[COMMA] dirty creatures - *SCAPE Singapore

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[COMMA] dirty creatures

Creative Arts

16 - 31 Jan 2027

*SCAPE Whitespace, L3

dirty creatures is a strange, intimate portal into a world inhabited only by the invisible, where truth is not a destination but an exquisite corpse of many tellings.

Three supernatural entities from unruly folkloric oral traditions of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia are embodied through a dance: Butoh, Vogue, Lengger. They play with the seductive beauty of ghostly traps before the film descends into a nightmarish blur — a descent that is also a homecoming. Drawing on camp and caricature, the film reframes what society calls low or terrifying as the very place where glamour, desire, and power can also exist.

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This film was created by artists from the *SCAPE MOV:MENT Lab residency.

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Ticket Price

Free!

dirty creatures is a strange, intimate portal into a world inhabited only by the invisible, where truth is not a destination but an exquisite corpse of many tellings.

ㅤ

This film was created by artists from the *SCAPE MOV:MENT Lab residency.

Wildcard members, check in via the *SCAPE Wildcard App and earn 5 points for every check-in! Not a member yet? Sign up now!

Ticket Price

Free!

Schedule

16 – 31 Jan 2027

Weekdays

1:00PM – 8:00PM

Weekends

12:00PM – 10:00PM

more about the film

dirty creatures treats the urban legend as a living story — and in Southeast Asia, where ghost stories are a guilty pleasure and an afterlife of past transgression, wherever there is violence, there are ghosts. Every telling is an invocation, a summoning — and the pleasure, the thrill, and the repetition of retelling is what turns the legend into an abject reality and also ensures its survival.

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To be a dirty creature is to remain in the wound — un-purified, unresolved, and unapologetic — unnatural by modern society’s standards, outside the order of karma and religion.

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The dirty creature is an unrepentant spectre of past regrets and unresolved traumas — an archive of Southeast Asia’s complicated and invisible historiography, carried in the bodies of three dancers who hold these complex tensions within their own bodies and practices.

Artists

XUE

XUE is a Butoh artist, organizer, and founder of the Singapore Butoh Collective. Their practice spans performance, film, and the underground — co-founding the Singaporean rave-Butoh platform Endless Return and a music label (which was awarded a T:>Works Per°Form Open Academy Fellowship), through with their collaborator artist-producer Mervin Wong they conceptualized a four-hour rave-theatre work fusing Butoh with improvisational movement.

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This year, XUE performed at and was part of the organizing team for the Asia Butoh Gathering in the Philippines (2026), and curated three independent Butoh residencies supported by Goethe-Institut Singapur, Dance Nucleus, and a third in Bangkok, Thailand.

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Through performance, facilitation, and teaching, XUE positions Butoh as both an artistic language and a radical ethos for a new generation of artists in Singapore.

Otneil Tasman

A young choreographer and Lengger from the Banyumas tradition, Otneil Tasman voices gender justice through art. Exploring the fluid gender values embedded in Lengger, they create dance works through traditional and contemporary approaches.

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Founder of the Jagad Lengger Festival, Otneil nurtures, advances, and excavates local wisdom. Their 2024 book, Lengger is my Religion, invites dialogue on gender, tradition, and spirituality.

Aurora Sun La'Beija / Phitthaya “Sun” Phaefuang

Aurora Sun La’Beija

Known as Asian Father Aurora La’Beija of The Royal House of La’Beija, Aurora pioneered Thailand’s ballroom scene in 2018. Founder of Thailand’s first Kiki house, House of Sun, Aurora teaches, judges, and performs globally. Aurora’s contemporary performance works draw from both ballroom and Buddhism. Through Buddhist practice, Aurora also volunteers with Thailand’s autism and Down syndrome communities.

Phitthaya “Sun” Phaefuang
Phitthaya “Sun” Phaefuang (b. 1988, Thai-French) is a choreographer whose work spans performance and film. He premiered Luk Kreung (2022) and Mae Baan (2024), and is associate producer, co-concept creator, and protagonist of 10s Across the Borders. Blending Buddhism, ballroom, Thai culture, gender theory, and kink, his practice embraces underground and Asian approaches to contemporary performance.

Lucas Haynes

Lucas Haynes is a Bangkok-based independent filmmaker and curator working primarily with analog film. Their practice explores experimental documentary, video installation, and interdisciplinary forms inspired by folklore, spirituality, and the textures of place. They run R.O.T-Lab, a community-focused darkroom and public lab for 16mm and Super 8 film. For Lucas, filmmaking is a way of pausing, listening, and staying in touch with the world.

Antiwira

Antiwira emerges as an experimental sonic art entity from Singapura-formed in 2018, working covertly at the intersection of cinematic sound design, drone minimalism, and doom laden atmospherics. Practices that center upon long-form, immersive works that dissolves the boundaries between music, performance and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Tysha Khan

Tysha Khan is an artistic force whose practice centres around finding simple ways to present truth in order to facilitate understanding. Known for her versatile acting and powerful writing, her career defies easy categorisation, spanning multiple disciplines, languages and creative media. In 2025, she won Best Performance at the 36th Singapore International Film Festival for her role in BUAH (FRUIT) by Jen Nee Lim, for which she also wrote the Malay dialogue.