Continental Drift: Connecting Asia-Europe Dramaturgies

Masthead Image
Masthead Image
15 June - 12 December 2024 | 4:00 - 11:59pm

What are the consonances between dramaturgical thinking and doing in Europe and Asia? How might these produce collaborations that span the social, political, environmental and cultural urgencies of two dramatically differing continents and contexts? What might a resulting community of practice look like?

Continental Drift: connecting Asia-Europe dramaturgies invites practitioners from both regions to embark on a collaborative journey together, culminating in a week-long gathering in the cities of Prague and Olomouc in the Czech Republic in December 2024. Participants will collectively reflect on personal praxes, share and exchange knowledge, and build a community of practice through a series of online and in-person encounters.

This programme is jointly organized and presented by the Czech Association of Independent Theatres (Asociace nezávislých divadel ČR; AND ČR) and the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (ADN), with funding support from the Czech Ministry of Culture, the National Recovery Plan and the European Union.


Programme Participants

Ten participants have been invited through an Open Call held from 15 Mar - 15 Apr 2024. Five participants from SEA countries/region and five from Czechia/bordering countries will be embarking on a programme via a series of online seminars and an eventual in-person visit to the Czech Republic in December 2024. 

The ten participants and their respective statement of intent or proposal about international collaboration and collaborative projects are:

Arsita Iswardhani

Project: Re.Ro.o(u).T(e)

Re.Ro.o(u).T(e) highlights acts of re-listening, re-valuing, and re-telling stories and forms of knowledge that are forgotten or invisible. By sharing those often unknown stories, Re.Ro.o(u).T(e) offers the possibility of new narratives for society's future. The project offers 'listening-first' as a methodology, which means the literal act of listening and deep observation.

Arsita is interested in meeting artists and resources who share their passion for a listening-first
methodology. They believe that every story, no matter how small or seemingly ordinary, is part of a larger network of people's ideas and activities and contribute to the narratives that make up our history and the broader social choreography. These stories, collected through the possibility of collaboration will become a part of one big network of stories that influence/shape each other.

Barbara Gregorová

Project: International Theatre Festival, Brno 

Barbara hopes to share about the festival's dramaturgical vision with other dramaturgs, especially in the contexts of the current sociopolitical situation and so-called polycrisis in the European area. Barbara is interested in the role of the dramaturg within the institution - a profession that builds permanent dialogue not only in the creation of productions, but also with audiences.

En-Ping, Yu

Project: To be added

Eva Lietavová

Project: To be added

Ian Rafael Ramirez

Project: Feeling Queer Tongues across Continents

Feeling Queer Tongues across Continents aims to understand the queer languages spoken across Southeast Asian and Europe - how these languages are devised, their linguistic nuances, and why queer people choose to speak these languages. This project hopes to forge solidarities and international queer alliances through queer affect as a universal language, transcending language and borders to build South-to-North solidarities.

Ian is interested in engaging in international collaboration to develop their project and reflect on their praxis alongside other practitioners, who will bring their unique methodologies of performance-making. They are keen to engage with other queer practitioners who challenge normative modes of dramaturgy and performance-making. They wish to better understand their perspectives on queer praxis, and how it can break down oppressive systems within the arts and cultural sector and foster more inclusive performance-making methodologies. 

Linh Valerie Pham

Project: The Tho Dia Project

Named for Tho Dia, a Vietnamese tutelary deity in charge of a specific piece of land, The Tho Dia Project fuses puppetry and lecture-performance to examine the city as a living entity whose increasingly mercurial body challenges its inhabitants' instincts to take root and belong. 

Valerie is interested in exploring possibilities to further develop their project through collaborations with a local dramaturg and local performer/city-dweller, and a more thorough examination of questions about belonging to the city and the city belonging to its inhabitants, which will create an anthropological tapestry of urban lives.

Marc Nair

Project: Thank You For Holding

Thank You For Holding uses the speculative to consider labour inequalities and highlights 'the Other' in terms of agency, expanding the performative space of the city by transmuting the mundane into spectacle, building alongside the idea of performance being a podium of possibilities for the maker and the receiver. 

