Isaac Chong Wai at Playground 2025: Live Arts Festival
M Leuven and STUK presented Playground 2025, the annual festival dedicated to artists working at the intersection of performance and visual art. Taking place from November 13 to 16, 2025, the festival brought together performances, installations, films and choreographic experiments, offering a platform for practices that push against disciplinary boundaries and propose new ways of engaging with contemporary reality.
Curated by Eva Wittocx, Lore Boon and Steven Vandervelden, the programme brought together artists who explore new languages of movement, intimacy, vulnerability and perception.
This year’s edition highlighted the Belgian premiere of Isaac Chong Wai’s performance Falling Reversely. Working with performers of Asian descent, Chong investigates movements of falling caused by physical violence, transforming them into acts of collective resistance. Drawing on CCTV footage of Asian individuals who collapsed as a result of assault, the performers slow down and reverse the motion of falling, reimagining these moments not as impacts of harm but as gestures of solidarity.
Image: Photo by Joeri Thiry, By courtesy of STUK Leuven.
Performed by Ryota Maeda, Selina Shida Hack, Soyeon Shin, Nobutaka Shomura, Vasundhara Srivastava
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