Born in Osaka in 1970. Here are some of Yamashita’s major works; In The Poetry Reading, the performers introduce the books that are important in their life as dance. It Is Written There asks the audience to turn the pages of a 100-page book and watch the stage in turn. In It’s Just Me, Coughing, “inhale” and “exhale” signs and texts consisting of phrases from haiku that appear on a screen correspond with the body. A Stay in Yokohama is a voice diary of someone who is not sure about how to make a dance piece. Dancers confront the freedom and the restrictions of choreography as they stand on a swaying stage in The Sailors. In A Grand March he mutters about fragments of what happens in the world on a real railroad track. It Is Something Like a Garden creates a network of communication using dumped trash. Yamashita learns Balinese dance remotely on-line from a teacher in Bali, Indonesia, in Road to Evil Spirit. Sakyo-ku District’s Folk Dances is a pseudo-documentation of how the tradition is handed down. In GE14, he followed the election candidate in Malaysia’s change of power, so-called bloodless revolution, recorded and reenacted it. In the performance of Invitation, all gestures and speeches are possible only by gaining the approval of the facing performer.

Nhã Thuyên is a poet, writer, and editor based in Hà Nội, Việt Nam. For over two decades, her practice has primarily dwelled in writing and making books, while extending to public readings, performances and collaborative poetic exchanges. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and in English translation, including từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere) (2015), bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry) (2019) and đừng giấu cơn điên (don’t hide the madness) (2024). In 2014, she co-founded AJAR, a micro bilingual journal-press — an online and print poetic space with occasional small gatherings. Her work has appeared in venues such as Asymptote, Cordite Poetry Review, The Margins, Words Without Borders, Jacket2, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her poems have been translated into English, German and Dutch, and performed in various cafés, art spaces and at international festivals in the Asia-Pacific, the UK and across Europe. She is a recipient of honours including the 2022 Rotterdam Poetry International and the 2023 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship. Currently, she is engaged in practice-based research at RMIT University, while her next poetry collection, vị nước (taste of water), waits to see the moon.

Project Đẩy Sàn (PĐS) is a collaborative project based in Ho Chi Minh City that fosters learning, collaboration, and experimentation for emerging Vietnamese performance artists. It was founded in 2024 by independent artists & producers including Đoàn Thanh Toàn, Nguyễn Hải Yến (Red), Nhật Huỳnh-Vũ, Trà Nguyễn, with support from the Goethe-Institut Ho Chi Minh City. Literally translated as “pushing ground(s)”, Project Đẩy Sàn recognizes the scarcity of models, training opportunities, and methods, thus proposes a few tools to engage what’s available in critical manners.
PĐS consists of two distinct but complementary components: 1) Rèn (forge): a collaborative capacity-building workshop, and 2) Dựng (build): an incubation and showcase program for works-in-progress which offer Viet artists various channels to acquire performance-making tools and receive one-of-a-kind support in staging and presenting their performance to the public.
Over the past two years, PĐS collaborated with numerous international artists such as Sasapin Siriwanij (Thailand ), Mark Teh (Malaysia), Lina Oanh Nguyễn (Germany), Young Boys Dancing Group (Switzerland), and contact Gonzo (Japan) in various capacities—such as project advisor, workshop coordinator, artists, and co-producer.