Explorers – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

BERLIN – In a scene from his video installation “The Wanderer”, the artist Choy Ka Fai, who has traveled thousands of kilometers to a spiritual gathering near the city of Ulan-Ude in Siberia, kneels at the feet of a shaman, his head bowed, eyes closed. A shaman’s assistant introduces Choy.

“He’s from Singapore,” says the assistant. “He is a supernatural dance researcher.”

Choy, who lives and works in Berlin, took on this title when developing “CosmicWander: Expedition”, an ambitious, immersive exhibition that arose from his research on shamanic dance practices across Asia. Presented for the first time by the Singapore Art Museum, where it opened in January, the exhibition can be seen until August 22 as part of the annual Tanz im August festival at the KINDL Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

In the center of a large gallery that is shown on six screens, “The Wanderer” circles a vibrating platform with a pink carpet on which the audience sits. Its five chapters correspond to the five countries Choy visited over 18 months: Taiwan, Vietnam, Russia (Siberia), Singapore and Indonesia.

The 42-minute work begins with a 3D game prototype inspired by his time in Taiwan – where he took part in a nine-day pilgrimage for the Taoist sea goddess Mazu – and then switches to documenting ghost channeling rituals, with the text providing some insight into their complex story. In addition to other video and costume pieces, the exhibition contains interviews with religious practitioners from “The Wanderer” on topics such as the origins of some shamans and their daily work. (One is a cook, another is a tour guide.)

Trained as a video artist and with a Masters in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art in London, Choy, 42, often explores the relationships between technology and the body. His works, which can have a satirical edge, have been published by Sadler’s Wells in London, ImPulsTanz in Vienna and earlier editions of Tanz im August. This year he is part of a stripped-down version of the Berlin festival, which offers a mix of indoor, outdoor, live and online events: an effort to remain flexible for live performances in a precarious time.

“This hybrid was very important to us,” says Andrea Niederbuchner, curator and producer of Tanz im August. “We really wanted to do something that we don’t have to cancel.” If everything goes according to plan, Choy’s “Postcolonial Spirits”, a stage work that deals with the Indonesian trance dance form dolalak, will be premiered on Thursday at HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

“CosmicWander” is not the first project that Choy is leading through Asia; for “SoftMachine” (2015) he interviewed more than 80 independent dance artists in five Asian countries. In our most recent interview, he spoke frankly about his position both as an insider – “an Asian who is going to Asia,” he said – and as an outsider who is sometimes viewed with skepticism. A work that he presented at the Taipei Arts Festival last year under the umbrella of “CosmicWander” drew the accusation of cultural appropriation.

“That is the eternal anthropological question,” says Tang Fu Kuen, the artistic director of the Taipei Festival, who also comes from Singapore and works with Choy as a dramaturge. “How can an outsider enter a foreign culture and see it with new eyes, different perspectives?”

“He’s not exploitative as people think,” added Tang. “They think, ‘Ah, he just walks around, enters different countries and takes himself away from the culture.’” But from Tang’s perspective, Choy’s work is more about honoring and learning from those he meets. “It is always attuned to its own understanding while being respectful and loyal to the voices he encounters.”

Before the opening of “CosmicWander” at KINDL, Choy took a break from installing the show to talk about his path as an artist and where his wanderings have led him. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

What was the first thing that moved you to dance and work with your body?

I studied video at the art school and later did theater performances, working a lot with dancers and musicians. I’ve drawn more and more to dancing because I always find a problem with language. It’s ironic though because there has been a lot of talk in the last 10 years of my dance work.

But it really started when I went to London in 2010 to study design. I left my comfort zone and everyone I worked with. Back then I was playing with muscle sensors and only had myself, my laptop, and a few sensors. I became like a DIY scientist in the bedroom electrocuting me and trying to stimulate muscle movement.

You describe yourself as an artist in exile. Why did you leave Singapore?

