SoftMachine The Return is a dance performance and documentary project that span over 10 year of documenting the lives of five unique artists of my generation with Rianto(Banyumas, Indonesia), Surjit Nongmeikapam(Manipur, India), Xiao Ke x Zhou Zihan(Shanghai, China) and Yuya Tsukahara(Osaka, Japan). The SoftMachine project originally initiated in 2012, as a independent survey of the choreographic landscape in Asia.
SoftMachine The Return is envisioned as a performance that manifest across the format of lecture, demonstration, dance and documentary. The project weave together a decade of experiments in dance-making, through the critical lens of five unique dance artist. We desires for the return to the body - to think about dance and beyond.
“As artist, as friends, as collaborators, I feel the desire to question on our dance practices over the span of a decade. I ask: How can we grow old together, think together and play together? How many ten year can we have in our artistic lives?
When we first gathered as an informal collective back in 2012, we are young and ambitious, we wanted to express ourselves as a new generation of dance maker. We were seeking for change, resisting the norm and embracing radical alterity.Perhaps we had remain radical in our own pathway, and maybe it is time to gather and dance together, beyond the reminiscence of the past,
to propose new futures for the landscape of contemporary dance in Asia”