January 8, 2026
Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay
Sydney Festival
Post Orientalist Express is a 90-minute romp through stereotypes, expectations, and clichés. In an atmosphere that borders on a dance club, world-renowned Korean choreographer and artist Eun-Me Ahn flips them back on themselves as often as the dancers’ bodies.
Visually extravagant and playfully subversive, Post Orientalist Express arrives in Sydney through Sydney Festival, supported by Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections program — an introduction to Eun-Me Ahn’s work that feels long overdue.
“Now that we are beyond ‘post,’ what comes next?” Ahn asks. That question is posed before the work even begins. As the audience enters, a lone performer, back to us, dressed head to toe in black, sits watching a projected montage of stereotypical Western depictions of the East. Periodically — and inexplicably — she falls from her chair. The image sets a tone of instability and inversion.
What follows is a pastiche of colour, glitter and spectacle. The work moves like an express train through costumes and cultural references, driven by Young-Gyu Jang’s percussive score drawing on the pulse of dance music. Eight dancers tumble, ripple, back-flip, heel-walk, Berezka-glide, and leap through a physical language that stitches the scenes together. But while much of the movement vocabulary will feel familiar to a contemporary dance audience, the puppet-like suspension and ease of landing of these dancers give it a particular lightness, unmistakably their own.
The costumes — all designed by Ahn — are an artwork in and of themselves: 90 in as many minutes — with tradition filtered through humour and satire. Part cultural défilé, part exhibition, I was reminded of Cao Fei’s My City Is Yours installations at the Art Gallery of NSW, of Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted worlds, and of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, where scale and illusion constantly shift. A giant soft panda bear appears, popping and locking. A balloon-bursting snowball costume closes the parade, finished with platform hot-pink shoes. In an era when dance has often pared itself back for reasons of taste, economy, or both, Ahn’s flamboyance is a rare delight.
The costumes’ colour and excess are met in kind by Jinyoung Jang’s brazen lighting and Taeseok Lee’s video work, which animate Ahn’s curtains of circular discs — each uniquely patterned — producing a dizzying sense of constant motion.
The most compelling sequences for me were Eun-Me Ahn’s own solos. As the author of the work, she carries a particular authority: the freedom to play and perform a private logic and story that remains her own — entrancing and entirely enigmatic. The title “diva” feels both apt and earned.
If anything bothered me, it was that I found myself waiting for a clearer line of commentary to emerge after the opening gesture toward the Western lens. Where was Ahn taking me? That question, however, proved moot. Post Orientalist Express is one of those works that pays its dividends over time: its imagery and ideas linger in the mind well after the curtain falls.
-Emma Sandall