I was exhausted from the infrastructure there. In order to meet certain funding requirements, I had to produce and produce. There was no time to think. I went to have more headroom.

Her work “SoftMachine” focused on independent dance artists in Asia. What led you to shamanic dances from there?

It started with a piece called Dance Clinic in 2017. I was working in West Papua [on the island of New Guinea] with a folk dancer trained in contemporary dance. I was playing with this brain wave sensor and had the question of what happens to the brain wave when you go into a trance, when the body becomes possessed or when it enters a heightened state of consciousness.

I started to wonder if I am putting this motion capture sensor on top of a shaman and the god is coming into the body while he is performing this dance ritual – if I record this digitally, does that mean I am recording the dance of God? This was basically the opening line of my suggestion for “CosmicWander”: What would happen if I could digitize this immaterial divine presence? It expanded from there.

One of the rituals you attended for “CosmicWander” took place in Singapore. Did you learn something new about your own country?

In Singapore I saw this mixture of Chinese and Indian shamanism, Taoist and Hindu. The nuances are so interesting. You can actually put this Indian flower garland on top of a Chinese god. When I saw this I thought, why are artists in Singapore so afraid to express themselves? These shamans freely express whatever is possible.

I came up with the theory that religious practitioners in Singapore are more liberated than artists. Because artists worry about censorship or self-censorship. The arts in Singapore are heavily subsidized by the state; Many artists survive with government funding.

Do you think they are afraid to criticize –

They fear that if they take a wrong step, they will lose their funding. But nobody knows where the line is. There are cases when the government or [arts] Council believes your art is having a negative impact on the people of Singapore, they will stop your tax dollars.

Are you a religious person yourself?

I am Christian. I believe in Jesus. But I stopped going to church. That’s a different story.

Somewhat more personal: Before I went for a walk with the sea goddess [in Taiwan], I was in a bad mental state.

What happened?

It was the low point of my private life. I had just broken up with my partner. We were together for almost four years. That moment didn’t make me believe in all of the things that I used to believe in.

I’ve already researched them all [for “CosmicWander”]. Then this happened and I wasn’t sure if I should continue to be an artist. Then I thought, “I got the funding, so I’ll go and go with God.” That’s why I picked myself up. And the experience was quite transformative, mentally and physically.

Has “CosmicWander” restored your belief in being an artist?

It restored my belief that there are many wonderful things in life that I have yet to experience. I think that’s an easy way of putting it.

Tim Severin, a British adventurer who meticulously mimicked the journeys of real and mythical explorers such as St. Brendan the Navigator, Sinbad the Sailor and Marco Polo for 40 years, died on December 18 at his home in West Cork, Ireland. He was 80 years old.

His daughter Ida Ashworth, said the cause was cancer.

In May 1976 Mr. Severin left Ireland on his boldest journey: After St. Brendan, a 6th century monk followed, who is said to have undertaken a spectacular journey from Ireland with a group of other monks across the Atlantic to the “Promised Land” in one Leather wrapped boot.

St. Brendan’s was a seaman who spread the gospel while traveling in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. If the story of his trip to America were true, he would have beaten Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus by centuries.

After studying a travelogue – in a medieval Latin text that was written many years later with the title “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” or “The Journey of Saint Brendan the Abbot” – Mr. Severin put together a team of designers and craftsmen who helped him build a ship. The 36-foot two-masted oak and ash boat was covered with a quarter-inch thick ox leather.

The boat’s small crew, named Brendan, took off from Brandon Creek on the Dingle Peninsula on Ireland’s west coast. They sailed north to the Hebrides and west to the Faroe Islands on a course to Iceland. Day after day, whales that stayed near the boat visited; Mr. Severin thought they might have mistaken the boat for another whale.

Their arrival in Reykjavik in August 1976 enabled them to investigate the condition of the Brendan. After scraping barnacles off, they found that the leather had held. But because of pack ice, which would make navigation impossible, the crew encamped the Brendan and returned home to wait for better conditions.

