Daniel Kok + Luke George
Commissioned by AsiaTOPA 2025
A Betty Amsden Participation Program
Installation / Performance
Over 15 days, craft specialists, community groups, and participants from the public will weave their materials, skills, stories, and histories together in a series of workshops and activities at the main forecourt of Arts Centre Melbourne.
As the fibres intertwine, Home Bound enacts the social entanglement of life in Naarm-Melbourne. It is a choreography of knots that represents social dialogue, the negotiation of differences, and a testament to co-existence. You’re invited to get involved by donating materials, watching the creation process or partaking in workshops to help create the tapestry itself.
Home Bound is the ninth Betty Amsden Participation Program – large-scale community events designed to engage diverse communities, break cultural and economic barriers, inspire civic and public participation and build community pride.
INTERVIEW WITH PLURALMAG
Daniel Kok + Luke George
This book reflects on a decade of trans-local artistic collaboration between Luke George and me. The publication features essays by Lim How Ngean (Melbourne / Kuala Lumpur), Eva Neklyaeva (Ghent), Jessica Olivieri (Sydney), and Miguel Gutierrez (New York) - dramaturge, curator, academic, artist from across different milieux offering their comments on our work as well as their own current points of view.
In our invitation to these contributors, we did not propose a central question, but put forward ‘Entanglements’ as a theme along with a short vocabulary list consisting of terms like collaboration, queering as a process, participation, social engagement, and community.
PUBLICATION (PDF)
In our invitation to these contributors, we did not propose a central question, but put forward ‘Entanglements’ as a theme along with a short vocabulary list consisting of terms like collaboration, queering as a process, participation, social engagement, and community.
PUBLICATION (PDF)
Daniel Kok + Luke George
Blending dance, experimental music, and installation – with plants as mediators, performers, and new companions – Hundreds + Thousands is an opera that attempts to reconcile the relationship between people and the natural world.
The audience is invited to bring along their favourite plant to the performance. As we gather in this collective experience of the visual, the sensual and the sensible, we consider what plants know, and catch a glimpse of a world where time is transformed, and humans displaced.
For us, the title “Hundreds and Thousands” is a reminder of the overabundance of things that exist (in nature or man-made), the vastness of infinity, the great history of the earth and the universe in which humans are but a blip. What if we can ‘see’ together the times and spaces before the human epoch, or long after humans exist?
Commissioned by National Gallery Singapore, Performing Spaces 2021, PICA and Performance Space for Liveworks Experimental Festival of Arts 2022
Daniel Kok (Singapore): Lead artist, performer
Luke George (Melbourne): Lead artist, performer
Alice Hui-Sheng Chang (Tainan): Performer (Vocalist)
Leeroy New (Manila): Sculpture Design
Nigel Brown (Tainan): Composition, Sound Design
Matthew Adey (Adelaide): Lighting Design
Virtual Nursery design: Factory 1611
Stella Cheung: Stage Manager
VIRTUAL NURSERY
“Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”
- Robert Macfarlane, Underland, 2019
Hundreds + Thousands is the sophomore project between Luke George and I. Collaborating since 2014, our artistic practice has been concerned with alternative ways of seeing, communal and participative encounters, and relational politics in the theatre.
This creation began in 2018 but has encountered many turns and upheavals, resulting in different serendipitous discoveries (notwithstanding much frustration and disappointment), and iterations of a work that organically evolved over a slower-than-expected process. These included versions of this performance, photographs, a video, a website, and an online engagement process with a big group of participants in different cities.
Over the pandemic, we came across numerous people who have developed deeply personal relationships with plants. Plants became our meditative companions even as we ourselves lived like potted plants during lockdown. As we were forced to slow down, some of us began to pay attention to minute shifts in light and air qualities in our apartments, changes in our bodily and thought patterns, new buds sprouting and old leaves withering.
