Red Peter

Premiere 19 June 2016 at  Korzo Theater , Den Haag.

Jitti Chompee is captivated by Franz Kafka’s Ein Bericht An Eine Akademie, in which the protagonist, Red Peter, describes his loss of true freedom in the midst of gaining acceptance and recognition in the human world. Animalism, absurdity, and evolution are corresponding concepts that prevail in both Chompee’s and Kafka’s works. Red Peter draws from many elements of the ape’s journey of learning to behave like a human.

As for movement creation and choreography, Chompee finds inspiration from works of visual artists that depict striking images, including De Bruyckere’s sculptures and Picasso’s cubist paintings. He is especially intrigued by the abstract architecture of the bare human bodies in De Bruyckere’s sculptures which still resemble natural human positions. Hence, he uses this inspiration to design shapes and positions of the dancers’ bodies, both individually and with one another. Similarly, the rearrangement of objects and bodies to produce a cohesive depiction in cubism stimulates Chompee to experiment with creating distorted images, including headless bodies. These artworks guide him to achieve similar effects of creating peculiar images within his choreography that trigger various feelings and associations in the audience.

“The present controversy about the misuse of the Khon to promote tourism becomes a triviality face to face with this remarkable feat of dance theatre. Whatever your artistic provenance, including our traditional Khon, if you can achieve what the choreographer and the four dancers could do tonight (22 September 2016) in “Red Peter” at the Bangkok CityCity Gallery, you can very well speak (out of the originalWagnerian context) of an “apotheosis of the dance.” I had never realized that the human body could do so much and could be so expressive. What a stupendous display of the physicality of man. But the show contains a more succinct statement inspired by Kafka. It is by aping the ape that we can exploit the full potential of our body and thereby create something innovative. Once you have learned to be humble, the door is open to all possibilities. The troupe has gone beyond the ironic Franz Kafka. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the philosophical message is amazingly relevant to present-day Thailand.”

by Chetana NagavajaraThis creation project in 2016 with Korzo was made possible by the Kylián Foundation in the Netherlands.