When the crew went back on board the Brendan in the summer of 1977, they went to Greenland, where they had to cross the Denmark Strait, a dangerous canal.

“We knew that this would be the actual test of the boat,” said Severin in a 2012 lecture at Gresham College in London. “It was inevitable that we would get terrible weather in the Strait of Denmark. But we made a commitment that there was no going back. “

The Brendan survived the strait, but ice prevented landing in Greenland, and the Brendan sailed around them. But soon they were shrouded in fog – no one responded to the boat’s distress signal – and then slowed down by melting patches of ice in the Labrador Sea.

On June 26, 1977, the Brendan finally arrived on the coast of Newfoundland.

The purpose of the trip, he said, “was to show that the Irish monks’ technology was able to reach North America.” He added that he could not be certain that St. Brendan and his crew had sailed to North America, only that it could have.

Mr. Severin, who funded his adventures with book advances and other sources, wrote The Brendan Voyage, published in 1978, about the trip.

A review of the book in The Guardian called the trip the “most remarkable sea voyage since Thor Heyerdahl to prove that a balsa raft can cross the Pacific”.

Mr. Severin was born Giles Timothy Watkins on September 25, 1940 in Jorhat, Assam, in northwest India, where his father Maurice Watkins ran a tea plantation and his mother Inge (Severin) Watkins was a housewife.

Tim’s wanderlust was sparked by his early years in India – where he said in a 2015 interview on his publisher’s website: “The entire family environment consisted of living and traveling in distant, often exotic places.” And it grew up at boarding school in Tonbridge, Kent, England, where he read adventure books that fired his imagination.

He took the surname Severin to honor the maternal grandmother who looked after him in England while his parents were in India.

He holds degrees in history and geography from Oxford. While he was still studying there, he and two other students followed Marco Polo’s caravan route on motorbikes in 1961: They started in Venice, then traveled to the Chinese border in northwest Afghanistan, down the Grand Trunk Road in India and ended the trip in Calcutta.

The journey led to his first book – “Tracking Marco Polo” (1964) – and a career of adventure. To explore the stories of the fictional seafarer Sinbad the Sailor, Mr. Severin sailed in a replica of an Arab sailing ship from Muscat in Oman to China. To follow the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, as well as that of Ulysses, he traveled in a replica of a Bronze Age galley.

His other adventures included riding with Mongolian nomads to explore the legacy of Genghis Khan. Tracing the path of the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace through the Spice Islands in a Prahu, a kind of sailing boat; and see if there ever was a white whale like Moby Dick.

In his review of “In Search of Moby Dick” (2000) in the New York Times, W. Jeffrey Bolster wrote: “Severin works at the intersection of imagination, action and myth and is as ripe as any other place for a miraculous White to find whale. “

He wrote more than 20 books – Reports of his travels and historical novels based on his expeditions.

“To write about my own travels, I have to be sharper, more precise and clearer to tell what happened,” he said in an interview on his publisher’s website when his 2016 novel “The Pope’s Assassin” came out. “In contrast, writing historical fiction is a looser, more impressive process that stimulates the imagination and allows the plot to go its own way.”

On his last great trip, he searched for the true origins of Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe on islands where shipwrecks occurred, as well as in Central and South America. His book “In Search of Robinson Crusoe” was published in 2003.

In addition to his daughter, his wife Dee (Pieters) Severin and two grandchildren Mr. Severin survive. His first marriage to Dorothy Sherman ended in divorce.

Mr Severin’s first wife – a specialist in medieval Spanish literature – played a role in his decision to recreate the St. Brendan’s expedition. While reading The Voyage of St. Brendan, she told Mr. Severin that the story contained far more practical details than most medieval texts.

“It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits,” he recalled when she told him in “The Brandon Voyage”. “It carefully describes the progress of the journey, the time and distances and so on. It seems to me that the text is less of a legend than a story that embroidered a firsthand experience. “

Mr. Severin soon created his own legendary story.