We also learnt of other artists as well as personnel working in other fields such as scientific and social projects that also involve plants and ecology. We began to appreciate that this common interest is rooted in our increasing anxieties over the climate catastrophe. Understanding plants better is one way in which we, each in our own small ameliorative ways, cope with the overwhelming sense of disaster.
Gradually, far from needing to create a unique work of art, we also began to be interested in the knowledge of others, considering a network of co-authorship in which people think together, if only so that we feel less helpless ourselves.
In Hundreds + Thousands, we ask ourselves how we might be able to displace ourselves to catch a glimpse of the other. As this is a performance for people and plants, with people and plants, we wonder what kind of language is needed for us to listen, to see and to speak to/with plants.
For us, the title “Hundreds and Thousands” is a reminder of the overabundance of things that exist (in nature or man-made), the vastness of infinity, the great history of the earth and the universe in which humans are but a blip. What if we can ‘see’ together the times and spaces before the human epoch, or long after humans exist?
We want to approach ‘seeing’ as a perceptual process that is based on more than sight. To see is also to sense with the body. To gaze at something or someone is also to empathise with them. To listen is also to ‘see’ what is not immediately apparent: gaps, the in-between, what is absent or what is actually present even if it is invisible.
We might be able to choreograph a sense of empathy by reorganising the way we perceive time, bodies and materiality, when what is seen is also felt, when the one seeing is also being seen, when objects can gaze back at the subject, or when identities become fluid.
Listening to, breathing with, waiting for... performance happens at the moment when subjects present themselves to one another fully, when a movement out of (or into) stillness reveals the rich layers of relationship between things. In such a space, transformation becomes a possibility.
Daniel Kok + Luke George
Still Lives is a performance-installation series that captures (with ropes) significant moments or movement in relation to specific cultural contexts. Each edition of Still Lives is a durational, site-responsive and context-specific process of binding cultural objects in their place. This allows new conversations to emerge and unveils narratives about local history, political tensions, social connections and personal attachments. So far, the series has included:
Still Lives: Melbourne
Presented at National Gallery of Victoria for Rising Festival 2022
Five Australian Rules players transformed into living sculptures, in which a spectacular mark by footy legend and proud Noongar man Andrew Krakouer was recreated as a suspended tableau. As spectators gathered in the National Gallery of Victoria for the Rising Festival 2022, the powerful influence of football in the cultural life of Melbourne became an object of interrogation.
Still Lives: Ghent
Presented by Viernulvier, Minard. Theatre, 2025
Two Belgian cyclists - including world champion Johan Museeuw and their bicycles are suspended in the historical Minardschouwburg as if they are in the middle of a race. Belgian accordionist, Suzan Peeters created live compositions for the show.
Still Lives: Auckland
Presented by the F.O.L.A. - [AKL], 2024
In Town Hall of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, eight female rugby players were bound together to re-create one half of an interlocking scrum. Urgent issues, such as sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia within sporting culture are also revealed through the knotty negotiation between bodies.
Still Lives: Fremantle
Presented by the Fremantle Biennale 2023 SIGNALS
Looking to maritime past and histories of imprisonment of a key naval port in Australia, whilst out at sea, sailing towards Walyalup / Fremantle from the direction of Wadjemup / Rottnest Island, a bugle player was suspended between the masts of a 130 year old pearl lugger. As the ship entered the Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour at sunset, the bugler performed The Last Post, an international anthem for remembering and rest.
Still Lives: Florence
Presented by Fabricca Europa, Secret Florence 2023
3 queer-identifed Italians respond to the 3 figures in Giambologna’s Ratto delle Sabine (Rape of the Sabine Women) by being physically bound into the interlocking compositon of the Baroque sculpture.
Still Lives: Venice
Presented by La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Danza, 2019
For the 2019 Venice Biennale, a gondola and gondolier were tied together using 1km of locally made jute rope. With its relationship to water and boats, rope is an ever-present material in Venice. Before it became a central venue for the Biennale, the Arsenale also housed the making of rope for its naval fleet. This durational performance-installation took place in a public square on Via Garibaldi, in front of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Monument.
