1st Edition
Lives in Motion Celebrating Dance in Thailand
Lives in Motion celebrates dance in Thailand, focusing on the diversity of Thailand’s dance cultures and their place in today’s world. Giving voice to eminent artists and scholars on the complex roles that Thailand is pursuing for artful movement at home and abroad, the book provides key perspectives on Thai dance traditions and practitioners. It explores the many forms and meanings in contemporary dance, changing local traditions in the country, the evolution of Thai dance on the global stage, and hybrid features of the Thai dance world.
The book examines how hybridity has been integral to dance cultures in Thailand and discusses how they have actively adapted and negotiated their knowledge in relation to modernity and globalization. Developing new models, standards and sites for dance, movement and theater, dance in Thai has been advancing in innovative ways, whether it is to include fresh forms of skilled bodily movement or to expand in new arenas like tourism and online platforms. Similarly, old systems of training, which included artists’ homes, palaces, and temples, have been adapted into the new world of modern education, media, home schooling, and new community rituals.
A pioneering contribution on Thai performing arts, this volume examines contemporary Thai dance cultures in the local, national, regional, and global contexts. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of dance and performance studies, cultural studies, Southeast Asia studies, and art.
List of Figures vii
Contributors x
Foreword xiv
Acknowledgments xvi
1 Introduction: Dancing in Thailand 1
PORNRAT DAMRHUNG AND LOWELL SKAR
2 Remembering Contemporary Thai Dance with an Eye to Its Futures 17
SURAPONE VIRULRAK
3 Unseen Thailand: Exploring the Hidden Lives of Dance in Contemporary Thai Culture 31
PORNRAT DAMRHUNG
4 Lakhon Phanthang: Thai Hybrid Dance Drama on the International Stage in the Early 20th Century 47
PAKAMAS JIRAJARUPAT
5 Reimagining Classical Thai Dance for the 21st Century: The Evolution of Pichet Klunchun’s “No. 60” 65
LOWELL SKAR
6 A Glocalized Tradition: Worldly Currents of Nora in Southern Thailand 81
KANIT SRIPAORAYA
7 Made to Order: Corporeality and Community in the Contemporary Isan Dancing Body 97
TANATCHAPORN KITTIKONG
8 Preparing BFA Students for a Life in the World of Dance: Thai University Pedagogies 111
SUPHANNEE BOONPENG
9 Lanna Dance Now: Our Moves with Contemporary Northern Thai Performance Cultures 125
SARAN SUWANACHOTE, RONNARONG KHAMPHA, AND WAEWDOW SIRISOOK
10 B-Floor’s Moves on the Contemporary Stage 141
JARUNUN PHANTACHAT
11 My Improbable, Extraordinary West-East Dance Life 156
BENJAMIN TARDIF
12 Dance Dreams Realized: My Journey from a Bangkok Dance School to New York’s Dance Theater World (and Back Again) 171
NAPAT RODBOON
13 Artists’ Interviews 186
LOWELL SKAR AND PORNRAT DAMRHUNG
14 Glossary of Terms Relevant to Dance in Thailand 225
PORNRAT DAMRHUNG AND LOWELL SKAR
Index 237
Biography
Pornrat Damrhung is Professor of Dramatic Arts at Chulalongkorn University and Associate Member of the Royal Society of Thailand, specializing in contemporary dance cultures, community performance, and young people’s theater.
Lowell Skar teaches Global Cultural Studies at Chulalongkorn University, and focuses on how modern cultural life in Asia, including the performing arts, is both entangled in local embodied knowledge and engaged with transnational practices and imaginaries.
