becoming god

Melyn grew up in a first-generation Christian family in Singapore. She was taught to fear her father's family temple in Malaysia, seen as unclean, spiritually dangerous, a place to be avoided. Any gods beyond the Christian ones were viewed with suspicion and treated as taboo.

becoming god emerges from a desire to explore precisely the space she was raised to reject: an inquiry that pulses with risk, tenderness, contradiction, and a longing to meet the divine on uncertain terms. In a society that has largely lost its sense of the sacred, the performance opens a compelling space for ritual, transcendence, and transformation.

Through live music, movement, and a performative score, composer Lưu Thoại Linh (Animistic Beliefs) and performers Sjaid Foncé and Nazar Rakhmanov join Melyn in a playful, devotional and unpredictable exploration of a forbidden, mystical other.

A key inspiration is Melyn’s uncle, Chow Tek Sen, a Chinese spirit medium (tang ki) who lends his body to the gods. This possession practice, known as 跳童, literally “divining youth” or “danced child”, functions as a crucial framework through which Melyn investigates identity and embodiment. 

Docu installation

An important part of the research for becoming god took place in Malaysia, in the Taoist temple of Melyn’s uncle, Chow Tek Sen. Excerpts from the documentary about Melyn’s research are screened every evening in the basement of Verbond Café (Nes 71). The documentary, featuring interviews and Melyn’s solo for her uncle, adds an additional visual and sensory layer to the performance and serves as a bridge between our local context and the one in which Melyn grew up.

The installation can be visited freely before the performances, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Afterparty 

On Saturday 17 January, becoming god closes the first performance week with an afterparty at Verbond Café. Directly after the show, XAKALELE (of Animistic Beliefs) will play a DJ set. XAKALELE is the solo project of Mara Lalihatu (they/them), a Moluccan-Dutch artist and composer based in Rotterdam.

Their work explores the contradictions they’ve lived as a biracial, neuroqueer, and polyamorous person in Rotterdam. Moving between overlapping subcultures, they explore the tension and emotional weight of living between worlds. drawing from Southeast Asian Indigenous practices, early synth experimentation, rave, noise, and DIY culture.