Hiroaki Umeda’s split flow & Holistic Strata are OzAsia Festival exclusives. Photo credit: Ryuichi Marui, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.
Home to over four billion people across more than 50 nations, the Asian continent is home to a diverse array of cultures and art forms – and yet when Asian performing artists are presented in Australia, it’s often as practitioners of classical forms as if contemporary Asia did not exist.
‘Australia has had a great tradition and a lot of success in showing diversity from across Asia in a lot of traditional performing arts areas – we’ve seen a lot of gamelans from Indonesia, we’ve seen a lot of traditional dance from Southeast Asia, we’ve seen operas from mainland China and Hong Kong,’ explained Joseph Mitchell, Festival Director of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival.
‘But as a guiding principal of what the festival is, I’m very much about original work and contemporary voices from Asia.’
Given Australia’s easy access to Asia, and our love of travel, it’s no surprise that Australians visit Asian countries regularly – so regularly in fact that your average Australian backpacker is potentially more familiar with the diversity of contemporary Asia than your average arts-literate festival-goer.
‘It’s become more and more common for people to travel throughout the region, whether it’s for holidays, backpacking – even business people are aware of sectors like Northern Asia, Southeast Asia and even Central Asia and the Middle East,’ said Mitchell.
‘But I do think that of course there is a greater need for Australia to gain a stronger contemporary cultural understanding of the region, more so than a traditional cultural understanding … And the contemporary culture is highly differentiated across different countries throughout the Asian region and that’s so much what our festival is seeking to highlight.’
Art in a post-colonial world
The OzAsia Festival this year celebrates 10 years of showcasing contemporary Asian art, with a program embracing everything from Japanese dance and Korean comedy to circus from the streets of Cambodia. There’s even a Hindi translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from Mumbai in India.
‘I broke my own rule with that show,’ Mitchell laughs. ‘Really, when I took on the position I was very reluctant to ever program Shakespeare – or to some degree any large, iconic work from the European canon. I was much more interested in original stories by contemporary artists coming out of Asia.
‘But really when I saw this production of Twelfth Night and I thought about the history of India and its successful attempt to overcome colonialism, and then looking at this production … you can really see the links to the colonial roots of the past, but also really appreciate how India as a contemporary society has been able to take that and use it for their own storytelling, as a forward-looking way to tell a modern story about India rather than using Shakespeare as a tool to try and keep them connected to their past.’
Learn more about the Mumbai Twelfth Night
Directed by Atul Kumar, the Company Theatre Mumbai’s production of Twelfth Night also addresses an issue that has been at the forefront of Australian theatrical conversations in recent years: the question of adaptation.
‘I think that anyone who sees this production will see that this is first and foremost a contemporary Indian work that’s drawn from Shakespeare. As we know, some contemporary playwrights often rebrand works as “after Ibsen” or “after Shakespeare” to some degree, and this is very much an “after Shakespeare” production,’ said Mitchell.
Twelfth Night: image supplied.
Contemporary concerns
Twelfth Night illustrates another thread running through the 2016 OzAsia Festival program: the way a nation’s artists use their work to interrogate and investigate contemporary concerns.
‘As I was thinking about what to do for the 10 year anniversary, I really started to appreciate that artists from many countries that I was already familiar with were using the arts – and with depth and complexity – as a bit of a microscope to look at what the key social and cultural issues of their contemporary cultures are and have been over the last few years.’
Productions such as the Japanese play God Bless Baseball (which uses levity to explore the way the US sport of baseball has become entrenched in the social fabric of Japan and Korea – both of which were occupied by American forces at different points in history) and the Hong Kong dance piece As If To Nothing, artists have created works which respond to and reflect the major cultural issues of their countries.
‘I think that there’s a certain sense of uncertainty in Hong Kong at the moment; they’re halfway through a transition from Great Britain to mainland [China] and the transition began 15 years ago and the next phase happens in 10 years. And so we’ve seen things in Hong Kong like the [pro-democracy] umbrella movement happen over the last few years,’ said Mitchell.
‘I think there’s a very powerful and passionate artistic community in Hong Kong who are really trying to investigate “who are we as a city? Are we a city or are we a satellite country? What is our relationship to mainland China? What is the identity of a Hong Konger at this point in time?” So there’s just a lot of inherent and natural questioning and uncertainty around identity that comes out of Hong Kong, and you can really see that in a lot of As If To Nothing.’
City Contemporary Dance Company’s As If To Nothing. Photo credit: Isamu Murai.
Time to party
As well as artistic self-analysis, there’s also plenty of opportunities for celebration in the 10th annual OzAsia Festival. Joining familiar events like the Moon Lantern Festival, an award-winning selection of films and a diverse visual arts program, is a special outdoor celebration in Elder Park.
‘I really wanted to do something in our 10-year anniversary that hopefully wouldn’t get locked down into an annual event. We already have the Moon Lantern Festival – which was very much the founding identity of what OzAsia Festival is, and it’s an important community and cultural celebration that brings the city of Adelaide together for one night – and I love the idea of doing something for one night. But a festival for me is about coming down multiple times over one or two weeks and really engaging in a whole range of different performing arts activities,’ said Mitchell.
His response was to explore the possibility of programming ten nights of free international music from ten different countries to celebrate the festival’s anniversary.
Discover the OzAsia outdoor concert series
‘Ten nights was a pretty ambitious feat and we were lucky to get some additional support from federal and state governments, which was timely because I really think OzAsia Festival is starting to put its mark on the Australian annual arts calendar … So across these 10 nights we have 23 different international artists coming in to perform and probably 80-90% very much represent a bold contemporary music identity.’
Indian ensemble Pung Cholom; artist supplied image.
A festival of premieres
Not only does Mitchell’s program focus on the contemporary: it also boasts a remarkable number of Australian premieres, with 35 of the 50 acts not seen before in Australia.
‘This is really the only annual international arts festival in Australia that’s dedicated so heavily to engaging with the Asian region – to the point that so much of what we do has never been here before,’ he said.
‘And I think that what we’ll see over the next decade is a timely shift towards really seeing the complexity of contemporary performance and culture that’s coming out of Asia … We’ll start to see a very influential and unique performance language coming out from many countries across the Asian continent, which will start to influence and inform what is going to happen in performing arts across the world over this century.’
Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival
17 September – 2 October 2016
www.ozasiafestival.com.au
