SoftMachine: The Return at Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay

SoftMachine: The Return is a project that weaves together a decade of experiments in dance-making through the critical lens of five Asian artists: 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 in the form of dance, incorporating lecture, demonstration, and documentary.

SoftMachine: The Return will present four solo performative experiences, each reflecting on the artist’s biography and practice. First is an intimate portrait of Rianto’s search for love within the spectrum of dance, gender, and tradition in Indonesia. With Surjit Nongmeikapam, the work will narrate his journey from the marginal to the political, encapsulated in a dance of resilience that transcends the history of Manipur's ethnic conflicts. Xiao Ke and Zihan dance through the new social realities of China, shaped by its emergence as a global superpower. Finally, Yuya Tsukahara’s presence will be digitally reinvented, questioning the boundaries of dance and interpretation, absence and archive.

As a whole, the SoftMachine project 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 change, resisting the norm, and embracing radical alterity. Perhaps we have remained radical in our own pathways. 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.” – Choy Ka Fai, September 2023, Taipei

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 the da:ns festival in 2015 at Esplanade. The project subsequently toured and was performed in more than 60 shows internationally until the pandemic struck in 2020.