Pot of Chaos: Young Critics Discussing Juggle and Hide
Young Critics*
BIPAM Festival, Bangkok, Thailand, March 2025. Juggle and Hide, concept and direction Wichaya Artamat. Pathipon (Miss Oat), text by Wichaya Artamat, Pornpan Arayaveerasid, Rueangrith Suntisuk. Art and technical direction by Yuya Tsukahara. Dramaturg Araki Masamitsu.Sound design and operation by Laphonphat Duongploy. Mechanics creation by Piti Boonsom, Monthira Jamsri. Technical operation by Surat Kaewseekarm. Object operation and stage management Toru Koda. Sound engineer Thongchai Pimapunsri. Project management Sasapin Siriwanij. Producer Carina Chotirawi. soi squad: English Translation.
Instructor’s Introduction
Hana Strejčková (Czech Republic)
The award-winning, internationally collaborative project Juggle and Hide, presented at BIPAM festival in Bangkok, sparked lively discussions among the young critics who attended the IATC/AITC workshop. This article is the result. At the same time, it underlines and affirms the diversity of vision and critical thinking. Capturing the events we have all seen, it both highlights the multilayered nature of the work and allows for the specificities of writing about theatre.
Qiao Zhangweijing (China): Juggle and Hide is documentary theatre that explores themes of time and memory. The creator utilizes a table as a stage for the presentation of personal experiences and historical and political events in Thailand, meticulously arranging various items. Concurrently, a series of miniature trains, equipped with cameras, pass over the table. This integration of visual elements along with the auditory narrative constitutes the essence of the documentary.
Maria Ibrishimova (Bulgaria): A screen, two surfaces with rails and a camera that records the view from above. A theatrical installation without actors, but with people who control mechanisms. There is no plot, there is only the history of Thailand, which is difficult to follow for foreigners who do not have an idea about the context. At the very beginning of the screen there is a projected arrow that resembles a timeline. The surfaces gradually accumulate with different objects until the field is completely filled. And then chaos sets in—disturbing and oppressive. This insane technological structure takes us through the memory of time by reviving all the objects on the stage. It is overloaded, shining and noisy. The system explodes, only the ruin remains. Juggle and Hide is a political performance which provokes the mind and definitely leaves you with mixed feelings about it.
Thanapat Wongwisit (Thailand): The performance unfolds in two parts: the first explores fragments of personal memory combined with the political history of Thailand. In the second part, the objects on the table begin to disrupt the director’s intended meanings, almost as if they are liberating themselves from the constraints of the existing social order. It’s kind of weird that the title Juggle and Hide resembles Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—it’s an insane parody. In the classic story, a man who seeks to create a better drug ends up turning into a monster that destroys him. The director Wichaya Artamat’s work somehow follows the same pattern, where objects from memories—or representations of those objects—begin to revolt against their creator. They glorify themselves, compete over virtue, and create chaos on the table.
Elizabete Šiklova (Latvia): But, how to write about a performance, a kinetic installation that moves fast, becomes disturbing and abandons the spectator, and the world that it creates leads to destruction. During the show Juggle and Hide the audience’s attention is overloaded with visuality, which is the main medium especially for any non-speaker of Thai. The train wagons get fuller and fuller until the content starts dripping out of wagons. Whichaya Artamat and the production team are in the role of silent creators of a work of art, of a new world, whose final touch is left for the spectator, who has to decide which pieces to take with him. The train ride through Whichaya’s life and personally important historical events end in a moment of today.
Maria Ibrishimova (Bulgaria): Is it a robotic installation or a theatre performance?
Lachezar Yordanov (Bulgaria): Hundreds of cables are laid out all over the stage, with some cameras. Above them were two large tables with small railroad tracks on them and musical instruments scattered around them. Everything happens too fast, too chaotically. Some hands were constantly lifting up a puppet and six people were simultaneously putting some kind of stuff on stage. This vague combination didn’t convey information, but made confusion.
Anastasia Chernetsova (Georgia): This documentary summary of Thai history is first of all juggling with the audience. Spectators observe how an overwhelming number of objects appear on the table, like in the Georgian national dish ajapsandali, as there are many ingredients in it, and similarly, the performance is made up of a variety of elements.
Qiao Zhangweijing (China): The creator’s extensive use of material, related to preparing a “hot pot,” serves to present a comprehensive blend of personal sentiments, historical imprints, and the fervour of social transformation to the audience in a single experience.
Lukáš Cenker (Czech Republic): The narrator of Juggle and Hide, an obscure playground in a sense of history, introduced us to some main parts of Thailand’s modern history. He talked about strikes, police and government brutality and about the citizens, who were abandoned by the whole world.
