TOUCH, MOVE, INTERACT, OPEN UP
Dujdao Vadhanapakorn’s latest experimental show is designed to challenge the audience’s feelings
Even when they’re about violence, Dujdao Vadhanapakorn’s shows always feel inviting. Perhaps it’s because of her therapy background (Dujdao is Thailand’s first dance movement psychotherapist) that she likes to create the kind of space — physical and emotional — that invites you to touch, move, interact or open up.
In her directorial debut, Something Else, she invited the audience to touch and play with the set and the props. In her previous show, Secret Keeper, she invited the audience that surrounded the stage to join her and the dancers in a pool of water in the middle of the room to unload their secrets.
In her new show, Blissfully Blind, which, like many of its predecessors, is called an experiential performance, Dujdao continues her mission to sensitise and make us more empathetic. And again, she invites us to move freely among the light installation in the Bangkok CityCity Gallery.
Dujdao has divided the high-ceilinged space into three sections. The first is wide open, with a platform made of glass tiles in the centre. The structure that divides the room and where the audience can watch the performance is a scaffolding draped in opaque and transparent tiles. The third section, with its low ceiling of plastic strings, requires the audience to crouch down to enter and move around in.
The freedom she gives us in experiencing this performance holds more meaning than in her previous works. It goes beyond the stimulation of the senses that are outside theatre-viewing conventions. She gives us the freedom to choose what to see or not see, to see as much as possible or as little as possible, to stay in one room and see all that it can offer or move around and see bits and pieces of each room.
On one level, Blissfully Blind carries the common theme that runs through Dujdao’s body of work: empathy. She creates experiential performances to ask us to examine both our capacity for compassion and cruelty, which is, in a way, our capacity to see and turn a blind eye.
On another level, Blissfully Blind asks us to become more aware of what we choose to see and how and why we make these choices. These questions feel ever more pertinent in an age where we receive information, express our views, interact with other human beings largely on the internet, a place where ideological tribes are formed and ideological wars are waged. Like the internet and any kind of space that is designed to store and disseminate information, the show is a space where you see not everything, but only what you choose to see, and what’s available for you to see has been curated for you.
And Dujdao has always been an adventurous curator and designer of experience. This time, she collaborated with Zeight, a company that has made light installations for Wonderfruit and Kolour in the Park, among other festivals. The glass-tile structures in the first and third sections of the space are all lit from within, as is the frame of the scaffolding. As usual, everything is visually stunning, clean and delicate. Lighting designer Tawit Keitprapai and sound designer Kamonpat Pimsarn together bring a gamut of emotions to the viewing experience.
At times, the show feels like it’s going in too many directions, and as a whole it does address too many issues — violence, censorship, surveillance, paranoia, education — without saying much or presenting anything new about them.
But it still contains a few affecting scenes, starting with an intimate whisper that explodes into bodies violently dropping to the ground at the sound of gunshot, the dancers moving around the space and staring into our eyes with paranoid looks on their faces, two dancers carefully looking around as they lift their shirts, a dancer trembling in the confines of the scaffolding.
The final scene is the only one in which all the performers speak and is also the most powerful one. Dujdao, dressed in a powder-blue outfit with a hood in contrast to the white and grey costumes of the other four dancers, orders the others to turn left or right before asking them what the see. At first, all their answers are identical, describing a room. Then, one by one, their imagination seems to have climbed out of that room. Their descriptions differ from one another and gain life — markets, people, trees — as Dujdao repeats the question in an increasingly agitated voice.
Blissfully Blind may have a fuzzy and weak middle, especially when you feel you’ve got the message and are tired of playing the game of moving from one room to another. But the final scene transports us outside of that space and makes the act of seeing about the imagination.
Dujdao surprises us by ending the show — whose atmosphere throughout has been one of violence, fear and paranoia — in a defiant celebration of the imagination.
The show is a space where you see not everything, but only what you choose to see