demons of good dreams
When Rirkrit Tiravanija invited me to participate in the Okayama Art Summit, a triennial in Japan that he was curating in 2022, I had not yet exhibited in any visual art contexts. My background was primarily in dance and theater (and law). At first, the invitation felt random, so much so that my first response was to check if he had mistaken me for someone else. Thankfully he hadn’t, which affirmed that even without a portfolio or pedigree, I had come to Rirkrit’s attention through embodied practice and critical inquiry that insisted on experience over object and relation over category.
I was asked to spend a week in Okayama in the spring prior to the triennial to conduct my research, to get acquainted with potential sites for my work to be installed, and to begin working with local performers. For the latter, Rirkrit asked me to teach workshops throughout the week. I was given a team of facilitators (including a translator and guide) to accompany me everywhere.
demons of good dreams ultimately became a multi-sited, multi-form work that unfolded across filming, installation, and live performance. One part of the video component was filmed inside the Manabe Equation House, an icon of Japanese architectural experimentation. Each of the sites in which a part of the work unfolded felt transitional—neither fully private nor fully public, and the dancers’ movements imprinted these thresholds with a ghostly presence. Nothing monstrous per se, just remnants of the strange, unresolvable residues of lived experience.
At the center of a sumo wrestling ring, a vertically hung monitor presented a looping video where dancers moved alone through disparate, liminal sites — the return landing of a stairwell, an atrium, and other threshold spaces, setting up a tension between ritual ground and mediated image, presence and absence, inviting viewers to consider how dance haunts, inhabits, and reconfigures environments.
At another site, within the barred enclosure of an Inari sessha on the grounds of Okayama Shrine, dual monitors were installed on each side of the altar. Here, two dancers appeared as a spectral offering, folded into the rhythms of devotional architecture. In addition to these installations, demons of good dreams also took shape as a hybrid live performance on the Okayama Summit’s opening day. Performed inside the former gymnasium of the repurposed Uchisange Elementary School, the dancers collaborated with Yutaka Sone’s band Untitled, in an hour long live improvisation, moving on and around Rirkrit Tiravanija’s marble Oil Drum Stage.
Rather than presenting an object, demons of good dreams staged a condition: a site where memory, dream, and corporeal trace converge.
Credits:
Directed and filmed by: My-Linh le
Assistant camera: Jardy Santiago
Produced by: Okayama Art Summit
Installation and Performance Sites: Okayama Jinja Shrine, Uchisange Elementary School, Hayashibara Museum of Art, Manabe Equation House,
Performers: Yasunari Kinjo, Yuko Hirai, Luna Kishimoto, Yuki (“Octo”) Nakazawa, and Tatsuki Nishikawa
Original Music Compositions: Alex “Pu22l3” Abalos and Secret Sidewalk
