Power Play
2020 · The Arts House, 20 Depot, and online

Power is not only the thing that compels us. It is also the thing that builds. That was Foucault's argument and it was the premise the festival started from. Power runs through education, government, religion, and work, shaping how people behave long before anyone gives an order. It produces coercion and conflict. It also produces the discipline that holds a society together and the authority that lets people change one.

Play is where this becomes visible. A game has rules, a winner, and a moment where someone tests what they are capable of against someone else. Players improvise, build strategy, and measure themselves against whoever is across from them. The pleasure of play is the pleasure of finding out how much power you have, and of being proved right.

Power Play set those two registers against each other, the seriousness of power and the whimsy of play. 20 International and 20 local artists working in performance, video, and visual art, asking who holds power now, who performs it, who is looking, and what happens when the rules are set by someone else. The questions ran across environmental collapse, gender, and geopolitical identity.

The festival was staged in 2020, when gathering was not possible. Half of it lived in physical space, half online. A show about control and constraint, made in a year when both were being renegotiated in public.

Co-produced with Jaxton Su and Jireh Koh.

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Role: Artistic Director, Co-Curator.