SoftMachine: The Return is a project that weaves together a decade of experiments in dance-making through the critical lens of five asian artist; Rianto (Banyumas, Indonesia), Surjit Nongmeikapam(Manipur, India), Xiao Ke x Zihan (Shanghai, China) and Yuya Tsukahara(Osaka, Japan). The presentation is envisioned as a performance that manifests across the format of dance with lecture, demonstration and documentary
SoftMachine: The Return will present four solo performative experiences, each reflecting on the artist's biographies and practices. First is an intimate portrait of Rianto’s search for love in-between the spectrum of dance, gender and tradition in Indonesia. With Surjit Nongmeikapam, we will narrate his journey from the marginal to the political, encapsulated in his dance of resilience beyond the history of Manipur's ethnic conflicts. Xiao Ke and Zihan will dance to the new social realities of China, triggered by its emergence as a superpower nation. Finally, Yuya Tsukahara's presence will be digitally reinvented, as a form of questioning the boundaries of dance and interpretation, absence and archive.
The SoftMachine project as a whole, desires a return to the body, to think together about dance and beyond, while negotiating its own knowledge archive to generate relevant dialogues on contemporary dance in Asia.
““ As artists, as friends, as collaborators, I feel the desire to question 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 years can we have in our artistic lives? When we first gathered as an informal collective back in 2012, we were young and ambitious, we wanted to express ourselves as a new generation of dance makers. We were seeking for change, resisting the norm and embracing radical alterity. Perhaps we have remained 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.”
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The SoftMachine project was originally initiated in 2012, as an independent survey of the choreographic landscape in Asia, with a focus on the ecologies of independent dance makers in response to the persistence of exoticism in the cultural production of contemporary dance. It culminated in the original production of SoftMachine, which was commissioned and presented as part of da:ns festival in 2015 at Esplanade. The project had subsequently toured and performed more than 60 shows internationally until the pandemic hit in 2020.