Marc intends to create new collaborative storytelling work that brings together personal and observed experiences centred around specific themes, including identity and autoethnography. Keeping in mind political elements of migration, income inequality and agency, Marc is interested in integrating a European worldview towards collaborative storytelling. They are interested in how audience interactions impacts the way a narrative is shaped and how collaborative storytelling can embody the performative.

Matyáš Dlab

Project: To be added

Oksana Maslova

Oksana explores how people cope with challenging life situations and seek personal solutions to overcome or adapt to them. They are interested in investigating how people adapt their thought processes to the idea and reality of war, and how they find ways within themselves and others to live despite war. They are interested in the perspective of Asian culture on these issues, and the ways different traditions and cultures influence different perceptions, perspectives, and solutions.

Riyadhus Shalihin

Projects: Eviction and Landscape-Bodies

Eviction dwells on the dramaturgy of the 'residence/place' phenomenon within a site in Bandung, exploring how cities are both physical monuments as well as made up of human and ecosystem elements. Landscape-Bodies is a long-term dramaturgical project that researches how capitalism carries out the continuous process of extractivist activity on labour and landscape. 

Riyadhus is interested in the ideas of continental drift and continental law, and their relation to legality, ethics, tradition, resistance, and indigenity. They want to explore the body's resistance to dramaturgical practice in Europe, especially economic injustice/inequality between Eastern versus Western Europe, evictions and gentrification in densely populated areas. Riyadhus hopes to foster collaboration that allows for artistic and research-based intercrossing. 


Programme Schedule

Introductory Meeting

  • 15 June 2024, Saturday 
  • 4PM - 6PM (UTC +8) or 9AM - 11AM (CET +1)

This is the first meeting point for all participants and organizers to gather for an introduction to the programme intent, schedule, logistics and to foster an understanding of each participant’s practices.

Seminar 1

  • 14 September 2024, Saturday 
  • 4PM - 10PM (UTC +8) or 9AM - 3PM (CET +1)

This session invites participants to deepen their connections with each other’s processes and dispositions, and their specific geographic and sociopolitical contexts. Collective exercises will revolve around the concept of the “invitation”—what it means to extend an invitation to others, and what these intimations entail and engender.

Seminar 2

  • 5 October 2024, Saturday 
  • 4PM - 10PM (UTC +8) or 9AM - 3PM (CET +1)

This seminar is in two parts: a public session featuring participants and invited panelists discussing approaches to international collaborations; and a private session where participants will share proposals with the earlier panel in mind. This sharing may be a way for participants to find collaborators within the group, or be recommended collaborators through the group’s wider network.

Visit to Czech Republic

  • 4 to 12 December 2024 
  • 7-day itinerary in Prague and Olomouc 

After months of online gatherings, participants will finally meet in person for an immersive trip. Expect a rich itinerary comprising follow-up discussions, meetings, pitch sessions, venue visits, performances, and industry contextualisation. The group will also attend the 23rd Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art PAF 2024.

Participants from Asia attending this programme will be covered for the following expenses during the in-person gathering in the Czech Republic:

  • 2-way return airfare to Prague/Vienna
  • 7 nights accommodation with breakfast
  • Local transport and tickets to performances in the programme (also included for participants from Central Europe)

Documentation

Introductory Meeting
15 June 2024

This is the first meeting point for all participants and organizers to gather for an introduction to the programme intent, schedule, logistics, and to foster an understanding of each participant’s practices. The participants were tasked to prepare a brief 3-minute introduction of themselves, using three keywords that currently inform or influence their artistic practice. Here’s a summary of everyone’s offer of their keywords: 

  • Arsita - relistening, revaluing, rerooting

  • Bara - audience, networking, dialogue

  • Corrie - encounter, hosting, mengembara (adventuring, wandering, roving)

  • Eva - curiosity, learning, humour

  • Ian - queer joy, translation, commoning through mess

  • Linh - collaborative, experimental (access/inclusion), destabilise

  • Marc - collaborative, multidisciplinary, speculation

  • Matyas - experiment, collaboration, relevance

  • Oksana - acting through understanding, trust, honesty

  • Ping - rest, encounter, play

  • Riyad - cure, care, resistance

Zoom meeting featuring twelve participants in a three by four grid.
Seminar 1
14 September 2024

In the first seminar, the participants engaged in activities to better articulate past collaborative projects, and sharing sessions with fellow participants, where they discussed their projects with each other. 

