have missed, saying with a grin, “The protagonist in the Ramakien is a man; that in ‘Black and White’ a woman. Do you still remember who was our prime minister back then [in late 2011]?”

 Photo/Weerana Talodsuk

The restaging of “Black and White” this weekend – the first time in the company’s home venue Chang Theatre – was originally scheduled for late June, but a member of the company had a motorcycle accident so serious that he cannot walk even now. Pichet recruited a freelance khon dancer to replace him and two months later we’ll finally get to watch it, before it goes on tour soon to a dance festival in South Korea.

This year, the company is restaging a few works at home so that the audience can see how they have progressed and be ready for their next big move.

Pichet notes, “This work uses very specific techniques based on the ideology of khon and dancers need to have training and a background in khon in order to perform it. This is the company’s old way of working which we’re gradually steering away from and hence this may be the last time we’re staging it.

 Photo/Weerana Talodsuk

“Many dance companies perform in a specific style; we keep progressing. Next year, the audience will see this artistic change in our new works. They’ll no longer require the performers to have khon training. This goes along the same line as that being implemented in such international companies like Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. From the outlook, some audience members might think that these works are no longer connected with khon, but ideologically and spiritually they remain so.”

While Pichet notes that his company members continue to develop and as this will be reflected in a more-refined performance in “Black and White” than in previous outings, he’s taking himself out of the cast. That’s partly because he’d rather the audience focused on the company and their performance than him, an international superstar of contemporary dance.

He adds, “I always encourage our company members to find any possible opportunity to work with and learn from other choreographers to keep developing.

“It’s okay if one day any of them decide to start their own company so that we’ll have more works and a larger group of audiences too.”

BUT IS IT KHON?

“Black and White” is on Friday and Saturday at 7.30pm and on Sunday 2pm.

Tickets are Bt500.

Chang Theatre is in Soi Pracha-uthit 61, in Thung Khru, Thonburi.

For bookings, call (099) 213 5639 and (095) 956 9166, or online at http://www.ChangTheatre.com.

DANCER and choreographer Martha Graham once referred to her chosen form of expression as the “hidden language of the soul” and few would disagree that dance is a powerful performing art that ensnares those who watch it equally as it does those who dance. And dance has always been an important part of Bangkok’s International Festival of Dance and Music, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a slew of dance performances that will astonish.

“Break The Tango” sees dancers from Argentina and Switzerland mix the classic South American moves with breakdance.

Among them are “Break The Tango” from Argentina and Switzerland, an epic mix of tango, breakdance, hip hop and live music on September 22 and 23 at Thailand Cultural Centre and Bollywood musical – “Taj Express” from India – which is a brilliant showcase of how Bollywood has based its moves on Indian classical dances on September 28 and 29.

With creative inputs and dancers from Argentina and Switzerland, “Break The Tango” sees tango meet street dance in an explosive choreographic work set to live music from a four-man electrotango band with a singer. The band plays electrotango hits by Otros Aires and artists such as Adele, Christina Aguilera, Radiohead, Pitbull and Beyonce.

World champion tango dancers from Argentina German Cornejo and Gisela Galeassi along with Ezequiel Lopez and Camila Alegre share the stage with leading breakdancers and world champions Bboy Prince Henry (Henry Monsanto), Bboy Jonathan (Jonathan Anzalone), Bboy Hill (Gil Adan Hernandez Candelas), Bboy Issue (Kwangsuk Park) and Bboy Cho (Joo Hyosung).

The show breaks all the rules as these two completely different styles of dance come together. As the tango dancers glide elegantly across the dance floor, the athletic breakdancers create a fusion of Milonga traditions. What at first seems like an impossible combination blends together as the show progresses to become a perfect partnership.