Yaşam Özlem Gülseven (Türkiye): The whole collection of objects, messy toys, documents moved by the people on the stage came alive at the end of the performance and moved on their own. It became very exhausting to follow the performance among the many distracting images. Although the director’s audio recording, which established the verbal narrative of the performance in an ironic language, determined a follow-up line from time to time, it created an overwhelming process in the audience’s reception.
Ketija Jurčenko (Latvia):
there is a war of words
there is a war of actions
there is a war
deep time is not linear
train of memory never stops
there is something opened in me that i’m confused how to close
history loops
juggle the chaos, the meta of it all and then hide
healing can look like a fight
questioning the history
questioning memory
questioning personal running
but sometimes burdens of time make people fall asleep
dying also makes people fall asleep
there are gray recordings of history that are shot with present day cameras
there are people who are shot with self purpose
there are people shot
i can be shut down but time stays and loops and laughs piercingly
there is something opened in me that makes me both sad and grateful
about the idea of overlooking plain water and bread
Tamara Vajdíková (Slovakia): There is something hidden in every country’s history that no foreigner will ever understand. That chaotic, nonlinear timeline, that is hard to explain to anyone who never lived inside of it. And it’s even more difficult to catch the essence of it with something as complicated as theatre. The creators of the BIPAM 2025 performance Juggle and Hide tried anyway. What the audience of an international festival saw was deeply personal, but also a political eclecticism brought to a stage through various cameras, angles and points of view. Like a good Italian pizza chef throwing everything on to the dough base, the creators pulled many different things: toys, photos, articles, papers, lights, a lot of plastic inanimate objects. With a little toy train circling around them, they recorded and projected on screen their visions of rooms, places out of the main creator’s memory. It was a burst of colours in a full white room, a show full of visible technology and stuff. And then through the process the inanimate objects became animate. It was the uprising of things, what we saw on stage, much as Thailand’s history emerged around people protesting and fighting for their freedom. But being so tightly tied to this cultural memory and space, it was too much for a non-Thai to digest. The attempt to bring us up to speed with history became overwhelming and confusing. Not even the western references to Luigi Pirandello or R L Stevenson could help.
Nikola Stanišić (Serbia): What if Juggle is Jekyll and Hide is Hyde?
In the performance Juggle and Hide
Through the third eye of the camera
And beam of light
On a table full of rails
And cables below
A small train is moving
with a recording phone
Things are overloaded, disoriented and noisy
But they shine
Like a miniature Bosnian hotpot
At lunch time
A few colours stand out
Blue, red and brown
But that’s nothing compared to the doll
Hanging from the wall
Natalie Rine (United States): A historical lecture comes alive through multimedia usage of video, trains and a lecture taking us through time and memory. The speaker explores political, personal and historical memories in his native Thai language. Aided by subtitles on the same screen that shows the live video feed, there are many creative focal points for the audience to choose and take in. The train’s action on stage accompanying the audio lecture is in a chaotic environment of props constantly being stacked more and more. The inanimate objects, from newspapers to bobble heads, accumulate on the train table, being filmed in full view of the audience. Around the stuff, the train is constantly looping a single track as the history lecture drones on. The history jumps from year to year, rebelling against a straight timeline and drawing connections between the dates of occurrence, jumping in a circulatory nature to and from dates and political movements while the train visually circles the historical memorabilia in sight.
Natalie Rine: The distracting camerawork overwhelms the senses. When the history lecture of rebellions ends, the inanimate objects subvert expectations and declare sovereignty for themselves. The controlled camera lens is then secondary to the chaos that is declared on stage as part of their, literally moving protest. The items rebel against the lecturer’s idea of them, overthrowing a kind of assumed alter ego; in doing so, they reclaim their memories and narratives just as the people in the lecture’s uprisings did. History, memory and time are thus connected through the overwhelming chaos. The train is constantly moving. Time is constantly moving.
*Hana Strejčková holds a PhD from the Department of Nonverbal Theatre at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts (AMU). She serves on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Theatre Critics (AICT/IACT). She teaches at both the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Palacký University in Olomouc. As a researcher, she collaborates with the Czech Arts and Theatre Institute. Hana also works as a dramaturg at Laterna magika – part of the National Theatre. Her training includes studies at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris and completion of a three-level program in Meyerhold’s Theatre Biomechanics in Perugia, Italy, under the mentorship of Master G. Bogdanov.
Qiao Zhangweijing is a PhD. candidate at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, China.
