Across the wealth of “traditional” Asian performing arts, audiences are generally expected to know what they are watching. Take Japanese Noh (能) and its centuries-old codified technique that allows performers to convey entire emotional universes through minute, poetic gestures. A hand slowly raised to the face, fingers outstretched? That is weeping. A fan dropped with intention? Fury. But how would you know—unless you already knew? Even the word Noh itself comes from the Sino-Japanese for “skill” or “talent.” Across traditional forms, one might hence sus- pect, the stage is set for a parade of epistemic gatekeeping. Who decides which understanding counts—and through which know-ledge systems have these sensual modalities developed?

Into this storied terrain of form and format enters Tianzhuo Chen (陈天灼), ever the wizard of performing invented traditions—or, in his own words, working in his way of theatrical “DJing.” 1 For Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁師, he has teamed up again with long-time collaborator Siko Setyanto, channeling characters they recently have been engaging with in another work, Ocean Cage 2. Fol- lowing its threads of planetary storytelling, ritual presence, and memory unbound by borders or timelines, they once again open up an embodied space of ancestral invocation. If Ocean Cage was a maximalist maelstrom, then Moyang and Seaman are its introspective cousins. Gone are the moving image projections and floating object ecstasies of the earlier stage works. Instead, Chen sets the audience adrift in a deliberately self-limiting mise-en-scène, reveal- ing new facets of his fakelore reference aesthetic that con- tinues to poke holes in realist orthodoxies and monocen- tric belief systems. Staged across two interlinked but distinct parts (Moyang, Seaman), the work unfolds as a multi-day event, alluding to pre-modern modes of theatre-making in which performance was not a singular act but a temporal offer- ing. Think of the extended cycles of Indonesian Wayang or the multi-part Japanese Kabuki epics—dramaturgies stretched over days and designed to unfold like mythic time; layered temporalities that blur the boundaries be- tween act and afterlife, past and present, ancestor and sea- farer. The first spark of Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁師 was struck in Tokyo last fall, when Chen and Setyanto were invited to BENTEN, an experimental arts festival, which granted them access to perform on the Shinjuku Kabu- kicho Noh stage—a gesture far more than symbolic. Tra- ditionally bound by the “iemoto” (家元, lit. “family founda- tion”) system, which governs transmission through strict hierarchies of master and disciple, Noh venues are usually protected by layers of intangible heritage regulations and inaccessible to outsiders. It was a rare opportunity for the artists to engage with the spatial logic of its stage, which they transformed once again for the new Brussels version.

For this iteration, a fusionist temple takes shape, merg- ing the wooden and spiritual foundations of Noh with the Southeast Asian vernacular rumah adat, the traditional houses found throughout Indonesia, Setyanto’s cultur- al heartland. The influence of Southeast Asian forms on Japanese architecture remains an ongoing debate, but the common features of thatched roofs, raised floors and the practice of removing shoes before entering are hard to ignore. Hovering somewhere between quotation and mythopoetic invention, the present stage at Beursschou- wburg enlivens the idea of such an intra-Asian globalist dialogue, recalling not only the lived materiality of these forms, but also extending to their distortion—in how Non-European architectures were idealised, exoticised, or flattened into ethnographic spectacle in the colonial Expos of the 19th and 20th centuries. Inhabiting these ten- sions, Chen folds both idealisation and Verfremdung into the scenographic logic itself, allowing its contradictions to linger, unresolved. His sacred coexists with the scrappy: spray paint on cardboard and cut-outs, distantly reminis- cent of shadow puppetry, form the backdrop. Anchoring this constructed cosmos is the all-seeing eye of ADAHA, a recurring emblem in the artist’s visual registers. In keeping with his truly additive method, it echoes the Sanskrit adha, a meditative particle and linguistic hinge meaning “there-fore” or “moreover.” 3 Suspended above a Hokusai-esque wave and framed by fire—a symbol of transformation, pu- rification, and necessary destruction—it presides as idol, icon, and astral mascot.

Across both Moyang and Seaman, performer Siko Set- yanto moves through a series of embodied transformations, inhabiting the figures of the Ancestor, the Sun Moon God, and the Fisherman. They function as allegories—open, mu- table, and collectively resonant—gesturing not to a singular cosmology, but to shared imaginaries: the Ancestor as a vessel of intergenerational presence; the Fisherman as a seafarer of all oceans; the Sun Moon God as a celestial entity that transcends denomination. 4 In sonic dialogue, Kakushin Nishihara (西原 鶴真) plays the Satsuma Biwa 5 in the Tsuruta style (named after Kinshi Tsuruta 鶴田 錦史 6). Both grounded and spectral, this instrument serves more than musical accompaniment: it is yet another vessel, his- torically associated with narrative transmission and spiritual purification. Seaman, continues the spiritual transformation, with the Sun Moon God descending into the body of the Fisherman. For Seaman, Setyanto is joined by the Balinese experimental music duo Kadapat (I Gede Yogi Sukawiadnya- na and I Gusti Nyoman Barga Sastrawadi), whose staging of gamelan practice evokes a deep ritual dualism. In Balinese cosmology, metal instruments address the gods, while wooden instruments address the human world. Tradition- ally, these sonic realms remain separate—played in tandem but not in unison, maintaining the boundary between divine and mortal communication. Here, this boundary is gently experimented with, stretching the tonal grammar and ritual boundaries of the instruments into a fluid continuum.

As Tianzhuo Chen points out in conversation, in East and Southeast Asian cosmological and philosophical tra- ditions, the sacred and the everyday, the spiritual and the material, often coexist without formal separation. The an- cestral altar is part of the domestic household, the temple blends into the street. In this light, Chen’s artistic proposal reads as a ritual space that is performative and provisional, ephemeral and inhabited—a place of becoming rather than belonging. Let us think again about the stage—as for Chen, this iteration of Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁師 marks a return to the Black Box. Following on from recent series of im- mersive installations, he embraces the seated theatre, but not without twisting its framework, as he inserts a hybrid “Asian stage/house” that conventionally belongs to a very different spatial logic. Therein, Chen and his collaborators have crafted a dramaturgy of transmission—diffuse and flickering—that invites us to sense, not solve, what is being staged. The result is a performance that gestures, beyond both the sacred (fanum) and the profane (pro-fanum, literally “outside the temple”). It is a staging of what might be called the anti-profanum: a space expanding binary logics of inside and outside, sacred and secular, known and unknowable.

Freda Fiala, March 2025

Dr. Freda Fiala, a wayfarer between Performance and East Asian Studies, works at the University of the Arts Linz. Informed by stays in Berlin, Hong Kong, and Taipei, she writes on transcontemporary arts ecologies.