The final outing

Back for a fifth and final time, the Unfolding Kafka Festival 2024, a biennial contemporary performing arts festival founded and directed by Jitti Chompee, will unveil its most ambitious programme yet in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death and the festival’s own 10-year anniversary.
Divided into three sections, the festival’s programme consists of 15 performances (including two world premieres and six Asian premieres), four exhibitions and one screening, which collectively feature 40 molam musicians and local performers, as well as 25 international guest artists from 13 countries.
While the festival’s departure is a grave loss for Thai contemporary dance, Jitti, the founder and choreographer of 18 Monkeys Dance Theater, says that its meteoric rise to rival world-class arts festivals has now reached its apex. Ready to take on new challenges and step away from the formidable funding demands that have grown with the festival, he intends to pivot to shorter projects that will more directly impact the Thai performing arts community. The festival will remain a cherished memory, as well as a valuable digital archive for young Thai artists.
The Unfolding Kafka Festival this year was made possible by its main supporters, the Goethe-Institut Thailand; the French embassy; the Institut Francais; the Embassy of Portugal; Camões – Institute for Cooperation and Language; the Spanish embassy; the Jim Thompson Art Center; the Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau; the James H.W. Thompson Foundation; the Czech embassy and Canon Thailand.
A hallmark of the festival’s upcoming edition is its focus on the metamorphosis of Thai folk music and performance traditions in the present day.
With the rise of soft power in international diplomacy, traditions at the periphery of mainstream Thai culture have acquired new relevance and the festival can be sustained by two approaches — conservation and innovation through contact with other art disciplines. The two-part approach, like a Banyan tree, provides shelter for older performance traditions endangered by cultural shifts, while also unfurling intrepid branches that spread out in new directions across disciplinary and national borders, ensuring that Thai traditions reach broader local and international audiences. Following the success of The Miscellany Of Khon, which took National Theatre artists on a world tour, Jitti set his sights on the presentation of Thai folk traditions — chiefly molam, an Isan spiritual and musical tradition — with the global stage on the horizon. Over the past year, he invited Spanish and German artists to attend residencies and collaborate with molam artists in uncovering new possibilities in the context of avant garde performance.
On Nov 1, the festival’s opening ceremony kicks off with a fashion show of archival Jim Thompson textiles, curated by Jitti and set to molam played live by a Mahasarakham University ensemble.
The second show of the evening, Fon Farang, is a collaboration between Spanish choreographer Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola, Arthit Khamhongsa and blind khaen master Sombat Simla. In Fon Farang, Juan Kruz draws on an extensive background in classical Western music to investigate identity, inspired by Kafka’s quote, “music is the sound of the soul, the direct voice of the subjective world”.
In addition to bridging experimental approaches and folk traditions, the programme also challenges received notions of what constitutes “dance”, opening up new frontiers for dialogue and experimentation in the local arts scene.
Director’s picks WELCOME by Joachim Maudet and Gaya de Medeiros’ Atlas Of the Mouth are two such pieces. Both profoundly impressed Jitti when he attended the Spring Forward Festival in Dublin last year.
While Maudet’s work, performed with members of the Compagnie les Vagues, liberates the musicality of the body through the fascinating use of their tongues in choreography, Medeiros and Ary Zara explore trans embodiment through the mouth, seen as the interface between social binaries such as the public and private, erotic and political, word and silence. Seeing the piece in Dublin left Jitti with an indescribable feeling of fullness, and certain of the piece’s place in the festival programme.
Morien Nolot’s Sortir Du Bois and Herwig Ilegems’ Head To Head epitomise the festival’s unique concept of “Kafka Zoo”, where animalistic, raw and wild pieces overtly explore the mutable boundary between human and animal in Kafka’s oeuvre. The two pieces deconstruct, as Kafka does, the tension between self and other through representations of animality.
Morien Nolot’s Sortir Du Bois, inspired as much by motorway scenes as by 18th-century Dutch vanitas, is a fantastical tableau that questions our relationship to animals, wilderness and the land. It is cleverly brought into conversation with Herwig Ilegems’ extraordinary video installation Head To Head, in which he touches foreheads with animals ranging from an ostrich to a water buffalo. The film completely mesmerised Jitti when he saw it at the Voorlinden Museum, and he knew that it needed to be shared with audiences in Bangkok.
Other radical approaches to performance displace the human as protagonist of a narrative and unfetter the agency of objects at the fault-line between puppetry and object theatre. Olivier Rannou’s Love Of Risk — which Jitti saw last year at the World Puppet Theatre Festival in Charleville-Mézières — evokes the spirit of Odradek, a talking inanimate object that can disappear at will which appears in Kafka’s The Cares Of A Family Man. Brilliantly witty, this “ballet for robot vacuum cleaners”, in which a charming and chaotic ensemble of AI robots attempt to serve a man his candle-lit dinner, is a must-see for true devotees of the art of performance.
Transformed into an open playground, the Jim Thompson Art Center is the designated arena for multiple site-specific performances and experimental works in the programme, including Javier Martin’s The Improper Point A/S/V and Joachim Maudet’s ‘Sto:riz.
Whereas ‘Sto:riz uses sound and gesture to explore embodiment, The Improper Point A/S/V, a multimedia performance featuring technological devices such as stethoscopes, binaural headphones and projectors, charts an orbit around self-perception, asking: “How much of us is extraneous? What is true and where to find it?”
The festival also presents the Asian premiere of The Glory Of Life, a rare, newly-released biopic chronicling the romance that blossoms between Kafka and Dora Diamont in the last year of Kafka’s life.
Closing the curtains on the festival’s decade-long run, the premiere of Mo[ram]lam is the culmination of a year-long collaborative project between 18 Monkeys Dance Theater and CocoonDance Company, whose director Rafaele Giovanola recently received a nomination for Best Choreography from the Deutscher Theaterpreis.
Featuring molam artists and CocoonDance Company members, who will simultaneously perform two pieces of choreography on a stage divided by a barrier, the piece uses an interdisciplinary approach to reveal new frontiers within molam and contemporary dance by exploring themes of physicality, vocal improvisation and repetitive movement present in both directors’ practices and molam.
The dancers will use their bodies as instruments, devising a new ritual contained by the rarefied, fleeting event of live performance. Mo[ram]lam will go on an international tour in Germany next year.
This year’s Unfolding Kafka Festival will bewilder, excite and enchant audiences with a programme of innovative performances, the calibre of which is unmatched in the region. For artists and patrons of the performing arts, and anyone enticed by a window into a new form of cultural stewardship that includes visionary art-making, exchanges between artists of different cultures and the revitalisation of Thai performance traditions, the Unfolding Kafka Festival 2024 is a must-visit and a harbinger of the expansion of contemporary Thai performing arts to the global stage.
Tickets are available at ticketmelon.com or email [email protected]. For more information on the festival programme and participating artists, visit unfoldingkafkafestival.com.