RIDING THE RHYTHM emerges from a conversation between Kornkarn and her father about a solo performance titled “OOK-MA” (Horse Dance), an improvised folk li-kay performance in which rhythm plays a central role, one that was once performed by her grandfather in the past. This dialogue led to a reconsideration of what rhythm means, and brought her back to memories of growing up within a family of folk performance artists, where dance functioned as living knowledge, transmitted through the body, storytelling, and forms of being together across generations.

When reflecting on the layered crises of the present, climate change, war, and technologies that relentlessly accelerate the pace of life, often at the expense of bodily attunement and ecological awareness, we find ourselves increasingly disconnected from our bodies and from nature. Inherited structures of thought and imagination no longer correspond to the complexity of the contemporary world. This condition urges us to re-examine how we think, coexist, and perceive the world anew.

Within this context, RIDING THE RHYTHM returns to embodied practice as a way of listening again. The work explores rhythm not as a fixed structure or something owned by an individual, but as something that emerges through relationships, interdependence, and negotiation between the body and forces beyond human control.

Through Kornkarn’s experience of learning to ride a horse, she encounters rhythms that are not her own, rhythms shaped by nature and by the mutual negotiation of bodies, without a fixed center of authority. Movement does not begin with command, but with memory, perception, and shared response, shaped by trust, vulnerability, and attention to the other. Horse riding thus becomes not merely a symbol or metaphor, but a process of rediscovering bodily rhythm, one that transforms how we listen to and perceive the rhythms of life once again.