ENGLISH

Angkot Alien is a festival bus with no route. Jump on board with Rafaella McDonald and Natasha Tontey as the bus from Java tours time, space and dead end GPS routes to finally arrive in Melbourne. Angkot Alien is communal transport: a borderless vehicle in a heavily bordered country.
Using the common Indonesian Angkot van as a literal vehicle to explore the politics of labour across cultures, McDonald and Tontey play the roles of the Driver and Kenek, our entrepreneurial Angkot owners, infiltrating the city in their fully-hotted-up van that pulses with the sound of reggae mashed up with riot grrrl and instructional video aerobics.
Intimately exploring the politics of labour across cultures, this international collaboration sees the merging of costume, painting, performance and fiction to create connections and disconnections. What can cross-cultural friendships, journeys and experiences offer us in terms of improvisation and imagination? How fixed are the systems within which we live and work? Angkot Alien is a way to keep moving while embracing interruption, friction and precarity.

Angkot Alien was commissioned and developed through Next Wave’s Kickstart program for Next Wave Festival 2016. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Playking Foundation Asian Performing Arts Travel Grant. Thank you to Polyglot for use of van.