Post-Orientalist Express

South Korean choreographer and director Eun-Me Ahn begins this stunning satirical circus with animations of what the western eye sees as traditional Asian cultures – the precise and slow gestures, the still subservience, the enigma of the East.

Edward Said, influential author of Orientalism (1978), would know the cliches, and probably smile at how Ahn and her seven dancers deconstruct these traditions and replace them with new cliches, high camp and post-modern. 

Sheathed in trains of cloth, figures are remade into larvae, a gormless panda, or limbless beasts and other shape shifting fantasies.  To Young-Gyu Jang’s tech music, entrancing and surprising, the dancers run and leap across each other, perfectly paced and in the most beautiful every changing costumes (all 90 designed by Ahn).

The dresses and materials are sweeping and sumptuous, a feast of colour strikingly lit by Jinyoung Jang, and inventively drawing on traditions in Okinawa, Manila and Bali and her background in Korean shamanism.  

Ultimately, the androgenous dancers begin to share a smile and relish when the audience feels free to laugh and, maybe, get the joke.  While not highly original, the choreography highly kinetic, pausing only for Anh’s last entrance dressed tightly in black satin emblazoned with a dragon, like some old James Bond villain.  She delights in, literally, smashing through these cliches.  

Sydney Festival’s new artistic director Kris Nelson made a good choice to open the 50^th festival with this audacious and viscerally enthralling show. It’s just right for Sydney, even if its title, the Post-Orientalist Express, while suggesting speed, also hints at something more insightful and explanatory.  Just leave that thought at home.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Jean-Marie Chabot