The Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) and Arts Network Asia (ANA) will support Asiatopia Performance Art Festival on 13 to 19 October 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand. Asiatopia has existed in Thailand since 1998, and has presented the work of more than 500 international artists from all over the world. This year’s Asiatopia Performance Conference 2016 is the second effort (the first being in 2005) to bring performance artists together with regional organizers, curators, writers, historians, and theorists for the purpose of sharing stories, accounts and theories concerning the development of performance art in Southeast Asia.
Asiatopia 2016 includes performance art laboratory, live-actions, seminars, discussions, oral histories, and publications. We intend to trace and annotate performance art’s cross-fertilization with social movements from the period of the cold war, the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the defeat of the United States in Vietnam to the present. We are particularly interested in the historical legacy of activist performance art in Southeast Asia: its emergence from the body-at-risk and grass-roots political theatre in urban and rural settings.
Asiatopia is supported by ASEF and Arts Network Asia (ANA) through the Creative Encounters programme. It has been selected from pool of 75 proposals submitted in 2015. Project Partners include: Concrete House (Thailand), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (Thailand), University of the Arts Helsinki, Live Art And Performance Studies (Laps), Theatre Academy, (Finland).