INTERVIEW WITH ATHLETA MAGAZINE
Still Lives: Melbourne
Presented at National Gallery of Victoria for Rising Festival 2022
Five Australian Rules players transformed into living sculptures, in which a spectacular mark by footy legend and proud Noongar man Andrew Krakouer was recreated as a suspended tableau. As spectators gathered in the National Gallery of Victoria for the Rising Festival 2022, the powerful influence of football in the cultural life of Melbourne became an object of interrogation.
Still Lives: Ghent
Presented by Viernulvier, Minard. Theatre, 2025
Two Belgian cyclists - including world champion Johan Museeuw and their bicycles are suspended in the historical Minardschouwburg as if they are in the middle of a race. Belgian accordionist, Suzan Peeters created live compositions for the show.
Still Lives: Auckland
Presented by the F.O.L.A. - [AKL], 2024
In Town Hall of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, eight female rugby players were bound together to re-create one half of an interlocking scrum. Urgent issues, such as sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia within sporting culture are also revealed through the knotty negotiation between bodies.
Still Lives: Fremantle
Presented by the Fremantle Biennale 2023 SIGNALS
Looking to maritime past and histories of imprisonment of a key naval port in Australia, whilst out at sea, sailing towards Walyalup / Fremantle from the direction of Wadjemup / Rottnest Island, a bugle player was suspended between the masts of a 130 year old pearl lugger. As the ship entered the Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour at sunset, the bugler performed The Last Post, an international anthem for remembering and rest.
Still Lives: Florence
Presented by Fabricca Europa, Secret Florence 2023
3 queer-identifed Italians respond to the 3 figures in Giambologna’s Ratto delle Sabine (Rape of the Sabine Women) by being physically bound into the interlocking compositon of the Baroque sculpture.
Still Lives: Venice
Presented by La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Danza, 2019
For the 2019 Venice Biennale, a gondola and gondolier were tied together using 1km of locally made jute rope. With its relationship to water and boats, rope is an ever-present material in Venice. Before it became a central venue for the Biennale, the Arsenale also housed the making of rope for its naval fleet. This durational performance-installation took place in a public square on Via Garibaldi, in front of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Monument.
INTERVIEW WITH ATHLETA MAGAZINE
Daniel Kok
Rules of Engagement is a performance-lecture commissioned by Maxim Gorki Theater’s (Berlin) WAR OR PEACE festival in 2018 that commemorates the centennial anniversary of the armistice of the first World War.
The work is based on Daniel Kok’s experiences as an infantry commander in the Singapore Armed Forces. In this performance, he employs the battle procedures of the infantry, such as the infantry commander’s operational orders for his troops to prepare them for a battle and military mission.
In Version 1 of Rules of Engagement, the Battle of Verdun of World War 1 was the basis of the work. In future iterations of the work, Daniel Kok will readapt the lecture/[erformance to refer to a historic battle that is of relevant to the local audience that he addresses.
Creator and Performer: Daniel KOK
Creative Assistant: LEE Mun Wai
Dramaturge: Jens HILLJE
Special Thanks to: Mazlum Nergiz, Sergiu Matis
The work is based on Daniel Kok’s experiences as an infantry commander in the Singapore Armed Forces. In this performance, he employs the battle procedures of the infantry, such as the infantry commander’s operational orders for his troops to prepare them for a battle and military mission.
In Version 1 of Rules of Engagement, the Battle of Verdun of World War 1 was the basis of the work. In future iterations of the work, Daniel Kok will readapt the lecture/[erformance to refer to a historic battle that is of relevant to the local audience that he addresses.
Creator and Performer: Daniel KOK
Creative Assistant: LEE Mun Wai
Dramaturge: Jens HILLJE
Special Thanks to: Mazlum Nergiz, Sergiu Matis
Daniel Kok + Miho Shimizu
xhe is not a he, not a she, not an it. Pronounced “zhee” or like “j’y” in French, xhe is the
pronoun for the possible, the queer or the multiple, a figure that moves between a Square an an Octopus.