The idea of mixing tango and street dance emerged a few years ago in Zurich when choreographer and world tango champion German Cornejo visited the classical dance company Tango Fire. Cornejo connected with Maag Halle producer and operator, Darko Soolfrank, and spoke to him about the possibility of a new dance form, developing classical dance styles and mixing the traditional with the modern. One of the questions that the duo grappled with was: How do electrotango, hip hop and breakdance influence traditional tango? They decided to test it out by inviting young tango dancers to a week-long workshop in Buenos Aires to try out new electrotango dance moves – classical tango set to electronic beats then presented their experiment at El Catedral, a time-honoured tango hall.

Cornejo and Soolfrank then decided to take the project even further and incorporated breakdancers into the company. Breakdancing choreographer Bjorn Buz Meier was then brought on board and soon the two dance styles were combined to create new dance moves. Meier is the winner of several breakdancing contests both in Switzerland and internationally and runs his own breakdance school in Zurich and is an important figure on the Swiss city’s breakdance scene.

With the two award-winning choreographers pooling their talent, the show has developed into a symbiosis of tradition and modernity, of South America and Europe. Adding to the electrifying dancing are the visual effects and bold new choreography that is powerfully executed. Lighting and occasionally video projections help to create many different moods.

“Taj Express” promises an exciting evening full of colour, highenergy music and sensational dance scenes.

And then there’s Bollywood, which provides the ultimate celebration of song and dance. This brand new production of “Taj Express” features several hit songs by Oscar winner AR Rahman and blends them with explosive dance, spectacular lighting, and elaborate costumes.

The musical follows in the footsteps of a young composer looking for his big break. With its cast of multi-talented performers, “Taj Express” promises an uplifting evening full of colour, high-energy music and sensational dance scenes choreographed by Vaibhavi Merchant who has a string of Bollywood films in her list of credits. The show is directed by Shruti Merchant.

The show is written by Grammy nominee Toby Gough, a multi award-winning international music theatre writer and director. He is also the creator of such hit musicals as “The Merchants of Bollywood”, “The Bar at Buena Vista”, “Lady Salsa”, “Soy de Cuba”, “Hemingway’s Havana” and “Havana Rumba!” He is currently also working on two new musicals– “Miami Libre” with Cuban artists living in Miami in collaboration with the Grammy-nominated super group Tiempo Libre and a new Hip-Hop project, in the Dharavi Slums of Mumbai.

Supporting the Festival are Crown Property Bureau, Bangkok Bank (PCL), Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (PCL), BMW Thailand, B.Grimm Group, Dusit Thani Bangkok, Indorama Ventures, Ministry of Culture, Nation Group, Major Cineplex, PTT (PCL), Singha Corporation, Thai Union Group, Thai Airways International and Tourism Authority of Thailand.

A Date with Dance

Tickets are now on sale at Thai Ticket Major counters, online at http://www.ThaiTicketMajor.com, and by calling the hotline at (02) 262 3191.

nFor more information, visit http://www.BangkokFestivals.com.

The exhibition kicks off with an opening party on September 1 at 6.30 and a pre-opening event that gets underway at 5pm. The show will run through October 27.

“Many Rivers” invokes the psychic creatures of Southeast Asia: dredged up from the collective unconscious, the magnetic shape of a hooded cobra with a woman’s wistful face; a young maiden in a sabai, alone beside a jungle stream — a place and time where magic, terrible or otherwise, happens.

For 12 years, artist Bruce Gundersen has immersed himself in fairy tales from the lands of the Naga: Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Siam, with their storied rivers, whose myths celebrate the people’s close bond with nature spirits and supernatural forces.

Here the line is blurry between the visible and invisible; where does ‘reality’ end and ‘fantasy’ begin? Do they in fact, as in Bruce Gundersen’s sublime photomontages printed on silk, overlap in beauty?

These stories and sacred initiations have come down to us from Southeast Asian prehistory, filtered through Buddhist, Hindu and Animist cosmology and repeatedly revealed over the ages through literature, song, dance and visual art.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm.

Find out more at (02) 234 6700 or visit http://www.KathmanduPhotoBkk.com.

AN EXCAVATOR shattered the windows of Ai Weiwei’s largest studio while workers hustled away his art, preparing to demolish the old Beijing factory three years after the artist and government critic left China.

