A NEW live performance art festival in Glasgow is to feature work by Asian and South East Asian artists.
It will be the first live performance festival to be held in the city in over a year – since the lockdown of spring 2020.
Staged at Tramway, CCA Glasgow and other locations in Glasgow, Journey to the East will involve contemporary performance, techno music, premiere film screenings and artist workshops, culminating in a final day symposium event.
Curated by performance artist Jian Yi, Journey to the East (JTTE) is intended to explore the idea of East as an internal landscape rather than somewhere purely geographical.
The programme of award-winning new and retrospective performance work includes the Scottish premiere of Yingmei Duan’s Happy Yingmei, previously shown around the world. Duan is part of the original Chinese avant-garde and was a contemporary of Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan in the 1990s Beijing East Village.
Also premiering his work in the UK for the first time is Frederic Gies alongside long-term collaborator and Berghain resident DJ Fiedel.
Drawing from their dance floor experiences in techno clubs and raves, Dance is Ancient is billed as a club night and a club night that is a performance – a strictly limited capacity, live participatory evening of dance with a four hour DJ set.
The festival also features Singapore-based choreographer Daniel Kok, also known as Diskodanny, the artistic director of Dance Nucleus, performing the now classic work Cheerleader of Europe.
Kok’s work has been previously showcased globally, notably at the Venice Biennale, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, Festival/Tokyo and AsiaTOPA in Melbourne.
Alongside many more artists presenting live and filmed works, JTTE is set to showcase the Scottish premieres of Sin Wai Kin fka Victoria Sin’s If I Had the Words to Tell You We Wouldn’t Be Here Now, Marcos Lutyens’ collaborative work Hypnotic Show with Raimundas Malasauskas, originally produced for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Indonesian-seminal performance group Breathing Forest Dance Theatre’s masterwork, Dry Leaf.
On the final day of the festival, JTTE will host some of the most prominent artists and contemporary theorists as discussion panellists on pressing social themes from within curatorial research, international and independent dance and experimental performance art.
Speakers at the event include Sophia Hao, principal curator of Cooper Gallery, Dundee, and Dr Cecilia Wee, former chair of Live Art Development Agency.
Journey to the East takes place from August 27-29: www.jttefestival.eventbrite.com
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