KUBILAÏ KHAN INVESTIGATIONS: S.O.Y Oct 28, 9pm Studio Elsa Helsinki City Theatre Direction: Frank Micheletti Performers: Takumi Fukushima, Chiharu Mamya, Cynthia Phung-Ngoc, Dimitri Jourde, Laurent Letourneur, Frank Micheletti, Rui Owada, Vladimir Vaclaveck "To throw away is to forget, to pick up is to reflect and dream." (voodoo song) Avignon, one of the European Cities of Culture, is represented at the Trans Danse Europe 2000 festival by the multinational Parisian dance company Kubilai Khan Investigations and their performance S.O.Y. The company was founded in 1996 by dancers Frank Micheletti, Cynthia Phung-Ngoc and Ivan Mathis, who had previously been with Josef Nadj's company, a group of former circus artists and actors, and musicians, with the aim of establishing an identity of multiculturalism and plurality in the spirit of Kubilai Khan. The majority of the company members are originally from East Europe and Asia. The performance S.O.Y. is an inexhaustible marketplace of different art forms, a swap meet with art and imagination as the bartered goods. It is designed to open up new angles to the various art forms, their methods and the interaction between them by combining dance, circus arts, theatre, music and the latest technology. The themes dealt with in S.O.Y. are geographical distance, emigration and mass migration. The ethnic elements in the work reflect the ongoing process leading to ever-increasing interaction between cultures. Its quality serves as a warning against the dangers of conformity and uniformity. True interaction can never take place without the acceptance of otherness and the unknown, without the space for difference to exist. <<<