In “xhe”, Daniel Kok and Miho Shimizu explore how a singular body might already be an expression of multiplicity, whereby One is always already Other and Many. The durational performance is a choreographic mash-up of different forms - part installation, part dance, part concert - bringing different international artists together in search for this elusive figure.
As we spend time together, we hope to summon, to discover, to receive, even to become xhe.
Concept & Choreography: Daniel Kok (Singapore/Berlin)
Visual Artist: Miho Shimizu (Tokyo)
Performers: Karol Tyminski (Berlin/Warsaw), Daniel Kok
Sound Composition: Filastine & Nova Ruth (Barcelona)
Dramaturge: Lilia Mestre (Brussels)
Graphic Design: Currency (Singapore)
Premiere production in 2018 by CultureLink (Singapore), Co-Commissioned by Esplanade Theatres By The Bay (Singapore), Live Works Festival of Experimental Art (Sydney), with support from the Naomi Milgrom Foundation
pronoun for the possible, the queer or the multiple, a figure that moves between a Square an an Octopus.
In “xhe”, Daniel Kok and Miho Shimizu explore how a singular body might already be an expression of multiplicity, whereby One is always already Other and Many. The durational performance is a choreographic mash-up of different forms - part installation, part dance, part concert - bringing different international artists together in search for this elusive figure.
As we spend time together, we hope to summon, to discover, to receive, even to become xhe.
Concept & Choreography: Daniel Kok (Singapore/Berlin)
Visual Artist: Miho Shimizu (Tokyo)
Performers: Karol Tyminski (Berlin/Warsaw), Daniel Kok
Sound Composition: Filastine & Nova Ruth (Barcelona)
Dramaturge: Lilia Mestre (Brussels)
Graphic Design: Currency (Singapore)
Premiere production in 2018 by CultureLink (Singapore), Co-Commissioned by Esplanade Theatres By The Bay (Singapore), Live Works Festival of Experimental Art (Sydney), with support from the Naomi Milgrom Foundation
Artist Statement
“For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousands… and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own… so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there… and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.” - from “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf
Perhaps the public/audience has always been a dystopia - a singular as well as plural body constituted by irreconcilable differences. In a shared visual space, the experience of a theatrical performance could never be conceived in universalist terms. As an object for spectating, the dancer is always seen differently, answering to different expectations and desires.
“xhe” is a work that is concerned with audienceship. The term ‘spectatorship’ usually refers to the conditions of spectating for a singular subject - the cognitive and perceptual processes, the gaze. ‘Audienceship’ in contrast, refers to the socio-cultural codes and conditions by which a group of people gathers as an audience. By being conscious of the different perspectives and desires amongst the audience, that the audience is in fact a heterogeneous body, the spectator might appreciate that his singular perspective in drawing universalist conclusions about an experience is inadequate. His engagement of a performance then always takes into account that he may not be able to grasp the full (macro) picture of an audience’s experience - the experience of the multitude - and thereby begins to examine different possible realities besides one’s own.
Correspondingly, the dancer should no longer strive to embody only one set of meaning. In order to instigate ways of seeing that require multiple points of view at the same time, and to mirror the pluralism of the audience, the dancer needs to see themselves as both singular and plural, an agonistic Self or a figure of difference(s), that is to say, a trans-individual. Their work/performance might have to go so far as to embody a variety of identities, even conflicting ones, putting various positions into play alongside or against each other.
In “xhe”, we adopt the language of the bricolage, experimenting with mixing different forms together to try and activate different ways of seeing at the same time. How is a graphic pattern already a constitution of movement? How can a dance bring life to abstract objects? What is the sound of a material? We compare the ways we spend time in a gallery, in a theatre, and in a concert. What are we looking for in one aesthetic space that cannot be found in another?
