In January 2026, YDP launches Living, Rehearsing…, an evolving, genre-bending performance programme taking place throughout the building.

Living, Rehearsing… is conceived as a collaborative framework to test the possibilities of what YDP can be home to and how we might collectively reflect on the concept of rehearsal as a strategy for organising, reconfiguring and reimagining our lives as we venture into the unknown each day. Over the course of three months, the programme will invite an ensemble of artists from the fields of visual art, performance art, stand-up comedy, dance and sound to convene across four day-to-night events, where improvisation meets choreography. Each participant will offer an interpretation on the concept of ‘rehearsal’ and what it may mean to them, drawing on experiences of migration, contingency, navigating thresholds and channelling collective energies. The gatherings will also test a range of prompts and constraints set to explore different ways for audiences to explore the spaces around each performance, from simultaneous actions across multiple rooms, to moving through the building and experiencing collective resonances.

The opening chapter Soundings sets up an atmosphere where doubt and uncertainty become prompts for unpredictable interactions amongst artists and audiences. It is a collective probing of a void, a testing of things that elude our immediate perception, a tracing of the limits and a way to frame contrasting concepts of rehearsing and performing to examine possibilities before any firm direction is taken.

The artists included in Soundings appear both as distinct presences and as interdependent elements of a shifting ensemble. All of their actions evolve over six hours, encouraging audiences to wander through the rooms and corridors of YDP as active explorers. The result is an experience akin to a non-linear play. The sound of a cello reaches visitors as they turn a corner. A wax sculpture slowly melts in the conservatory. Moisture gathers and clears on the windowpanes. Bursts of laughter cut across the space. Pages of scores await deciphering as movements advance and recede in fits and starts. Aroma from a reimagined pie shop wafts out of the Artist’s Lab…Affinities and divergences accumulate: moments of harmony and unison give way to dissonance, while overlapping actions create a polyphony.

This first six-hour performance event in the series will feature Kelvin Atmadibrata, Liang-Jung Chen in collaboration with Kai Chareunsy, Hanako Hayakawa, Okkyung Lee, Jin Hao Li and Swilipino.

Between 20 January and 4 February, a rehearsal continues without performers. Residues from the performance remain present in the building. Throughout the YDP building, What Is Left Behind (Phase I), an evolving six-channel sound installation, extends the live performance programme by translating each event into lingering sonic traces.

What Is Left Behind (Phase I) features sound contributions by Kelvin Atmadibrata, Kai Chareunsy, Liang-Jung Chen, Hanako Hayakawa, Okkyung Lee, Jin Hao Li and Swilipino. Recorded by Andrej Bako. Remixed by Zhuo Mengting and Andrej Bako. Guest-curated by Zhuo Mengting, in collaboration with YDP curators Erin Li and Billy Tang.

Performance programme

Kelvin Atmadibrata

Alice is a site- and temperature-responsive performance that has been in slow-form development since 2019. Originally stemming from the artist’s incapability to understand a favourite song, it has grown through various phases into a journey of confusions, unclarities and unsolved mysteries. Celebrating this, the performance treats rehearsals as a series of unfinished and repetitive tasks and actions, while questioning if the curtain will finally call.

Performers: Kelvin Atmadibrata, Aksana Berdnikova, Lili Chin, Victoria Kosasie and Lili Muslihah

Liang-Jung Chen, ft. Kai Chareunsy

Ebb is to Flow as Wax is to Wane is a time-sensitive installation made and activated on site, centred on the shifting materiality of wax . Moving between solid, molten and evaporating forms as it is lit on fire, wax transforms through heat, gravity and time, leaving traces as it burns and disperses into the air. In the live performance, the artist constructs and deconstructs the wax structure. This new iteration of Chen’s continuously evolving work is accompanied by live improvisation from Kai Chareunsy, whose responsive sound is developed in dialogue with the work’s changing material states.

Production Assistant:Cameron Griffin

Hanako Hayakawa

Yūgi 遊戯 is inspired by Yūgi to Shoka (Games and Songs), a magazine published in Japan in the early 20th century to teach female students to dance. The magazine offered choreographies influenced by Western modern dance but adapted to the context of nationalist imperial Japan pre-World War II where its intent was to train the nation’s body and spirit. The work is also informed by Hayakawa’s long-term research project Mercurial Bodies, which reflects on the relationship between the body as it is seen, its subjectivity and agency and the frameworks that seek to define it. Based on the scores from Yūgi to Shoka, the work explores the potential to subtly destabilise structures of domination through playful, autonomous movements and attitudes resisting the forces that seek to control our bodies.

Dance research and performance: Hanako Hayakawa, Leah Marojević, John Shades and Yuri Shimaoka

Sound research: Hanako Hayakawa, Bela, Dove and Kazumichi Komatsu

Okkyung Lee

Cellist and composer Okkyung Lee will perform a six-hour-long improvised set with cello and portable speakers. She will use the sonic parameters of YDP’s building and the presence of other performers as both prompts and stage. Both acoustic and electronically processed, Lee’s shifting soundscape invokes a direct, live relation with the audience, the building, the surrounding and the event.

Jin Hao Li

Jin Hao Li invites viewers into his living room, as he constructs in real time a long durational test run of a new stand-up piece, Falling From a Moon – an introspective odyssey on the price of nostalgia and the struggle to move forward when anchored to the past. Performed on and off ‘stage’ intermittently, Li’s new material will evolve over a period of six hours. For a comedian, no two shows are ever the same – the work is never finished, and each performance is a rehearsal for the next. The interactions between Li and the viewers will reshape each test run as people move in and out.

Swilipino

Inspired by the cacophonic framework of Soundings, Swilipino sets up onsite to serve ‘Frankenfood’, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It plays with the notion of East meeting West and asks: How can two seemingly opposite cultures be respectfully merged through food when both are part of one’s heritage?

For Swilipino, cooking is a performance of connection and an opportunity to explore food as a bridge, a place where traditions can overlap and come together into something recognisable yet rooted in different cultures. ‘Frankenfood’ provides a social setting for reflection through a re-interpretation of a pie shop with distinct Filipino flavours.