Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Dublin are just some of the cities 35-year-old Pichet Klunchun has visited this year.

He's also made stops in Italy, Greece and Switzerland, and next month will be heading to Salzburg, Austria and New York for Europe and North America's most acclaimed summer events.

For the rest of this year and in the next few years, his mileage will continue to pile up.

Pichet is a dancer-choreographer who's performed his two latest dance-theatre works, "PK and Myself" and "I Am a Demon", to packed houses all over Europe, but most recently in Bangkok where his three shows as part of La Fête were sold out last weekend.

Three people, or more specifically three teachers, have shaped his life.

The first was the late master of khon (masked performance) Chaillot Khummanee. While his peers spent their after-school hours in snooker halls or malls, Pichet spent his in the company Khru Chaillot, or "Pho" Chaillot as Pichet refers to him, being trained as a yak (demon) character.

Then, while majoring in traditional Thai dance at Chulalongkorn University, Pichet studied choreography with theatre professor Pornrat "Khru Oui" Damrhung. That's when he started thinking about making his classical art "contemporary".

After graduation, his efforts with Oui and Janaprakal "Khru Chang" Chandruang put him on the path of lakhon khanop niyom mai - literally "theatre of new tradition", a way of presenting century-old works that even modern audiences could enjoy.

Pichet achieved national fame with his staging of grand-scale performances of classical theatre at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1998 Asian Games and at the "River of Kings" in 1999. A bigger stage beckoned.

In recent years, whenever he's in town, he's been helping to build a new generation of classical Thai artists with his LifeWork Dance Company. The lack of space between the two words is deliberate. To the artist, life is work and vice versa.

Pichet's aim "to revive Thai dance and theatre so that it 'exists' as part of  contemporary society, not as a product in festivals" has borne fruit. At LifeWork performances, the audience is a heady mix of society ladies, grandmothers clutching plastic bags of food and expats, among them Broadway aficionados.

However, his experimental works are never the talk of the town.

"The media have no interest in my kind of work," he says. "And Thais don't read newspapers anyway - they watch TV - so they don't know about my work. They're in love with TV and fast Hollywood excitement and fun. For the mass audience, my works are not considered entertaining."

Regardless, Pichet's fans keep coming back to see his latest works, and their number rises with the volume of invitations from dance and theatre festivals.

"For the past five or six years I've presented my work here first, then taken it overseas. Some people see this as a kind of cultural exchange. Actually it's not - this is my career: I'm neither supported by the government nor representing a university. I'm performing on behalf of myself, and these invitations are directed to me."

Pichet never stops learning and thinking, and his theatre and dance vocabulary continues to expand. Yet he never forgets his khon roots.

"I think I know khon better than before, in terms of its practice and the underlying meanings of its movements. I'm now ready to show Thai people the values of khon, which are more than just khon being a national art."

The problem with the productions staged by the likes of the government's Fine Arts Department, he says, is that the presenters assume the public understands the intricacies as well as they do. Pichet's job is finding ways to convey the meanings.

Yet, with a life unlike that of any other khon dancer, he jokes that he's a tua pralat - an outcast.

"We often hear that one never makes a living from classical Thai dance. Most dancers also teach and perform in restaurants for tourists. So I feel I'm doing something that's never been done before. And now we're building a dance company and managing a theatre."

For the next few weekends, his compact Chang Theatre will be featuring a new project, one initiated by Pichet, although he's not performing.

"On the Table" features four professional artists in four different modes - storytelling, acting, dancing and singing.

Visit www.PKLifeWork.com, where Pichet explains where his Demon - and traditional Thai dance and theatre - are heading next.

The writer, who can be contacted at Pawit.M@chula.ac.th, wishes to thank Sojirat Singholka for help on this article and the photos.

Pawit Mahasarinand

Special to The Nation