Daniel Kok
In MARK, nine dancers attempt a collective drawing in different urban spaces. The traces of their gestures, acts and relations reveal what happens when a dance encounters the public. The audience is invited to join the dancers physically in a drawing, which evokes social and imaginary landscapes where people can meet one another in an unfamiliar space. They come together in such a space to discover new layers to their daily lives and to find beauty in giving attention to one another.
MARK is an invitation to a radical moment of togetherness. The act of dancing is a desire to leave behind an indelible mark on the social body.
Choreographer: Daniel Kok
Dramaturge: Claudia Bosse
Dancers: Phitthaya Phaefuang, Otniel Tasman, Lee Mun Wai, Jereh Leung, Pat Toh, Melissa Quek, Yazid, Felicia Lim
Music: Phu Pham
Documentarian: Chan Sze Wei
Commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) in 2017
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN DRAMATURGE CLAUDIA BOSSE
AND DOCUMENTARIAN CHAN SZE-WEI
Chan Sze-Wei: What was the starting point for this work, MARK?
Claudia Bosse: I recall Daniel Kok speaking about three different elements. He was inspired by the Holi festivals in India. He imagined a ritualistic celebration which would implicate the public body in the performance. He also talked about Pink Dot (Singapore’s annual LGBT demonstration) and the way that a mass gathering was recorded in public space. Thirdly, a more general question about what kind of art is necessary nowadays in relation to the current global political order. How can we produce art that addresses something in the individual subject and in the common body that offers the opportunity to reflect on our own embeddedness in social and political norms?
This work takes place in three different public spaces. How do you see this shaping the work?
When we work in public spaces, the work is at once about the performance and not about the performance. The performance becomes a medium to allow us to observe the performance of the public space itself. As artists, we must consider whether the work is entertainment for the public or an intervention in a situation – the situated audience. Being a situated audience is not about being situated by the performer, but about being invited to situate myself. It’s about a special coexistence of bodies. The reading and listening on all sides can then become an open process in all directions, and the performance is just one part of it.
What about the risk that the audience will not want to be involved?
When I was here in March, I was invited to an (evangelical) church service. It was the first time I have experienced something like it. I felt like a dot in a mass of involvement. Every person there was completely involved, and had a clear ritualistic role to play. In the context of choreography, I’m interested in how the individual can get involved without a clear script. Instead, the invitation gives the responsibility back to the individual. There is a pleasure in becoming organised. You can choose to position yourself depending on the situation, the different propositions arising from the work. The proposition invites a choice, rather than saying that there is just one way to imprint yourself in that setting.
There is an interesting tension in making a work about collectivity, where each performer is very much an individual in this work. Daniel’s choice of cast and way of working highlights that each dancer has their own movement language, even their own little universe sometimes. I get the sense of individuals making a decision to come together, rather than performers presenting an already unified body.
This is part of a big discussion about collectivity, individuality, and uniformity. I would say it’s only possible to create a collectivity if the individual is clearly defined by his/her borders, standpoints, and desires. Without that clarity, you just submit yourself to a majority decision that has nothing to do with the collectivity but is more about consensus. How is it possible for a collective body to allow difference? How can it also allow us to meet one another to articulate our differences and seek a common interest? This is extremely difficult but also extremely important.
How does the drawing in this work relate to these questions?
I was touched to see Daniel’s choreographic identity meet his art teacher identity in this process. The drawing is a key part of this piece and it is much more than traces made on the white paper. Every ephemeral movement is a drawing in space. Every trace a body leaves in time is a new layer, a possible memory in the mind of the spectator. Throwing the coloured powder is yet another layer, like a virus or a contamination. How can we relate the energy of the trace-producing body and the traces themselves? What are the traces on the body, and what is then the composition in space? Must the traces become a statement, or can they stay permanently as a process of marking?
In a country that is so clean and ordered, explosions of art in public space easily cause anxiety.
