論壇摘要：

    With the rise of Taiwanese consciousness in the early 1980s, public discussions turned to the revival position Taiwan in the “South” map. Recently, the performing arts scene in the “South” has gained attention and deserves discussion. The conference theme "Navigating Location, Negotiating Identity” explores dance and its relations to identity, focusing on the currents and flows involved in navigating location in and outside of relation to the nation and to the global. Following the theme of this conference, “South-South Performance Coalition” panel investigates rich dynamics of international dance performances and theorization among dance practices between Taiwan and Thailand. Hence, this panel contends that contextualizing Taiwan as part of the “South” can raise critical issues on Taiwanese and global dance studies. The dialectic potential between “inner” and “outer” as well as “intra” and “inter” points to the need in dance studies to reexamine the issues of identity and geopolitics across the global and regional.

    This panel, which includes three presentations, proposes to examine the study of dance from the perspective of the performing arts exchange between Thailand and Taiwan. It will centre around the international collaborations between Thai and Taiwanese artists, such as pieces “BEHALF” and “Rama’s House,” created by Pichet Klunchun (Thailand) and Wu-Kang Chen (Taiwan), and cases from Chang Theatre (Thailand)’s international connection with Taiwanese artists. Panelist #1 “Navigating the South, Negotiating the South Identity: On Chen Wu Kang’s Collaboration with Pichet Klunchun” focuses on the collaborative project between two choreographers, Pichet Klunchun (Thailand) and Wu-Kang Chen (Taiwan) to explore an example of South-South coalition. Through the same lens of intercultural performance, Panelist #2 “Bypassing the Center: Postcolonial strategies in the Cross-Cultural/Transnational Collaboration Monkey Show (2019)” pays special attention to the politically radical performance strategies aiming to embody criticism of the Western-dominant aesthetic on the global stage. Finally, Panelist #3 “Politics of Cultural Exchange: Beyond the Taiwanese and ‘Siamese' Moving Bodies” concentrates on the institutional and governmental aspects of international collaboration between Thailand and Taiwan. It addresses practical and administrative issues of international performance collaboration and/or co-production that occurs in the above-mentioned pieces by Panelist #1 and Panelist #2, with a special focus on cultural policy. This panel provides an overview of how proximity the artistic exchange can be between Thailand and Taiwan, to serve as examples for future collaboration among Southeast Asian arts.

    Overall, the conversation addresses how these iconic choreographers cooperate internationally to rewrite the conflicting history of performance in South East Asia. This panel seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Taiwanese and Thai cultural productions, including drama and dance, from a perspective of south-south coalition. Our study suggests that we can go beyond the familiar framework of East Asia or the Sinophone to deal with the complexity of Taiwanese dance’s place in the world. The contextualization of Taiwan in the “South” in the sense of celebrating and interrogating the connecting, mediating and negotiating power of dance in which we elaborated above may help tackle the issue of “navigating location, negotiating identity” in a non-reductive way.

 

關鍵字：South-South Coalition, intercultural performance, Pichet Klunchun, Wu-Kang Chen, Chang theater, Taiwanese and Thai dance, khon