How the ‘Emergence’ performance emerged in Bali

The body was red. Morale walked into the room painted head-to-toe in a dense color, a living glyph in a scarcely lighted room. In the middle of the floor seemed to be a small sea - made up of blue floorboards - as a place where he could go and swim in. Bare-chested, humble but charged, and moving as if movement were pulling him rather than the other way around.

This was the Emergence performance that we experienced in Bali during Silk Road Chapter 02 in May. Following up on this, I spent some time with the artist and director TJO to talk about how Emergence took shape, why it needed to be a live performance, and what it left behind – physically and mentally.

Movement as medium

A year and a half ago, during a shoot for his ongoing Diaries of Compulsive Obsessions project (artworks of raw and direct expression of introspection inspired by themes of mental health and the complexity of human experiences), TJO painted his studio entirely blue.

Important to know is that movement has always been present in the making of his art – he will ask sitters to not be static, make some gestures, loosen up, all in order to keep the body from becoming somewhat like a diagram. However, the endpoint had always been a still image.

On the blue floor that day, however, something happened to make that all change: the makeup melted off the models’ bodies and began to smear and pool everywhere. Red marks appeared where limbs had been or hovered on the blue set. These blotches were not designed as artworks, yet for TJO it suddenly clicked that they read as testimonies. “Here the body made its own record,” he says. And therefore the question changed for the artist: instead of suggesting motion inside an image, could he stage conditions in which motion left a form?

“There was always an act of movement in the making of my art, but the result was a still image. This time I wanted it to be about the movement.”

The Birth of Tragedy

TJO’s thinking is old-fashioned in the best sense: he likes frameworks, especially ones that make demands. He keeps returning to Nietzsche’s balance that the philosopher introduced in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), distinguishing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian – two aesthetic and existential impulses that interweave in art, myth, life, or basically just everything. The Apollonian (form, light, clarity, prophecy, restraint) holds the Dionysian (ecstasy, dissolution, rapture, dismemberment), so the chaos of life is there, but under control and ‘bearable’.

In Bali, the red figure carried the Dionysian charge. Morale didn’t want any choreography, asking only for a few anchor points. They were: an entry, a necessary collapse to the floor, and a contraction at the center to end. Everything between would be improvised. “He wanted no further preparation,” TJO says. “Wishing to be taken by movement.” And that choice matters, because it seems that ‘Dionysus’ here is not a metaphor for chaos but actually a method: relinquish prediction, accept risk, let the body do the thinking, and trust the process. In other words: just let the situation flow.

“I casted Morale because what he does is the most Dionysian thing I’ve seen. He lets himself be fully taken by movement and this sense of freedom is extremely special to witness.”

The Apollonian response in the performance arrived through RAM, an artist and long-time friend of TJO initially brought in to help with logistics and then, rightly so, ended up being a part of the work itself. After Morale’s dance improvisation, RAM turned to the blue canvas and ‘read’ what he had just seen and felt with paint. Making big smears first, and then pulling lines and figures out from it – translating a certain heat from the electric ambiance in the room. It was a second act of interpretation, in which Apollo did not silence Dionysus, but gave him the traces of a legible ‘afterlife’.

“I knew RAM could paint from nothing – without guides. So the idea became: a performance that leaves artefacts; then ‘an Apollonian hand’ that draws from those scratches.”

On feelings – that can derive from colors

Red-on-blue is a typical vocabulary for TJO, and not arbitrary at all. In his reading around psychology and mental health (which he speaks very openly about), TJO kept finding scientific “heat maps”: clinical images of disorder rendered as red hot fields against cool blue grounds. “When I saw that for the first time I thought: that’s my art but then science,” he says while grinning. “I’m drawn to the blue backgrounds and red intensities on top of it, the two entities both expressing a different sort of pressure.”

In TJO’s practice, blue stands for the inward drift – an “endless passage” with the color as abyss – and red is the archetypal impulse, the drive and the energy that presses through it. In Emergence, these colors did not change, since the artist has always believed in them instinctively, but something else did. “I was figuring out how to show the actual feelings that come with creation and from the performers within,” he explains. Therefore, leading up to this performance, TJO started trying to unlearn a certain internet reflex – the dissonant idea that he had to ‘signal fast’; i.e. to make images that easily cut through a social media feed. He researched how to be more sensible about showing emotions, and now understands that he actually has to let things in his work (situations, positions, postures, (facial) expressions etc.) be ‘longer’, lingering in a still, indescribable phase – “since that is where the full sensory perception and inner reflection take place.” He adds: “And the colors actually do most of the talking already, in that sense. I just had to listen more closely.”

For me, one of the strongest elements of the performance was actually the sensory space it occupied, so it feels like TJO understood how the audience could be able to ‘listen in’ as well.

“This performance helped me find the language I’d been circling for a few years now; my initial concepts weren’t wrong, I realized, but they still needed to mature with layers of emotional depth and slowness.”

How long can you sustain a state?

Turns out that, generally speaking, we might still not listen long - or carefully - enough though. After Morale folded into himself at center, the room held a clean silence. TJO, a bit anxious, broke it a beat early, starting the applause and later wishing he had let everything stand ‘still’ a minute - or two - longer. Its admission: Emergence [and performance in general] lives in how long you can sustain a state between forces – between the pull to frame or declare, and on the other side the wish to let the red body ‘burn’ a little longer on the sea of blue.

“I’m most interested in transitions. I don’t understand the state of things when they’re ‘in the state’. I only understand the motion.”

Looking back, TJO says: “This project has shown me something that I already embodied in the most part of my practice, but hadn’t fully grasped yet, and that is that I’m less interested in fixed states than in transitions. Not in the picture of a body, but the remains of its existence, of what came from it.” For the artist it feels like that is where he gets the best glimpses of something, because “every time I think I understand something and I make a still depiction of it, I look at it again later and get the feeling I was completely wrong about it.” Emergence is that claim made visible: moments are fleeting, always emerging into something else. And never again as they were, only as traces carried forward.

If Emergence taught me anything, it’s to pay attention. Look, listen, feel, and think closely. Catch the change. Because even in the gradual, moderate transitions, you never know exactly what the next state of being is going to be. I once heard someone [Jan Beuving, Dutch writer and comedian] say that you can actually never grasp the ‘now’, because as soon as you say ‘now’, there’s already a new ‘now’. So now, go on. Be in the present. Reset. Repeat.