SoftMachine: The Return
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| 20 EUR / reduced 10 EUR |
| Please book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the Foyer. |
| 12 years and older |
| English |
| Ground Floor, Hall 2 |
| Belongs to: Transkontinentale 2025 |
EUROPEAN PREMIERE
SoftMachine: The Return presents 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 from India, 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.
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 a family of 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
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.
Participants
Concept, Visual Design, Direction and Documentary: Choy Ka Fai (Singapore/Germany)
In collaboration with: Rianto (Indonesia), Surjit Nongmeikapam (India)
3D Visual Design and Programming: Lisa Kaschubat
Scenography, Lighting Design and Technical Direction: Ray Tseng
Music and Sound Design: Zihan, Mo’ong Santoso Pribadi, Nova Ruth, Chaoba Thiyam
Stage Manager: Ng Hui Ling
Project Manager: CIRCUS PROJECTS
Residency Support: Studio Plesungan (Indonesia, Melati Suryodarmo), Dance Nucleus (Singapore, Daniel Kok)
Commissioned by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and making its world premiere in Singapore in September 2025, this production was presented as part of da:ns focus – Connect Asia Now (CAN), a weekend that spotlights contemporary dance works by and in collaboration with Asian artists focusing on distinct voices and creative impulses from the region.
Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. Through research expeditions, pseudo-scientific experiments and documentary performances, Ka Fai appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body.
In 2019, Ka Fai started working on the CosmicWander series exploring shamanic dance culture in Asia. CosmicWander produced a collection of performances, exhibitions and VR works. It premiered in 2021 with a solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, followed by a VR experience Blue Sky Academy at tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf and performances in Hebbel am Ufer (HAU), Berlin. In Berlin, the performances of Postcolonial Spirits premiered at Tanz Im August Festival in 2021 and Yishun Is Burning was presented at Tanzplattform Deutschland in 2022 in Berlin (HAU). Equally at HAU, in 2024, he demonstrated his video game The Third Prince.
Ka Fai’s projects have been presented in major institutions worldwide, including Sadler’s Wells (London), ImPulsTanz Festival (Vienna) and Kyoto Experiment (Japan). He was the resident artist at tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf (2017 – 2019) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2014 – 2015). Ka Fai graduated with a M.A. in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.
Rianto is a master of lengger lanang, a dance that expresses gender, body, and construction through a man performing as a woman. He was born in 1981 in Kaliori village in Banyumas Indonesia, and received training in classical Javanese dance and central Javanese folk dance from a young age. Since 2003, Rianto has been living between Indonesia and Tokyo, Japan, where he founded Dewandaru Dance Company to introduce Javanese dance art to Japan. He has collaborated with a number of international choreographers, performance makers and companies.
In early 2017, Rianto joined Akram Khan’s company to take on Akram’s role in the feminist reworking of the Mahabharata, Until The Lions, with which he began touring in 2017. Rianto’s highly acclaimed solo work SoftMachine: Rianto, directed by Choy Ka Fai, continues to be performed throughout Europe and Asia Pacific. Since 2020, Rianto has worked to preserve the dance by establishing Rumah Lengger, a center in Banyumas that trains young dancers in the style; and collaborating with the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) to document the dance using motion capture technology.
Rianto can be seen permanently in Room 310 at the Humboldt Forum in a dance film. In 2022, he performed his piece Medium at the opening of the East Wing.
Surjit Nongmeikapam is an Imphal-based choreographer and dancer. He is the founder and artistic director of Nachom Arts Foundation. Born in Manipur, he has a B.A. in Choreography and has worked with the Natya Stem Dance Kampni and Natya Maya, Bengaluru, as a contemporary and traditional dancer. He is trained in Kathak, Kalaripayattu, Manipuri dance, contemporary dance and Thang-Ta, a form of martial arts. His notable works include OneVoice, a solo piece shown at Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich in 2013. Surjit is also a co-founder of Arts and Imphal, an upcoming international contemporary arts festival in Imphal, Manipur. Surjit was also a dance therapist at H2H, Human to Humane, Imphal, from 2009 – 2013. He has given awareness and dance workshops to several trauma victims in Manipur.
Surjit has toured and participated in major dance festivals in Switzerland, France, Singapore, Belgium, Japan, USA, Germany, Spain, Portugal, UK and more. He is one of the few dancers and choreographers in Manipur to engage with contemporary dance forms and seek to promote its development beyond the traditional conservative Manipuri culture. He is also an award-winning choreographer: Nerves won the PECDA in 2014 and Folktale in 2016.