For the first half of the seminar, participants were tasked to create timelines for a past project they had worked on, with a focus on the process and journey of working with their collaborators. This activity was followed by a group sharing session, where participants shared about the learning points they had gleaned from creating their timelines, such as considerations to be taken when working collaboratively, the profile of preferred collaborators, and how the work on these past projects impacts other projects they work on in the future. 

In the second half, participants revisited their personal archives of information and material about their past project, and identified a few artefacts that they felt best represented significant project milestones. During the sharing session, participants explained why they chose their specific artefacts and what these artefacts represented about the project. Participants articulated why the milestones they represented were meaningful and memorable. 

Moving on from evaluating past projects, the final activity prompted participants to look to the future. Participants shared with one another about key interests, contexts, and urgencies that shaped their current practices, and how their work and their projects responded to these interests, contexts, and urgencies. Participants spoke about various sociopolitical issues, geographical contexts, and cultural concerns that shaped their practices and inspired their work. 

Screenshot of 11 participants in a Zoom meeting.
Seminar 2
5 October 2024

The second seminar featured two dialogue sessions between institutional representatives who had practical and administrative experience producing international collaborations and facilitating partnerships in a regional or global network, and independent artists who had experience with co-creating and developing international collaborations. 

The first dialogue session saw Valentina Riccardi (Director of the Culture Department, Asia Europe Foundation) in conversation with Antonín Brinda (Czech artist and curator), sharing about their diverse experiences creating, producing, and facilitating international collaborations, especially within the Czech context. 

Screenshot of a Zoom session with three participants.

The second dialogue session featured Sasapin Siriwanji (Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting) and Alecia Neo (BRACK), who discussed several past projects they had worked on that involved international collaboration - their motivations, processes, concerns, and learning points.

Screenshot of a Zoom session with several participants, and a screen-share.

The final part of the seminar saw the participants sharing about their proposals for upcoming or future projects involving international collaboration, in preparation for in-person sharing sessions in the Czech Republic, and with the hopes of discovering intersections in each other's work that could spark further collaboration between participants.

Several screenshots on Zoom, featuring speakers screen-sharing powerpoint slides.
Visit to Czech Republic
4 to 12 December 2024

The participants' visit to the Czech Republic began with visits to numerous venues and theatres in Prague. Pictured: speaking with the team from Archa, a community-driven dance and movement theatre company, in the cafe adjacent to their new venue that is currently being renovated.

A group of people seated around a low wooden table.

At the next destination, Olomouc, the participants spent three days immersed in PAF (Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art). Pictured: some of the participants taking part in a speculative social media workshop at the festival's home venue, the Umělecké centrum Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci. 

A group of people seated around a white table, chatting.

The next stop was Czechia's second largest city, Brno, where participants visited various arts and culture venues in the city. Pictured: the participants visiting Co-Lab's brand new multi-purpose space. The main performing venue is under construction, hence the safety vests and hardhats!

A group of people wearing red safety vests and yellow helmets, smiling.

The participants also had the opportunity to share more about their work, practices, and projects to a group of artistic directors and festival managers. Pictured: Centre 42's Associate Producer, Shridar Mani, sharing about the work Centre 42 does within Singapore's theatre landscape.

A large group of people in a black box theatre, seated around some tables and talking.

The participants watched many performances at the various venues they visited across the Czech Republic! Pictured: the participants catching Destrukce in Divadlo X, which is managed by organiser of Continental Drift, Kryštof Koláček.

A top-down shot of a large audience in a theatre.

credits

Czech Association of Independent Theatres
Co-Presenting Organisation
Asian Dramaturgs' Network
Co-Presenting Organisation
NextGenerationEU
Funding Support
National Recovery Plan
Funding Support
Czech Ministry of Culture
Funding Support