Post-Orientalist Express - Sydney Festival

Post-Orientalist Express

Ros Packer Theatre

Watching “Post-Orientalist Express”, I kept returning to the question of why this work was chosen to open the festival. It is a bold decision. Not because the piece lacks spectacle or ambition, but because it resists the kind of narrative clarity or gentle invitation often associated with an opening-night statement. Rather than easing audiences into the festival’s terrain, it announces itself through excess, density and refusal, asking spectators to submit to its terms from the outset.

Known internationally as the enfant terrible of Seoul, celebrated South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn brings her kaleidoscopic, world-renowned vision to Sydney in a rare opportunity to encounter one of Asia’s most influential avant-garde artists on an Australian stage. Performed by eight dynamic dancers and featuring more than 90 dazzling costumes - all designed by Ahn herself – “Post-Orientalist Express” transforms traditions from Okinawa, Bali and Manila into a vivid, audacious and satirical exploration of Asian cultures. An riot of colour, cliché and camp, the work confronts Western audiences with their own generalisations about the East, not to moralise but to reclaim agency through pleasure, exaggeration and self-awareness.

Before the performance begins, video samples of Orientalist imagery flicker inside a circle projected onto a scrim: historical dance footage, scenes from films, and a catalogue of familiar “exotic” tropes. These references frame the work’s central provocation, laying bare the inherited visual language through which Asia has so often been flattened and consumed. Rather than reproducing these forms, the work absorbs their kinetic memories, crafting a dance language where the traditional and contemporary collide. The work aligns with a global choreographic shift toward plural, non-hierarchical forms, where tradition, pop culture and contemporary technique sit in deliberate friction without deference to Western frameworks of legibility.

The work knowingly activates Western assumptions of “Asian” performance as traditional, coherent and culturally explanatory, before steadily destabilising them through excess, hybridity and refusal of translation. In doing so, “Post-Orientalist Express” reframes tradition not as something to be preserved or decoded, but as a living, mobile and self-determined field of pleasure and agency. As an immersive feast for the eyes and ears, the piece privileges sensation and assertion over legibility, trusting excess as both strategy and critique.

The production’s carnivalesque exuberance - its camp sensibility, collective release and visual saturation - evokes the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, where celebration becomes both a strength and a complicating force. From an Australian perspective - informed by geographic proximity and ongoing cultural exchange with Asia - the work invites consideration of how easily celebration can slide into fetishisation when excess and spectacle are foregrounded. “Post-Orientalist Express” is alert to this tension, using self-awareness and exaggeration to keep the question open rather than offering a resolved answer.

Seen within the wider context of Sydney Festival, the decision to open with “Post-Orientalist Express” stands as a deliberate articulation of curatorial values rather than a bid for consensus. This is an opening night that functions less as a welcoming overture than as a declaration of intent: foregrounding global perspective, cultural multiplicity and formal ambition, and signalling a festival more interested in friction than reassurance. In this light, the choice reframes what an opening gesture can be - not an invitation to settle in comfortably, but an insistence that audiences remain alert, porous and open to work that resists easy orientation.

Kate Gaul

Image: Wendell Teodoro