SoftMachine: The Return

To understand SoftMachine: The Return, you first have to step into a time machine and travel back ten years. SoftMachineis a living archive of contemporary Asia – a constellation of bodies, stories, and movements. In this long-term project, Singapore-born choreographer Choy Ka Fai explored the continent’s choreographic landscape. As a fellow traveller and friend, he combines documentation, encounters and dance of four choreographers into a poetic reflection on time and movement.

Ten years later, with SoftMachine: The Return, he now curates a shared desire to grow old together – to repeat oneself with slight variations and to reopen earlier questions. The body becomes a site of knowledge: dance is not a metaphor but a form of thinking in its own right – an embodied practice of navigating and inhabiting life under power.

In Hanover, two of the four works will be presented: The Gonzo Prophecy by Yuya Tsukahara / contact Gonzo (Japan) and Rendezvous with the Ancestors by Rianto (Indonesia).

The Gonzo Prophecy is an audacious attempt to regenerate Yuya Tsukahara as a “metahuman” through technological means. Due to the challenges of balancing work, family, and private life, Yuya himself will not be travelling to Hanover; in his place, Choy Ka Fai will appear on stage. An experiment in dance notation, filmed documentation, and live action on stage, this performance is both a biographical survey and a gesture of digital reinvention – a project that questions the boundaries of dance and interpretation, absence and archive.

Rendezvous with the Ancestors is an intimate portrait. Through his dances, Rianto negotiates the search for love, confronts gender norms, and reflects on the significance of tradition in contemporary Indonesia. His movement vocabulary weaves together elements of various traditional Javanese dance forms, with a particular focus on Lengger — a folk dance from the Banyumas region in Central Java in which male dancers embody female roles. This traditional yet subversive art form challenges the construction of the body and gender. Through Rianto’s practice, Lengger is reinterpreted as an expression of queerness, cultural heritage, and an embodied archive.

Choy Ka Fai is an artist from Singapore living in Berlin. His multidisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of dance, media art, and performance. In his work, he combines research journeys, pseudo-scientific experiments, and documentary performances to reinterpret technologies and narratives, and to develop visions for the future of the human body. Since 2019, Choy Ka Fai has been developing the CosmicWander series, which explores shamanic dance cultures in Asia and encompasses performances, exhibitions, and VR works. His works have been presented at the Singapore Art Museum, Sadler’s Wells (London), ImPulsTanz Festival (Vienna), and Kyoto Experiment (Japan), among others. Choy Ka Fai was artist-in-residence at tanzhaus nrw (2017–2019) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2014–2015). He studied Design Interaction at the Royal College of Art in London.