When we were rehearsing in Punggol, we were surrounded by big white clouds of anti-mosquito fumigation fog. I realised that the swamps of Singapore can only continue to exist with this contamination, which is justified as separating bad organisms from good organisms. However, a similar cloud of coloured powder in a different context can be seen as dangerous or implying disorder. But if we explain that this is important for us to exist, then it can be justified.
This is how contamination and order co-exists.
Yes!
Daniel Kok + Luke George
Creation & Performance: Luke George & Daniel Kok
Dramaturgy: Tang Fu Kuen
Lighting design: Matthew Adey / House of Vnholy
Technical Stage Manager: Gene Hedley
Bunny was commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre (AUS), co-produced by The Substation (SIN), with support from the Playking Foundation (AUS), Australia Council for the Arts, Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, the National Arts Council (SIN), Singapore International Foundation, Abrons Arts Centre (NYC) and Tanzfabrik (BER).
KNOT NOTES Performance Notes
INTERVIEW WITH CONCERTGEBOUW
Daniel Kok + Luke George
By combining bondage with massage, the full range of pressure and release, or control and surrender come into play. The premise is that bondage is a dynamic relational practice that involves a heightened sense of touch and sensitive mutual listening between the giver and the receiver, as they they communicate their consent, trust, empathy and pleasure to each other.
This 2-Day workshop is suitable for anyone with a curiosity in interacting with others. Emphasising the duty of care in this workshop, we cater to different desires and interests, and explore the politics of intimacy that are revealed by the differences between doing and observing, seeing and being seen, leading and being led.
Daniel Kok
PIIGS is a European cheerleading team assembling as a force to cheer for a landscape in crisis. Widespread unemployment, austerity measures and increased euroskepticism have made it imperative for the PIIGS to speak.
PIIGS is a body of different voices. We have different reasons to cheer. We cheer to find the reason to cheer. We cheer because we want to be cheered. We are cheered and so we cheer.
EVERYONE WILL BE HAPPY IN THE END.
Initiated By Daniel Kok
Collaborating Artists Jorge Gonçalves, Sheena McGrandles, Luigi Coppola, Elpida Orfanidou, Diego Agulló
Video Hiroko Tanahashi
Costume Dusan Pejcic
Dramaturgy Peter Stamer, Pierre Rubio
Co-producers Maxim Gorki Theater, WorkspaceBrussels [Life Long Burning], Nationales Performance Netz
Supported By PACT Zollverein
Statements on Collaboration, Community, Collectivity & Cheering
I think about my research on collaborative practices in PIIGS through a particular distinction: one between thinking about the collaborative project as a community or as a collective.
A community answers to a role model and is based on sameness or an underlying agreement that is inevitable in any group. My own observation is that in Europe especially, no matter how people have grown increasingly skeptical of ideology, there remains a lingering desire to form and belong to communities. Notions of solidarity, togetherness and oneness are approached with ambivalence. A common denominator is perhaps still necessary especially since we wish to avoid fulfilling only individual objectives. Yet, a common denominator is not necessarily the same as a common objective, but a common problem or a common desire to assemble. It is possible for different and divergent points of view to share a desire to assemble, to transform and be transformed together. Because we assemble, we believe we can arrive at a higher point of transformation.
A group can also look at itself as a collective, which is based on singularities and differences simultaneously (assemblage). The collective is itself a commons, already a common resource. The collective is an amalgamation of parts, without needing to form a whole. A collective looks for something between Self-above-Community (liberalism) and Community-above-Self (confucianism, communism). The collective performs the collectivism by putting it into practice and performance in public.
This is important for the PIIGS cheerleading team, because we are dealing with the European project and European (political, economic) questions as if they were inseparable from our artistic creation. Simply put, Europe is seen as a paradox - a singular concept that tries to hold and protect the diverse differences within it.
As such, the PIIGS European cheerleading team is only a team insofar as we true: space for the individual is accomplished only by fulfilling the group. The PIIGS cheerleading team has to be a unified body with different voices - a polyhedric body. Similarly, PIIGS cannot be clear with what it says or what it wants from the audience, since it rejects conforming to a specific ideology or a coherent set of ethics.
