This event is for people ages 18+.

Performance by Waewdao Sirisook  

Directed by Sanhawich Meateanuwat

Lanna Dream is a 45-minute solo Lanna contemporary dance theatre performance that reflects the choreographer’s perspective on the recent historical progression of arts and culture in the Lanna region (northern Thailand). Within the context of the Lanna identity from the late 19th century to the present, Northern Thai/Lanna people have had an archetypal and stereotypical image imposed on them from outside and inscribed into their everyday surroundings and lives. This has also led to Lanna people inventing strategies for preserving and re-imagining their own regional identity in the face of intra-national hegemony. This has in turn resulted in an ambivalent practice by Lanna cultural producers and practitioners of self-commodification and exotification for the tourist gaze, especially since the 1980s when the “Lanna Renaissance,” a critical and commercial movement towards “Neo-Lanna” cultural identity, began. 

Through a series of dance and monologue sequences that gradually deconstruct the commodified image of the exotic and passive Lanna female, “Lanna Dream” directly addresses and critiques this cultural movement while also acting as a metaphor for larger issues around oppression, resistance, and self-knowledge. Writer, director, choreographer, and lead performer Waewdao Sirisook has been one of the leading artists of the Neo-Lanna movement for the last 30 years and fully embodies the show’s themes. She has created this performance not specifically as an ethical statement but rather to speak from direct experience as a Lanna cultural representative, who ambivalently desires the future of the Lanna people living their own “Lanna Dream.” 

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