Shamanism meets Voguing meets Yishun. For Yishun is Burning, choreographer Choy Ka Fai adapts Singaporean ritual dances for a transcendent, queer solo on a multimedia stage.

On a quest for religious ecstasy, the audience dives into the notorious city of Yishun. Yishun is Singapore’s dystopian suburbia, where hybrid spiritual acts are perpetrated – a suburbia of darkness, a kind of antithesis to the gleaming clean image Singapore cultivates – Singapore has traditionally been known as an authoritarian city state, where society is ruled by control and in which freedom of speech is non-essential.

Yishun is Burning is a multicultural voguing dance party that traverses the boundaries of gender, race, and religion. Inspired by the Singaporean phenomenon of ritual reverence of deities in their struggle against evil. The performance will be led by Norwegian-Thai dancer Sun Phitthaya Phaefuang a.k.a. Aurora Sun, who enters states between ecstasy, trance and drag.

Sun Phitthaya Phaefuang is a rising star of the Southeast Asian voguing scene whose dance will be accompanied by a music performance coming from the Singaporean Malay band NADA (Rizman Putra and Safuan Johari) and Chinese drummer Cheryl Ong.

Thirty years after the iconic New York documentary Paris is Burning, this evening combines themes of a globalized world with old and new movement traditions and celebrates the search for (one's own) spirituality in dance.