For PIIGS, cheering is an injunction that affirms the collectivism of difference. We ask the public/audience “What is our common desire?” but do not (or cannot) answer this question. Although our cheer is a provocation for change, we concern ourselves only with the provocation itself rather than the change or what happens afterwards. We are interested in performing relational politics that are in crisis so that a change might be imminent. Inasmuch that we are interested in performing the arbitration of the relationship between the individual and the collective, we pay attention to the speech acts that call for the recursivity of that arbitration.
Marx said that he was not a Marxist. He was not interested in a revolution per se but a society in permanent revolution (constant negotiation). In his utopia, every member of society is an active agent; and to not practice the permanent revolution is to negate the essence of being human.
The PIIGS European cheerleading team has set for ourselves this lofty goal despite knowing that we are more likely to fail, or at best, bring the theatre to a micro-revolution that lasts but an hour. Yet, it is not the nature of cheerleaders to doubt themselves.
We insist that EVERYONE WILL BE HAPPY IN THE END.
Daniel Kok
But one artist, resolute in his beliefs in the constitution of Europe, wishes to marshal the community towards a sense of unity. Who better to play the Cheerleader of Europe than the neutral Asian? Hailing from the economic miracle city-state of Singapore, he is Left and Right, East and West, In and Out and shake it all about. The performance
promises a utopic finale, complete with confetti.
Everyone must be happy in the end.
Choreography / Performance : Daniel Kok
Dramaturgy : Jorge Gonçalves
Text : Daniel Kok, Sergiu Matis
Producer: Tang Fukuen
Supported by: APASS, Nadine, WorkspaceBrussels,
PACT Zollverein Essen
Special Thanks to: Peter Stamer, Pierre Rubio
Abstract for Cheerleader of Europe
Cheerleader of Europe is a solo project through which I pin down my position as an independent Asian artist in Europe and develop a methodology of brokering a dialogic relationship with the European milieu I now call home.
I see the artist/performer as an agent of conflicting ideologies, putting various positions into play alongside or against each other, in order to mirror the audience as a pluralist community. I have been looking for ways to collect qualitative data, map out inter-subjective relations, facilitate collaborative discussions, as well as instigate ways of seeing that require multiple perspectives at the same time. In such a model, the solo artist/performer needs to see himself as an agonistic Self (Mouffe), that is a figure of pluralism, in order to foster a radical democracy in the theatre. To achieve this, the artist as well as the audience must be acutely aware of the systemic control and manipulation at work when the crowd is brought together by a shared desire to belong and coalesce as a community.
Thanks to a series of conversations with artists, festival programmers and other cultural workers since my move to Berlin and Brussels, I am by now fully aware of the impact of the Eurozone crisis on the creation, production, distribution and circulation of the performing arts in Europe. (What an inopportune time for an Asian Artist to relocate to Europe! A little ironic too!) In a time when arts festivals and organisations experience dramatic funding cuts and take to co-productions as a coping measure, artists and audience alike have to rethink the idea of cooperation and their overall modus operandi.
Nevertheless, it must be said that Cheerleader of Europe is not just an emancipatory project. I do look upon the utopic notions of the work with skepticism. This charming, seductive cheerleader that I envisage is also a figure of power, a benevolent but manipulative dictator; a not-so distant relative of the neo-liberal capitalist who sells freedom as a feel-good notion and grants limited choice so that in the end, it is he who benefits the most and laughs his way to the bank. How do I resolve this duplicitous character? How do I work for all of us sincerely, devotedly while at the same time sell us out? Who better to play this role than a Singaporean?
Interview with Elke Van Campenhout
Interview with Rahel Leupin
Daniel Kok
The Cheerleader kickstarts my series of performance works on cheerleading. This is a short solo performance that was commissioned by the Esplanade Theatres By The Bay (Singapore) for its 10th anniversary celebrations in 2012. Singaporean choreographers were asked to make a short work that pays tribute to someone. I invited LOW Kee Hong, then former General Manager of the Singapore Biennale and Singapore Arts Festival, and former Deputy Director at Arts and Community at the National Arts Council of Singapore to play the cheerleader.
