The Performing Arts Exchange Program 2025_YPAM Direction

Ayu Permata Sari is a choreographer and dancer from North Lampung, Indonesia. She earned her Bachelor's degree in dance creation in 2010–2014 at ISI Yogyakarta, Indonesia and her Master of Arts degree at the same campus in 2014–2016. Ayu founded Ayu Permata Dance Project. Since 2020, Ayu has focused on reading and reinterpreting the position of women and men in the Lampung Pepadun tribe.

Hasyimah Harith is a Malay-Muslim female artist who performs, choreographs and teaches Malay folk dance. Hasyimah works with Malay traditions and eroticism, as a way to reclaim agency over her body. Her working methods involve strategies for boosting libido such as fantasy and intimacy. Her works aim to confront and overcome the conditioned shame and grief that is often attached to female eroticism.

Daniel Kok explores the politics of Spectatorship and Audienceship. His works have been presented across Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America; notably in AsiaTOPA (Melbourne), Venice Biennale, Singapore International Festival of Arts, and TPAM – Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama. As Artistic Director of Dance Nucleus (Singapore), he develops capacities for other artists and sets up trans-local partnerships across the Asia-Pacific.

Pin-Wen Su (he/they) is a Feminism Artist. Su's work challenges the heteronormative, revolving around notions of gender, feminism and nudity. Since 2013, he's researched and practised tactile culture. They take dance into social and political realms beyond its forms. Their recent work explores body politics with feminist approaches across disciplines.

Su's work has been presented in Dance Umbrella (London), Camping (Lyon), Zürcher Theater Spektakel, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), SummerWorks performance festival (Toronto), Liveworks Festival (Sydney), Melbourne Fringe Festival, Certamen Coreográfico de Madrid, National Theatre of Taiwan's Dancing in Autumn (Taipei), Weiwuying's Taiwan Dance Platform (Kaohsiung), Camping Asia (Taipei), Taipei Arts Festival, Taipei Nuit Blanche, We Island Dance Festival (New Taipei), and Intertidal Dance Festival (Chiayi), among others.

Su is Artistic Director of KuaBo Dance Theatre Company, resident at Chiayi Performing Arts Center. They hold an MFA in Choreography from Taipei National University of the Arts and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from NanHua University.

Working across Live Art, performance, dance and queer culture, River Lin is an artist and curator based in Paris and Taipei. He is Curator at Taipei Performing Arts Center for the 2023-2025 Taipei Arts Festival, and has initiated and led ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance), Camping Asia, and Curatorké: Performance Curators Academy. As an artist, his work has been presented by Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Centre National de la Danse (France), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and Liveworks Festival (Sydney), among others. He also serves as Co-Curator of the Indonesian Dance Festival (since 2022), Guest Curator of the 2025 Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, Artistic Collaborator at Something Great Arts Centre in Germany, and Curatorial Board at the academic program “Curating in the Performing Arts” by Paris Lodron University Salzburg in cooperation with the Free University of Berlin and Szenische Forschung Bochum.

Thanapol Virulhakul is a Bangkok-based choreographer whose work explores how the body registers, resists, and reveals social and political forces. With a background in film and photography from Thammasat University, he approaches choreography as a practice and strategy for questioning structure, unsettling perception, and cultivating collective imagination. His performances often challenge conventional frameworks, creating shared spaces of tension, relation, and perceptual shift.

His work has been presented internationally at festivals such as Theaterformen, TPAM, SIFA, Offene Welt Festival, GHOST:2561, and BIPAM. He has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) and was a fellow at the Theatertreffen International Forum (Berlin).

Early recognitions include the Korean-ASEAN Fellowship and the John F. Kennedy Center's dance program. Notable works include TRANSACTION, Hipster The King, Girl X, Happy Hunting Ground, The Retreat, and INTERMISSION.
In 2024, he founded Backroom – Ritual Studio in Bangkok for embodied research and alternative choreographic inquiry.

Sasapin Siriwanij is a Bangkok-based performing arts producer, curator, and artist. She holds both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in English from the Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University. For over a decade, Sasapin has built a distinguished career at B-Floor Theatre as a performer, director, and producer. Her work is deeply rooted in social critique, personal empowerment, and societal transformation. Since 2018, Sasapin has been the Artistic Director of the Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM). She also co-founded the Producers of Thai Performing Arts Network (POTPAN), reinforcing her commitment to the development of the local arts scene. In addition to her leadership roles, Sasapin is an independent performing artist and international touring producer.

Japanese presenters might have struggled to articulate what Osamu Shikichi has been doing—not only because they moved to Brussels during the pandemic, but also because their notion of “work” does not neatly align with traditional conceptions. ur phantom eyes, our crystallized pains, launched during their studies at P.A.R.T.S., has functioned both as a performance and as a platform for ideas they have long explored, including skepticism about ownership of one's own body, the violence of the gaze, and phantom pain. Their approach to these ideas does not take the form of a critique of alienation in hyper-consumerist society, but is indistinguishable from their pursuit of liberation within the regime. We expect this session to be an opportunity to have them unpack and share what they have accumulated and to reflect on contemporary performing arts' capacity to serve as a vessel for such explorations.

Stefa Govaart's works across the performing arts, critical theory and poetry. They regularly collaborate with artists including Bryana Fritz, Lydia McGlinchey, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, and Osamu Shikichi. With Marija Cetinić, Persis Bekkering and Tessel Veneboer, they initiated the Sex Negativity Research Group at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Govaart performed in works by Oscar Murillo, Eszter Salamon, Claudia Pagès Rabal, among others. Recent text publications engage with the work of artists Simon Asencio, PRICE, and Tobias Koch. Govaart holds MA degrees in Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam) and Performance Studies (New York University), having previously studied dance at P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), where they currently teach Writing and Performance Theory.