Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
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Future Tense (2026)
A choreographed performance
~ 25 minutes
Future Tense begins with the desire for the future that animated many young nations between the late 1950s and the 1970s. This was a period when modernity appeared not only as technology, architecture, or transformation, but as a struggle for the rights to imagine oneself otherwise.
The performance stems from the 1964 New York World’s Fair and Osaka Expo ’70, yet does not return to this history as narrative. In the past tense, architecture became prophecy: nations staged not simply what they were, but what they wished to become. Within these monumental visions, the future was rehearsed at the body's intimate scale. Gestures of welcome, service, demonstration and presentation, often performed by women, quietly held the image of progress in place.
Future Tense loosens these gestures from their original functions, allowing them to drift into an abstract landscape of bodies, sound, light and moving shadows. Formations gather and dissolve; rhythms converge without becoming one; collective bodies appear momentarily coherent before revealing the instability within their form.
Tensed between admiration and mourning, Future Tense moves toward the future not as a destination, but as a repetitive cavity the body continuously learns, where velocity, discipline, and desire may survive the world.
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Video documentation of the first performance at ara contemporary, Jakarta, October 2026
Concept, Artistic Direction and Dramaturgy: Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Choreography: Nguyen Hoang Anh
Composer: Nursalim Yadi Anugerah
Dancers: Shalshabilla Siregar, Nadia Hersa Putri, Regina Audrey Ivana Zakariah, Niear Syahrani Putri, Vivian Aleyda Revalina
Costume: Ngài
Assistant: April Andriani
The Graham Foundation supported the research and development of the piece.
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