ABSTRACT
Since the 2010s, thousands of Isan (northeastern Thai) people of various ages and genders have gathered to dance in large celebrations and events in regional cities like Khon Kaen, Udon Thani, and Nakorn Ratchasrima. Their dances, known as Rum Buang Suang (‘worship dances’), suggest that they could be sacred dances to pay respect to spirits. While these recent dances may contain ritual elements, they mostly stress both communal kinesthetic experiences and the means to perform the collective Isan body into existence through their relations to political power, economic resources, and technologies. This chapter will explore the changing of roles of Isan dance as an art form and as a corporeal medium that is tied to changes in Isan society, and address the question of whether contemporary Isan dance and Isan bodies are establishing a new creative cultural platform, or rather are embodying an Isan imaginary body based on reinvented myths and rituals in contemporary practice. The chapter will link these dancing bodies to an Isan body identified as ‘Morlam’ culture that draws on the experience of a lived body from Isan folk dancers and artists. Since the Isan body today has been crafted into a new semiotic form that can be called ‘made to order’ for these city celebrations, it is worth asking how these collective dancing bodies relate to the individual dancers. Although this Isan dancing body was immobilized and socially distanced during the pandemic, since 2022 it has returned to help to perform Isan cultural identity into being once again.
