Naked performers lined in paint roll round atop filth and foliage. Menacing sculptures dangle from the ceiling and partitions. The costumes have a beastly high quality. At one level, a stream of feathers are strewn throughout the stage; at one other, pink petals float down from above. That is Trance, an immersive psychedelic expertise impressed by an eclectic mixture of influences from digital music and rave tradition to Buddhism, cartoons and Japanese Butoh dance theatre.
When 39-year-old Chinese language artist and director Tianzhuo Chen first had the thought for Trance in 2019, it was to accompany a solo exhibition of his work at M Woods Museum in Beijing. The preliminary end result was a three-day efficiency with every fraction spanning 12 steady hours. It has since been whittled right down to a single 12-hour-long manufacturing. This month, the present is on in London as a part of the Southbank Centre’s ESEA Encounters, a sequence celebrating east and south-east Asian arts and tradition.
It would function considerably of a creative homecoming for Chen, who did his undergraduate and grasp’s levels at Central Saint Martins and Chelsea School of Arts, respectively. “London undoubtedly influenced numerous the membership a part of it,” he says over video name, wearing a easy black T-shirt and clear-frame glasses. “Once I was residing within the UK, I used to be fairly younger and I skilled numerous its membership tradition.” Since graduating in 2010 (and returning to China for some years after), he has made a reputation for himself by bringing the sacred and the subcultural collectively.
In 2015, Chen based the music-art-dance collective Asian Dope Boys, which earned a cult following for reveals resembling each spiritual ceremonies and avant garde techno events. In 2018, 20 members toured Europe acting at venues together with London’s Barbican, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Säule, an experimental area at Berlin’s iconic membership Berghain.
He has lived in Berlin for the final three years. In 2024, on the metropolis’s HAU efficiency area, Chen premiered Ocean Cage, a video and efficiency piece impressed by tales from Lamalera. The fishing village in Indonesia is likely one of the final communities on this planet the place conventional whale-hunting nonetheless exists – the locals counting on it for each sustenance and as a part of their non secular beliefs. “As a result of it’s a volcano island, it doesn’t develop something, in order that they should go whaling for his or her survival,” he says, explaining that they consider that their ancestors had been reborn as whales as a way to feed the village.
With Trance, Chen wished to carry folks from completely different disciplines collectively. “Musicians, performers, professionals, non-professionals, all of it,” he explains. Six years on, the genre-bending theatre-rave has been carried out around the globe. The most recent model might be divided into six two-hour chapters, every reflecting on Buddhist themes, particularly the thought of reincarnation, which in its cosmology has six realms: gods, demigods, people, animals, hungry ghosts and hell. “At first, they’re acting from a picture of hell,” he says of a sequence additionally referencing a sequence of Fifteenth-century Japanese work that discover the completely different phases of loss of life. “A fantastic lady dies, her rotting corpse is eaten by canines and turns into mud on the finish,” he says. For him, the primary chapter feels significantly meditative. “It comes from the Buddhist concept of the way you deal with your physique, and that there’s nothing left apart from flesh while you die.”
By the ultimate chapter, Trance shifts into what Chen calls a “collective rave” and takes a extra optimistic flip. “The final half is essentially the most human; everyone seems to be dancing on their very own,” he says. “It’s the half most strongly associated to membership tradition, to dancing, to the expression of the person.” It’s additionally the purpose within the efficiency when these watching get most concerned. “A lot of it’s sharing the second with the viewers,” making them part of “this ritual and ceremony, a therapeutic and cleansing-type second”.
Trance doesn’t comply with an express narrative, permitting it to evolve because it strikes by means of continents and venues. “It’s a bit of bit site-specific, because the stage by no means appears to be like the identical,” he says. He factors out that some venues are well-equipped, some provide out of doors area, and a few are merely dilapidated buildings. However, because of this, he by no means will get uninterested in displaying it. “Little adjustments and completely different situations preserve this work progressing as a result of it has to,” he says. On the Southbank Centre, “we’re making a particular design for it, and we’re utilizing their huge theatre room to display Ocean Cave”.
He has additionally invited the Japanese dubstep musician Takeaki Maruyama, identified professionally as Goth-Trad, to carry out. “I went to numerous dubstep events once I was in London earlier than a number of the legendary dubstep golf equipment closed down, so now feels just like the time to embrace it,” says Chen.
It’s not each theatre manufacturing that may additionally double as a 12-hour rave. “I get numerous suggestions,” says Chen. “Folks say it’s one of the best efficiency ever … they really feel healed, they really feel cleansed, they cried, all these emotions. After which some folks actually don’t prefer it! All this robust emotion is what I recognize. You don’t have to know the story or have any background data – the way you emotionally relate and join with the piece is an important factor to me.”