Maria Ibrishimova is a student in Theatre Studies and Theatre Management at NATFA “Krastyo Sarafov” in Sofia, Bulgaria. She has gained early professional experience as a social media manager for a children’s youth festival and as a writer for several drama and puppet theatre festivals. Her work includes interviews for the platform 18th World Theatre in Sofia and contributions to festival newsletters.
Thanapat Wongwisit holds a Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies, with a minor in Acting at Bangkok University. He works as a film and theatre critic. He is a member of both the Bangkok Critics Assembly Awards and IATC Thailand.
Elizabete Šiklova is a theatre maker and a student of dramaturgy and theatre criticism at the Latvian Academy of Culture. She writes theatre reviews for LSM.lv (Latvian Public Broadcasting). Since 2024, she has been actively involved in the creation of contemporary performance, co-founding the performance collective “Drāmas dāmas” and joining the creative theatre company “Miglājs*?” (founded by theatre maker Jānis Balodis). In her work and research, she is drawn to the theatre of the real, to theatre as a conversation, to theatre that is accessible and theatre that is alive.
Lachezar Yordanov is currently studying theatre and theatre management at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts “Krastyo Sarafov,” Sofia, Bulgaria. He is director of the National Festival of Children’s and Youth Theatre Art “Theatre Sparks,” which takes place at the end of April in his hometown.
Anastasiia Chernetsova is a Georgian theatre scholar with a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies from Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film Georgia State University. She has participated in international conferences, workshops and festivals, including Mladinsko Showcase in Slovenia and BIPAM in Thailand. Anastasiia is a blogger and vlogger for Theatrelife.ge and a member of juries at various theatre festivals, such as the Freedom Theatre Award and the Student Theatre Festival. She is also a researcher for “Georgian Theatre 2022-2023” and an author for the magazine Theatre.
Lukáš Cenker is a theatre critic, dramaturg, and editor contributing to various cultural magazines. He was born in Prague, Czech Republic, and is currently studying at the Department of Theory and Criticism at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He is actively involved in publishing, serving as an editor for the cultural monthly ARTIKL, the theatre magazine Divadelní noviny, and the student editorial team of the Prague Quadrennial. In addition, he works as a dramaturg in several theatres across Czechia.
Yaşam Özlem Gülseven graduated from the Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy Department at Istanbul University. She serves as a board member of the IATC Turkey and works as project coordinator, editorial board member and writer for TEB Oyun magazine. Alongside this, she is a graphic designer for the international theatre platform HowlRound. In 2023, she founded Dramatist Türkiye, a platform for dramaturgs and playwrights. Since 2018, she collaborates with various teams as dramaturg and continues to create as producer, playwright and dramaturg at artalan kolektif, an independent arts space she co-founded. She pursues her master’s degree in the Women’s Studies Department at Ankara University.
Ketija Jurčenko is a Latvian theatre critic and emerging dramaturg. She studies Drama and Text Studies at the Latvian Academy of Culture and regularly contributes reviews and interviews to kroders.lv, a leading performing arts platform in Latvia. She has strengthened her critical practice through participation in international programs such as NORTEAS and the IATC/AICT Young Critics Workshop.
Tamara Vajdíková completed her Master’s degree in 2023 at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (VŠMU), Slovakia. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Theatre and Film Research Institute of the Arts Research Centre, Slovak Academy of Sciences. In her dissertation, she explores artificial aesthetics in theatre, particularly in connection with modern technologies. She publishes reviews in the journal kød and on the platform MLOKi and Theatre Monitoring in Slovakia. Since 2023, she is also the coordinator of the V4@Theatre Critics Residency project, a part of the International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra.
Nikola Stanišić is in his final year of dramaturgy studies. He has published the plays Kavez za ptice (Scena, Sterijino Pozorje, 2022), Suze Svetog Lavrentija (National Library Ilija M. Petrović, 2019), the novel Uzurpatori (Nova Poetika, 2021) and the fairytale Divljaštvo princa Oriona (Feniks, 2021). He is the recipient of the Sterija Award (2023) for Kavez za ptice and the Slobodan Stojanović Award (2018) for Suze Svetog Lavrentija.
Natalie Rine is a New York City based theatre producer, critic and founder of Broadway DNA, an international theatrical producing and licensing agency committed to connecting theatrical work to a prosperous life through distribution across borders on global stages. Her work has been published in Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, Nová dráma (Slovakia) and Stage Natalie (Japan). She currently serves on the Membership and International Committees for the American Theatre Critics Association.
Copyright © 2025 Hana Strejčková
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
