PACKAGE TOUR
THE PACKAGE TOUR (2011)
Trying to fit inside a rice cooker at Nature of Nomenclature. Photo by Tai Cao.
Jai Arun Ravine: The Package Tour investigates renaming as it relates to consuming, integrating, reclaiming and rewriting gender and cultural signifiers. I renamed myself to affirm the process of accessing a more legible, authentic me, a process that involves reclaiming trans-masculinity inclusive of Thainess, and Thainess inclusive of trans-masculinity. I explore the ways I consume my identity (bubble tea, T-pop, YouTube, half-Thai pop stars, white rice) and how this consumption interacts with practices of tourism. This is the Airport set of the Karaoke Music Video shot from the Quickly Open-Top Sight-Seeing Bus operated by the Travel Agency inside a Goodwill in West Virginia that will transport me to the Mountain Village of my name in a Package Tour.
Original Text and Choreography by Jai Arun Ravine
Video Projection by Jorrit Poelen
* This piece was developed for “The Nature of Nomenclature: An exploration of re-naming within queer communities” at the Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, February 25-26, 2011. A condensed version of this piece was also performed for “The Ms Tang Tang Show” at the Buriel Clay Theater of the African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco, June 23, 2011. “The Ms Tang Tang Show” version of “The Package Tour” is viewable via an archived live stream beginning at about 13:30.
Questions?
Utilizing my time-travel device at The Ms Tang Tang Show
What does it mean to be a legible/authentic Thai person when I am luk kreung/half-Thai with no solid sense of lineage and trans/genderqueer? Or when even Dutch singer Christy Gibson can access what it means to be Thai?
What does it mean to be a legible/authentic trans person when I don’t (want to) pass and experience cultural silence around desire/hunger/sexuality as the biggest obstacle in the process of coming in to my gender? Or when the gendered world of Thai boy band drama provides both a model of masculinity and a place to insert my illegible queer desires?
What does it mean to be legible when my desire for Thai food/Thai iced tea/Thai language/Thai masculinity is also a white desire?
What does it mean to be authentic when my connection to Thai trans-masculinity is what I collage together from YouTube, tomboy lifestyle magazines and Thai milk tea? How is renaming myself and consuming Thai trans-masculinity through pop culture different from a kind of colonization called “tourism”?
What does it mean to be a fad? What does it mean to be what people are ordering, to go?
