Renowned Thai choreographer and dancer Pichet Klunchun has staged an exquisite performance around the heritage of Khon performance and reembodying this classical Thai tradition in the present day. Cyber Subin, co-produced by the Holland Festival, is a combination of dreamlike, almost apocalyptic scenes with the concrete, autonomous, more pedestrian body, reminding sometimes of the heritage of postmodern dance. It also contains a hands-on, dancerly experiment with the audience.
Traditional Thai dance is rooted in the Mae Bot Yai (the "Greater Fundamentals" or "Theppanom canon"). This set of 59 interconnected poses serves as the foundation for Khon, a centuries-old classical Thai, masked court dance. The complex choreography of Khon features distinctive footwork, circular stepping patterns, fluid knee movements, and rhythmic stamping actions, along with elaborate hand and finger movements, such as intricate finger curls and stylised poses.
Klunchun spent almost two decades in deconstructing Thai Classical dance's 59 major postures, bringing them back to six principles. In the project, wittingly called No.60, he created a new system, in which the rigid postures are transformed into six elements and structures, that help people less familiar with Khon to relate to, and even play with, the system of movements central to Thai classical dance. It gives classical Thai dance a fresh twist. It breaks away from its rigid traditions while highlighting its sensitivity, energy, and playful intelligence. "It creates a complex dialogue between tradition and innovation," as Mekong Cultural Hub writes rightfully.
Together with MIT-researcher Pat Pataranutaporn, Klunchun developed an AI system, based on the No. 60 project. It enables dancers and audiences to improvise alongside a virtual agent. Through voice control, people can participate in altering the choreography of the virtual dancers. The resulting dance in Cyber Subin is a hybrid between humans and machines, emerging from friction and synergy, that demonstrates the potential of combining intangible cultural heritage, intelligent technology, and choreography.
When asked about the position of Khon dance in Thai society today, Klunchun explains that Khon is strongly rooted in Thai society, since it represents the king. "All the Thai kings are named Rama, Rama 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., after the main character, Rama, in the Ramayana Epic or Ramakien in Thai, the body of epic tales that is at the base of Khon performance. Also, the government takes care of Khon as cultural heritage, there are thirteen schools to study Khon in Thailand. But I am not part of the Collage of Dramatic Arts, I trained in a different way, I trained with my master at his home."
Khon is a form of classical dance that represents power and elite cultural tradition, in a way like ballet does in the west. Klunchun's performance opens up this tradition to a much broader scope of dance practitioners, by the dialogue with AI, the implication of dancers and audiences, and even a website to connect high school students to the project.
Pichter Klunchun, Pichet Klunchun Dance Company
11-13 June
Muziekgebouw
You studied Khon for many years, then you went to the US to study dance in New York. How did you experience the differences between these dance cultures?
In Thailand, when you study with a master, you become part of a family, I call my master my father. In a way we weren't studying dance, we were entering a culture. Dance training with a master is very diligent, it is spiritual. When I went to study in the United States, it was much more about technique, about the body and its parts. This was a difficult time for me. To be in between, between something you believe in and something you can describe, you can work with, with a lot of knowledge, technology, science even. Both are beautiful. But how to combine the two things? The spiritual makes me happy, it gives me a deep connection to the spirit, to my master and my dance. The Western approach connects me more to the world, the different languages that can be in the dancing body. After my return to Thailand from New York there were conflicts, I had a confrontation with my master, and my friends at school and even with Thai society.
How did you teach the computer about Khon?
First through motion capture, we gave the computer the forms from the traditional characters from the original Khon's performance. Then we applied my analysis and the six elements and then the dancers started rehearsing with the AI and created or produced their own understanding.
Are the dancers in the project all classically trained?
They all have different backgrounds. One is from Hong Kong and modern dance. One is from classical ballet from Taiwan. Two of my Thai dancer studied traditional Khon performance.
So you made a kind of pan South Asian union?
It is important to me that these people come from different cultures, and how they can each think about this body of knowledge or the ideas of No. 60. The challenge arrives when the dancers can make their own decisions. They have the option to follow the AI or they can ignore it and create their own thing. This is important. I am very open for the dancer to have space and time for this. It is a freedom, especially when you realise the work can be considered political, since Khon's performance is part of the royal tradition.
My assumption would be that as a Thai dancer you were more grounded, less instrumentalised, as tends to be the tradition of the west.
Well, I don’t know, but I can tell you one thing: as Khon dancers we were not performing for the human audience, we performed for the gods. Also, we perform as Khon characters. The dancers’ identities were never presented on stage.
This clash between different dance cultures was also the theme of your work with Jérôme Bel. What was your interest in studying and performing western dance?
I wanted to open the box of secrets of my dance into a universal language of the world. To combine the spiritual from within with the many languages in the world.
You don't put masks and costumes. There is a plainness in your work – the concreteness, the hands-on, the pedestrian - that reminds me of 'new dance'.
After I came back from New York, I liked to communicate and speak more directly to the audience. I wanted to speak for myself, speak as me, not as a character. The first thing was to take off the mask, take off the costume and communicate directly.
And have the gods also left?
The gods have left. But there is the spirit of the body, the spirit of movements. The spirit of dance is still in my body.
You said it is political in Thailand to touch the tradition and to show it in a different way. Your proposal to invite the audience to interact on stage with the AI hints at democratic values, like sharing means and everybody having a voice. It also suggests a broader and deeper relation with tradition, since people can experiment themselves in interaction with the AI.
If you have the power of technology and the power of AI, you can control and decide a lot of things. There are bad sides and good sides. For example, we are now creating a website called Cyber Subin School, for high school students. Khon and politics are traditionally related in a very specific way, since it belonged to the courts, it was a high society practice. The younger Thai are not very interested in this anymore. But the Cyber Subin website can create an interest and connect young people with the Khon tradition in a new way. It can generate a new body movement and reconnect them to the tradition. I think this is how the power of AI can be used in a positive way, the power of the technology serving a certain truth, a reality of practice. I think we can create a new ecosystem together.
What do you mean by ecosystem?
We can create an ecosystem of cultural heritage and technology for a new generation to relate and to practice. The past and the contemporary come together. I think this is the new ecosystem.
How do you see for the future in relation to AI?
I don't know about Europe, but in Asia, AI and technology have become part of the community, of everyday life. We use apps for everything. My concern is that if we use AI that much, we will lose our humanity, our intuition, our human instinct, the intangible aspects, which are difficult to preserve.
So, you are not so optimistic about the future of AI in society?
It depends. For example, we started this project with a photo from 1923. A hundred years ago they already documented Khon. From drawing a human body, they went into making photo's. The archive is still being used today. But with the photographs we also lost things, like the direction of the face of the dancer. In the photo's all the dancers are looking to the camera...
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Do you want to read more about Khon? Check out these websites: https://cybersubin.media.mit.edu/ and https://www.mekongculturalhub.org/news/2022/01/a-dialog-with-pichet-klunchun-through-no-60/