Dancing with Death (2016)

About Dancing with death

Where there is life, there is death, and where there is death, there is life. In Dancing with Death, award-winning choreographer Pichet Klunchun creates a space in between these intertwined worlds where the material and immaterial meet, where body and spirit exist in a state of kinetic freedom.

This liminal world – and being –  between the living and the dead was first experienced by Klunchun at a Thai folk festival and parade where locals don colourful masks and vibrant costumes to joyfully honour fertility and death. Here, death is not feared but celebrated, and dance is free, fluid and organic in expression.

This inspired Klunchun to create a new physical vocabulary marrying the improvisational and intuitive nature of folk expression with Klunchun’s contemporary choreographic system based on classical Thai dance. Using this intricate movement language, six dancers, including Klunchun, navigate cyclical paths of existence that vacillate between life and death, never clearly separating but always blurring the lines between these two phenomena. The spirit world parallels the material world and yet these realms intersect all the time engaging with each other. Just like how past gestures and movements keep returning to present choreographies. The ‘ghosting’ of these gestures are just like the haunting of spirits in the material world but also manifestations of the material in the ether.