Alternative Roots Brings Experimental ESEA Artists to Hoxton Hall for a One-Day Takeover

Alternative Roots is a one-day festival of live art, film, and conversation showcasing the experimental diversity of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) creative practice. Curated by the Ming Strike, the festival gathers 18 artists and collectives from across the ESEA diaspora, from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond - to explore how cultural inheritances are reimaged across disciplines and generations.

Many of the participating artists are first- or second-generation migrants whose practices rework traditional forms through experimental methods, from ritual performance to queer cabaret, noise composition, and zine-making.

Programme Highlights

The day brings together artists trained in a convergence of disciplines — dance, film, visual art, sound, and performance-making — mirroring the multi-rooted realities of diaspora life. Highlights to look forward to include:

• Live Works & Installations by dance and theatre practitioner Sook Kuan Tang (Malaysia/UK), performance artist Bunga Yuridespita (Indonesia/UK) and Shuyi Gao (China), somatic bodyworker Jan-Ming Lee (Taiwan/UK), ikebana practitioner Kassy Fang (China), and alternative cabaret performer Sam Reynolds (Filipinx-Irish-British), exploring themes of migration, queerness, ritual, and embodied storytelling.
  
  

• Film Programme – Radically Elsewhere: Artist films from East Asia, featuring Er Gao (China), Jessica Wan Yu Lin (Taiwan), and Funa Ye & Burong Zeng (China/UK), showcasing radical approaches to dance, sound, and self-publishing culture.
  
  

• Discourse & Conversation: A live Ming Strike podcast and a participatory reading workshop by Clare Chun-yu Liu, reflecting on identity, diaspora, and minoritised feelings within contemporary Britain.
  
  

• Marketplace: Food, zines, and art objects from Hidden Keileon, Outland Publishing, and VaChina 阴道中国, creating a social space for exchange and collective imagining.

“We want to show that ESEA art-making is not one thing — it can be ritual, noise, quietness, or digital projection. Each artist offers a different sense of rootedness — some fragile, some fierce, all alive.”
— Ming Strike

From the nineteenth-century Victorian music hall to the stained-glass-lit Palmer Room upstairs, Alternative Roots transforms every corner of Hoxton Hall into a site of artistic exchange and encounter.

Transforming Hoxton Hall’s Victorian architecture into a site of encounter, the festival unfolds through a day-long journey of performances, films, and conversations. Audiences are free to move between events, displays and the marketplace throughout the day, discovering unexpected connections and alternative routes to community.

Alternative Roots

Date: Saturday 8 November 2025
Time: 13:00 - 22:00
Address: Hoxton Hall, 130 Hoxton Street, London N1 6SH
Ticket Price: £20 / £15 / £8 (early bird)
For full Programme and ticket information can be found at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/alternative-roots-festival-of-esea-performances-and-communities-tickets-1757941041979?aff=oddtdtcreator

©️TPE-Tics 台北抽搐

©️This Is A Chicken Coop | Er Gao Dance Production Group

©️In the Shadow, in the Light

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the artists and contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Sound Behind Curtain.