The Choreography of Encounter

Yaşam Özlem Gülseven*

BIPAM Festival, Bangkok, Thailand, March 2025. Choreographic Intrusion. Artistic direction and choreography: Olé Khamchanla. Music: Mathieu Vallet. Sound. design for BIPAM2025: Taratawan Krue-On Thai-Lao. Dancers: Vanthiva Xayxana, Silibang One Vongsa, Phatsaraporn Ongsiriwattana, Dittanun Dungdao, Saruda Chantrapnichkul, Tayida Watanachaturaporn. Production: Compagnie KHAM. Supports: Communauté de Communes de Porte DrômArdèche, Drac et Région Auvergne Rhône Alpes, Département de la Drôme, Pôle Pik à Bron, Lux SN Valence, Baron de Bayanne.

Since 2016, BIPAM has been bringing together performing artists from Southeast Asia on an international stage. This year (2025), the festival hosted a choreographic intervention that transformed a public space into a site of encounter, inviting the audience to become participants. Without a fixed centre demanding our gaze and spreading across the entire space, the performance invited us to become part of the dance, the music and the surrounding atmosphere. Choreographic Intrusion, choreographed by Olé Khamchanla, featured five dancers and one singer. Yet everyone watching in One Bangkok’s Park became part of the performance.

Awakening gazes and curiosity, *Choreographic Intrusion* is an invitation to discovery and encounter. Photo: Naphatrapee Suntorntirnan

The performance began with a singer dressed in black, almost as if in mourning, whose voice led our gaze sharply behind us. This unexpected shift of gaze foreshadowed a sense of surprise that would stay with me throughout the performance. This first call was a ritualistic melody. The solo performance of the singer and the dancer accompanying her transformed the public space into a stage, as the dancer moved with a body that was fluid yet intermittent, fragile yet rhythmic. After her solo, the dancer made eye contact with the audience and invited people to be part of the performance with her body. Such an invitation might be unsettling for many audience members with conventional viewing habits, but after the dancers in the audience responded to this invitation, we realized that it was “doable” and that interaction was part of the performance.

Being Equal in Public Space

One Bangkok Park is located in an area of the city where everyday life unfolds; it has a calmer atmosphere, in contrast to the “chaotic” structure of shopping malls. The choice of this space for the performance offered an opportunity to encompass all the dynamics of everyday life and, in a sense, bring all participants into the same plane of experience. The fact that I, as a young critic from Turkey, was there that day, eagerly waiting to watch the performance, while a family watching their children playing around the fountain and coincidentally stumbling upon the performance, were in the same space, is an indication of this potential. Our bodies swayed with the movements of the dancers in the performance; we simultaneously listened to the sounds we were following. It was one of the most inspiring aspects of the performance to see so vividly the structure of a public intervention that creates space for both conscious and accidental encounters, and that transforms both city and performance itself.

Surprise or dream, this unexpected dance interlude, on hip hop, butoh and contemporary rhythms, occurs where we do not expect it. Photo: Naphatrapee Suntorntirnan

Inviting Bodies / Expanding Intervention

Each dancer involved in the performance extended this choreographic intervention with their presence on stage, causing a playful energy to permeate the atmosphere of One Bangkok Park. Some audience members of different ages moved around the space, as I did, trying to capture the performance, while others watched the moments from their vantage point. This scattered perspective meant that at times we could only witness what happened to fall within our field of view: we may have missed something, but the music and the rhythm of the hip-hop steps that surrounded us were too present to miss and stimulated not only a visual but also a kinesthetic awareness. At times the dancers performed solo, at others in pairs, and sometimes as a group. Over time they tried to invite us to join in, to create a collective moment with movements that were relatively easy to follow. Described as a hybrid dance with hip-hop, butoh and contemporary dance rhythms, the performance allowed for a choreography in which the audience could participate using only their feet or hands. At times this worked impressively, at other times the audience could only watch. Both decisions seemed like being part of “something”.

The openness of the performance’s invitation and encouragement to participate inevitably lead one to wonder how inclusive this call is. How would things have unfolded if there had been an audience unexpectedly involved in the performance? Would the performers have been able to continue their flow even when the invitation was answered in an unexpected way, or would this encounter have transformed things? My answer: Yes, and how beautiful it would be. The way the performers related both to their own bodies and to the dynamics of the performance suggested that they were ready for such a disruption. What was felt was not a strict choreographic gesture, but the thrill of a truly open invitation.

The dancers adapt to their environment, interact with the audience and create a new dimension in multiple living spaces. Photo: Naphatrapee Suntorntirnan

And yet, I wondered: if there had been dancers of more varied ages, body types or physical abilities, would the invitation have felt even more plural and unpredictable? The relatively young, professionally trained bodies may have raised the threshold of participation for some spectators. A greater diversity of bodies might have resonated even more closely with the dramaturgy of the piece and strengthened the connection with the audience.

This performance I encountered at BIPAM left me with many moments that I continued to reflect on after returning to Turkey. The festival not only opened up space for new forms and experimental approaches, but also created a space of exploration for new relationships with space, the body and the local context by bringing the work of artists from Southeast Asia together with an international audience. Choreographic Intrusion, a production of France-based Compagnie KHAM, was brought to Bangkok’s public space and reshaped with local collectives (Thrixept) and original sound designs (Taratawan Krue-On). The journey of the performance in different geographies this time blended into the rhythm of Bangkok and created its own unique language of “encounter.”

That language still finds its way back to me now and then. Because we were there from different places at the same moment, we felt the surprise of the same encounter, the rhythm of the same music, the childlike excitement of the same invitation. We were together. And perhaps togetherness is simply a way of speaking different languages in different places and still feeling the same things.

*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.

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Being Equal in Public Space

Inviting Bodies / Expanding Intervention

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