The Ghost Will Take Us by the Hand

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s The Ghost Will Take Us by the Hand is a new EMPAC commission that blends performance, video, and sound. Built on an inversion of the theater and its usual mode of address, the work unfolds in, over, and around the traditional fixed seating of the auditorium, with the audience seated on the stage. Video appears on clouds of fog; the performance overtakes the playhouse as its architecture pulses with light and sound. When the empty house of the theater is gradually seized by an atmospheric presence and choral score, a single dancer emerges within and above the rows of seats, drawn from this charged zone—as if a glitch has transmuted image into flesh.

Arunanondchai integrates performance into his live and recorded works. His investigations into animistic afterlives and spiritual technologies in Southeast Asia span the sacred and profane. The Ghost Will Take Us by the Hand takes cues from Asian horror films, using atmosphere—sonic, choreographic, visual, spiritual—as a primary medium for performance. The work disorients spectatorship and tests the boundaries between film and live action. Arunanondchai asks, What happens when ghosts haunt a place we think we already know? Are we merely watching—or are we instead witnessing, absorbing deep pasts and projecting new possible futures? After the performance, the stage shifts to present an installation of the video Unity for Nostalgia—a work that extends the questions of the performance, drawing on strategies also used in the performance such as thermal imaging and atmosphere. The work reflects on the power of historical myths and ancestral stories to shape experience in the present.