Multitude of Peer Gynts

The jury's
conclusion

“Multitude of Peer Gynts” is a project initiated by director Yudi Ahmad Tajudin and dramaturg Ugoran Prasad from Teater Garasi in Indonesia. The project is an inter-Asian project where artists from as diverse countries as Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam and Sri Lanka will look into the fourth and fifth act of Henrik Ibsen´s “Peer Gynt”, creating a collaborative piece of performance. In these two acts, we find a disillusioned Peer traveling, trying to find his way in the world: through corrupt business and by re-imagining himself in new personas over and over again. In the last act of the play, we follow him in search for himself as he returns to his place of birth. From this platform, the project will spring thematically, exploring issues like mobility and immobility, fear and anxiety and the idea of “home” from the perspective of diverse Asian corners. A collective devised work, searching for a multitude of Peer Gynts of the Global South, will be created. The project aims to add up numerous approaches, taking in the artists´ personal stories and the context of the cities involved. Individually and eventually collectively, they will stage their life stories: Peer Gynts, the multitude life story. The jury finds great promise in the project's cross cultural approach and the ambitions of the artists, looking at the legendary global vagabond of Ibsen, Peer Gynt, as a framework for stories on mobility, border-crossing, drifting and homelessness.

About the project

“Multitude of Peer Gynts” is an inter-Asian (Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam and Sri Lanka) contemporary theater collaboration project. Decrypting Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt”, the project explores the machination of fear and anxiety in the context (and frictions) of new Empires as experienced in contemporary Asian spaces.
The project looks at Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” as a courageous tactical manual of global mobility, border crossing, drifting, and intentionally getting lost in the fear-mongering, anxiety-inducing world from the perspective of precariat subjects. That is – getting lost in the search for a new sense and a different kind of home.
“Peer Gynt” gestures toward the possibility of Peer Gynt’s imaginary that consists of a multitude of subjects alike that were forced to travel the world for various political, social, philosophical, and/or personal causes. With this possibility, the project is aimed to begin uncovering the larger picture of the overlooked, tactical world-map, where all these Peer Gynts came from. Looking at the shrinking but perpetually reterritorialized world from viewpoints of the diverse Asian corners, the project seeks to discover new intersections along the pathways of Asian precariat’s, those who navigate through fear and anxiety as engineered by the invisible and ubiquitous new Empires of our contemporaneity. 

Initiated by Yudi Ahmad Tajudin (director) and Ugoran Prasad (dramaturg) of Teater Garasi, Indonesia, the project is structured by applying the collective’s devising approach in producing experimental theatre works for the past twenty-five years. Built through a series of collaborative workshops, the project is joined by a few of the most daring Asian contemporary artists today, in the likes of Takao Kawaguchi (performance artist-dancer-choreographer), Yasuhiro Morinaga (sound artist-music composer), Micari (actor-performer), all from Japan, Venuri Perera (choreographer-dancer) from Sri Lanka, and Nguyen Manh Hung (visual artist) from Vietnam. Besides working with the key artist-collaborators above, the project will also invite and collaborate with local artists of the respective city/country wherever the project eventually arrives, to rework and devise a new understanding of the multitude of Peer Gynts in a more socially grounded and culturally contextual approach.