As dusk descended on the old car parts factory on the outskirts of the capital, shirtless, sweating labourers packed large wooden crates filled with artworks onto a truck bed.

Hours earlier, Ai, who now lives in Berlin, had posted videos on Instagram showing several men looking on from inside the hollowed-out brick and concrete building as a backhoe went to work.

“Farewell,” Ai wrote in English, saying the demolition had begun without notice.

Ai helped to design the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Games, but fell out of favour following his criticism of Chinese leadership.

 People film as art works are loaded onto a truck at Weiwei’s studio in Beijing. /AFP

The artist was detained for 81 days in 2011 amid a crackdown on government critics. His passport was confiscated and he moved to Berlin after it was returned to him in 2015.

Ai wasn’t overly angry about the demolition, as the rental contract for the space had expired last autumn, said Ga Rang, an assistant who has worked for 10 years alongside the artist.

But it “simply wasn’t possible” to move out at the time due to the vast quantity of things stored in the space, Ga said.

Ga managed the hangar-sized space in the Left Right Art District, where Ai had worked since 2006.

“They came and started knocking down the windows today without telling us beforehand. There’s still so much stuff inside,” said Ga, wiping his brow in the extreme summer humidity as he directed a crew of movers.

They had been warned that the move needed to happen within days, but had not been told when the wrecking machines would appear.

“The authorities say they want to develop things here, build malls and commercial buildings. But it’s a shame – you won’t ever find a place in Beijing like this again,” he said.

Around the back of the building lay a cemetery-like collection of different parts from Ai’s various works, a ghostly outdoor retrospective.

Tall ceramic pillars in green, yellow and blue, like those from his 2006 “Pillar” series, stood next to twisted metal rebar reclaimed from schools destroyed in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, all encircled by a silent chorus of enormous, gnarled tree roots resembling those from his 2009 work “Rooted Upon” – an abstract meditation on encroaching modernity and displacement.

It was going to be impossible to find another space to house such large-scale works in Beijing, Ga lamented, and they were considering simply storing the works outside somewhere.

“Ai made countless works in this space – a lot of his iconic works were all made here.”

Work from Ai’s first solo show in his home country – a reconstructed Ming dynasty temple, rebuilt with all its 1,500 parts in a Beijing gallery in 2015 – stood packed up in boxes in the middle of the window-lined studio amid broken glass and timber.

Art works are seen at Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s “Left and Right Art Studio” in Beijing on August 4. /AFP

Far beyond Beijing’s city centre, the Left Right Art District is an old factory converted into artist studios and office spaces.

It lies next to the “Big Wealthy Regal Industrial Park” – an area full of tractors, dirty low-lying buildings and roadside watermelon vendors selling their wares for 20 cents (Bt6) a kilo.

Ai’s studio dominates the complex, where many of the other buildings dating back to the 1960s and 70s have already been reduced to rubble.

Demolitions began three months ago, said De Aihua, a long-time resident who moved into the factory in her early teens.

Ai’s studio used to be the state-owned factory’s meeting hall, she explained.

At its peak, the complex was home to 1,000 residents, but numbers began to drop after China’s reform in the 1980s shifted the economy away from rigid state-controlled planning. In recent years, only 20 or so residents remained.

She expected the government to allot her an apartment in a high-rise complex somewhere to compensate her for having to move, but deeply mourned the change.

“It was a wonderful life here. It was the way a life should be – with neighbours, trees, closer to nature,” she said, pulling her puppy Miaomiao through a leafy boulevard now overgrown with weeds and hedged on either side by debris.

She would speak with artists when they crossed her path, but didn’t know much of Ai Weiwei’s international renown, referring to him as “Ai Qing’s son”. His father was a famous Chinese poet.

As he prepared a jackhammer for the next morning, the young construction worker who would drive the demolition vehicle said he had no particular feelings about tearing down the historic building, but still preferred low houses to towering commercial malls.

“But even if I don’t like it, I’m just an ant, what say do I have?” he said. “And anyway, I don’t really know what you mean by art.”