Art Happens

What does it mean to be a dancer when dancing is prohibited? How do you feel when forced to refrain from doing something you have dedicated your entire life to? Starting from these questions, Iranian playwright Nasim Ahmadpour and director Ali Asghar Dashti create a breathtaking performance. On stage, the performers describe the movements they would have made if they could dance. These descriptions of a hand gesture, of a step to the side, entrust us spectators with reconstructing a choreography that is no longer possible to create. The detailed and touching account intertwines with episodes from the recent past, like the story of theatre director Hamid Samandarian. Banned from working in theatres in the early 1980s, his company decided to open a restaurant together. When their first customers entered, the performers felt the same stress as if this were an audience entering the theatre hall. Can anyone stop being who they are? In another episode, an imprisoned director wonders if, by making his fellow prisoners act, he could stop being a prisoner for a moment. Taking its title from a song verse, We Came to Dance is a theatrical gem and a love letter to the stage.

Credits

Dialogue with the Father will take the form of a documentary theatre performance that gathers archives, video footage, and songs from the late artist, writer and political dissenter Wat Wanlayangkoon. These archives will become materials for the three children of Wat Wanlayangkoon to reflect on, reinterpret, and dialogue with. Contemporary artists in their own rights, the three children – Wana, Wasu, and Wajjana – will take creative pursuits in the recollection and reconstruction of their father’s identity and his writing, poetry, compositions, and songs, all inseparable from his personal stories, political ideology, and artist’s identity.

Dialogue with the Father is commissioned to Wichaya Artamat (For What Theatre) and Pathipon (Miss Oat) as the second edition in the long-term series “Dialogue with the Master” by the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). Each edition features an established artist as the master, whose works and practices are reinterpreted through a unique collaborative process, resulting in a new and dynamic performance. For the 2024 edition, the BACC focuses on the late Wat Wanlayangkoon and invites Wichaya and Miss Oat to develop Dialogue with the Father from the performance Just Away that they co-conceived and co-directed for Bangkok Theatre Festival in November 2023.