Soil

Abstract

In the last half-century, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand have experienced humanitarian, political, and economic crises, many of which directly involved international causes and consequences. In each country, the cultural identity of both the nation-state and local populations has undergone fundamental, and often severe, upheavals and transformations. Reflecting on this overall context of three Southeast Asian countries, Soil is a dance theater work directed by dance theater scholar-artist Michael Sakamoto and co-written and co-choreographed with the performers, classical Cambodian dancer Chey Chankethya, contemporary Vietnamese-American dancer Nguyen Nguyen, and neo-traditional Thai dancer Waewdao Sirisook. Based on the dancers' lives as well as the crises of recent decades in their home countries, Soil addresses issues of: contested social values and bodies politic; authorial agency around cultural heritage, commodification, and embodiment; and East-West transnational identity.

In this paper, Sakamoto explores Soil's background, development, and status as a performative commentary on the writing, dancing, and circulation of diverse cultural identities in contemporary global society. Specifically, he examines the ensemble's creative process of dialectic embodiment through the body in crisis, a philosophical and methodological principle rooted in butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi's writings and choreographic approach. Sakamoto's method stems from his butoh practice, emphasizing image-based movement and performing contradictory/dialectic tensions within socialized personae. The artists integrate body images, situations, cultural behaviors, and the tension of multiple languages to create a remixed vocabulary of shared movement and visual/textual elements from each person's dance form, culture and history.

Soil further manifests a dialectic engagement by connecting quintessentially American stories of migration and transformation with the transnational realities of the Southeast Asian archipelago, which represents much of the USA's fraught, ambiguous international presence, especially since the Vietnam War. The dancers reflect many changes in Asian societies, where globalization infiltrating ethnic, land-based and linguistic traditions makes for porous, contested borders.

Notes

1 Words for soil in, respectively, Khmer, Vietnamese and Thai

2 Previous versions of this text were presented at the Institute of Language, Arts, and Culture Conference, Suan Dusit Rajhabat University, Bangkok, Thailand, and Our Roots Right Now International Conference and Festival of ASEAN Contemporary Theater, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. Material in this article is also being prepared for publication in the book, An Empty Room: Butoh Performance and the Social Body in Crisis (working title), under contract with Wesleyan University Press.

3 For a detailed historiographic analysis of Hijikata and the evolution of his methods through his contemporaries and students, see Baird 2012.