Bangkok Post – A unique take on Lanna dance

Khampha Dance will re-stage Fauwn Leb / Identity as part of the Bangkok Theatre Festival 2024, at Room 401, 4th floor of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Pathumwan intersection, on Saturday and Sunday at 1.30pm.

Created by two contemporary practitioners — Waewdao Sirisook and Ronnarong Khampha — the show highlights innovative aspects of the traditional Lanna dance form fauwn leb (fingernail dance), and its place in transforming contemporary and globalised Lanna culture.

The duo begin with the dance’s original form using traditional music and then incorporate a variety of musical genres to demonstrate their personal interpretation — by turns visceral, abstract, humorous and absurd — of fauwn leb in contemporary and improvisational dance.

Even though the show is not based on the “real” Lanna culture, it directly addresses how elements of “traditional culture” — in this case, the archetypal traditional northern Thai fingernail dance that now circulates throughout the Thai nation-state as well as its transnational marketing image — are manipulated at home and appropriated abroad for diverse cultural, economic and political purposes. Aspects of fauwn leb dance reach back into royal and colonial history and forward into the still-evolving trends of Thai and Southeast Asian exoticism employed by artists and entertainment presenters.

The dance is therefore originated by, taken from, and re-appropriated by artistic and folk cultural producers in the Lanna region of northern Thailand according to both local traditions, language and spiritual beliefs as well as popularised interpretations by outsiders. It becomes an art both “of” and “not of” the Lanna people.

The show was performed during the New Original Work Festival in Los Angeles and several venues in Thailand.

Tickets cost 280 baht and reservations can be made via forms.gle/zs6gk8WmGWmNgC119.

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