The text was co-written by Sergiu Matis (Berlin), Kee Hong and I. Here, Kee Hong pays tribute to the Singaporean public before he leaves Singapore permanently.
"KNNBCCB" is an abbreviation of a well-known profanity in the Singaporean Hokkien dialect. It means "F*** Your Mother's Smelly C***".
Choreography: Daniel KOK
Performer: LOW Kee Hong
Costume/Media Design: Dusan PEJCIC
Special Thanks: Sergiu MATIS
VIDEO OF THE CHEERLEADER (LOW KEE HONG)
Daniel Kok
I look at the figure of the stripper as an archetype to unpack performative labour, dance and spectatorship as economic exchange. The work is also an exercise in practising spectatorship as a collective and pluralist experience.
A pole dancer performs a pole dance that lasts for up to 3 hours while the song, “I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner plays on repeat. Spectators can freely come and go, take any seat and change seats. Spectators may also stand around in other parts of the gallery. A piece of text, divided into 8 parts is printed and distributed onto 8 different chairs:
Rules of Engagement in a Strip-Encounter
#1 - Voluntary Submission of Power
#2 – Dialogic Encounter
#3 - Individualized Gaze
#4 - Finite Capital
#5 – Heterogeneous Body
#6 – Suspension of Climax
#7 – Expenditure
#8 – Surplus & Loss
Text for The Stripper’s Practice
Daniel Kok
Through the online portal, gayromeo.com, I went on 40 dates in 60 days. During the encounters, I ask each one for a gift in response to our relationship. In exchange, I invite my gayromeos back to the performance where I return my gift in the form of a dance.
"You are going to be my bitch." Looking me in the eyes, he smiled lightly and said in a thick accent,"You understand? You are going to be my bitch."
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Daniel KOK
Dramaturgy: Jorge GONÇALVES
Producer: TANG Fukuen
Production & Stage Manager: YAP Seok Hui
THE GAY ROMEO LOG BOOK Manual to the Performance
Daniel Kok
“ddd” combines the linearity of written text with that of film in order to produce a narrative. the viewer is asked to actively imagine movement by considering the gaps between words and images.
Artistic Directions : Daniel Kok, Dusan Pejcic
Script : Daniel Kok
Costume Design : Dusan Pejcic
Set Design : Dusan Pejcic
Motion Graphics Design : Yoann Trellu
Editing : Hiroko Tanahashi
Text Animation : Hiroko Tanahashi
Sound : Sibin Vassilev
Performance : Daniel Kok, Lee Meir, Dusan Pejcic, Nikola Pieper
Voice : Daniel Kok, Ana Monteiro
Production Coordinator : Daniel Kok
Studio Tech Support : Susana Alonso, Nikola Pieper
Text Adapted From : "The First Person Singular" (2007) by Alphonso Lingis
Music : "Clair De Lune" (1905) by Claude Debussy
Daniel Kok
“Keep going north,” he told himself, for want of a better objective. And he would keep on photographing. Perhaps he might chance upon a revelation, a resolution. He might find out why he came after all.
Cataloging an overland journey across the snow-covered landscapes of Hokkaido with thousands of high-resolution still images, this dance work tries to overcome the limitations of a camera in capturing the breath and immensity of time and space. The resultant montage uncovers a dance that connects figure and ground.
Direction : Daniel Kok
Choreography & Performance : Ming Poon, Daniel Kok
Lighting Design : Takayuki Fujimoto
Video Design : Victric Thng
Sound Design : Chong Li-Chuan
Commissioned by The Esplanade - Theatres On The Bay
THE DANCE BETWEEN TWO PHOTOGRAPHS
Research Paper for “Hokkaido”