TAV's Participation in 4th Asiatopia

We will be performing the TAV version of the FUN DANCE!

Date: 24 Nov
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Santi Chaiprakarn, Park, Pra Athit Road

*TAV's participation in Asiatopia is sponsored by Lee Foundation*

Since its inception in 1998, Asiatopia Performance Art Festival has brought over 70 international artists to Bangkok. From Asia, the countries are Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Singapore, and also distant places such as Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Czech Republic, and USA.

One of the properties of this festival is that it is always held in public sites in local parks, streets and boulevards - in order to allow audiences to directly act and react with performers, and to introduce performance art as a form of public art.

Public space is always a challenge to performances where the boundary between performers and audiences is almost non-existent. The artists learn to negotiate the limitations in differences between culture of their own and the local public - the rules and different social orders unique to its environment.

At our last festival two years ago which was held over a period of two days, there were almost 1000 attendees at the venue located at Santichai Prakarn Park on the bank of Chao Praya River, Banglumpoo district, Bangkok. Responses from the audience were, by and large, positive and encouraging.

To reach out further to those who are interested to learn further about the artform, we gathered about 40 young people each time to sign up as volunteers for the subsequent festival. And they will be trained in a 3-days workshop Introduction to Performance Art. Following that, they will then be assigned to assist the artists during the festival. The festival also decentralised their activities to provinces outside of the main capital by initiating with other organisations and educational institutions to host performance events. Chiangmai Contemporary Art museum and Ratchabhat Institute in Nakorn Rachasrima (Korat) are examples of these benefited venues. Such activities duly hope to encourage young local artists to experiment and develop the visibility of performance art in gallery exhibitions and schools presentation etc, among other fields of art.

Since the establishment of Asiatopia, it has also introduced many local artists to international festivals arena. Among this region, Asiatopia began its outreach program in Vietnam in 1998, Myanmar in 1999 and has introduced and mediated artists from those countries to other international festivals too.

In 2000, Asiatopia joined forces with NIPAF (Japan) and other artists' networks in Asia to form the Performance Art Platform of Asia (PAPA for short): representing a network of performance artists in the region. The regional network is co-ordinated by Seiji Shimoda, an established artist from Japan, who is also currently the director of NIPAF.

For this year, 4th Asiatopia will spread itself in different venues around Bangkok as we hope the evocation set-up by these new sites would be in itself a challenge to the festival as well as the invited artists and the public.

Asia:
Houng Ly, Vietnam
Bui Cong Khanh, Vietnam
Aung Myint, Myanmar
Aye Ko, Myanmar
Yuan Mor'O Ocampo, Philippines
Mimi Fadmi, Indonesia
Sangjin Lee, Korea
Ko Siu Lan, Hong Kong, China
Fumiko Takahashi, Japan
Tomoko Takahashi, Japan
Kaori Haba, Japan
(artist from China has not yet been confirmed)

Groups:
The Artists Village, Singapore
Ukabat, Thailand

Black Market International:
Boris Nieslony, Germany
System HM 2-T, Germany
Alastair MacLennon, Northern Ireland
Elvira Santamaria Torrens, Mexico
Julie-Andree Tramblay, Quebec, Canada
Jurgen Fritz, Germany
Jacques van Poppel, Netherland
Norbert Klassen, Switzerland
Lee Wen, Singapore/Japan
Roi Vaara, Finland

Thailand:
Montri Termsombat
Nuts Society
Honey Bee Bo
M.L. Saksin Kasemsanti
Surapol Panyavacheera

• Paisan Plienbangchang
• Nopawan Sirivejkul
• Josef Ng
• Mongkol Plienbangchang
• Chantorn Muangsak
• Chantawipa Apisuk
• Pdungsak Kotchasamrong (Chiangmai)