With choreography by Yuka Kobayashi and costumes by Taisuke Abe, She de cusu oh chee! is a Japanese performance troupe of escapist alter egos [read more]

The whitewashed dancers of the latest Ishinha production are individual parts of a whole who are systematically arranged and rearranged like cogs in the most strange and magnificent machine imaginable [read more]

What if the Power Rangers reformed as a Japanese hiphop crew with degrees in sculpture? Taku Obata’s work suggests the result would be rather awesome [read more]

It is a festival factory line here in Tokyo. Design Festa, the Tokyo International Film Festival and Japan Fashion Week are all happening this month (with reports on all of them coming from yours truly), and a unique performing arts programme called Festival/Tokyo is about to kick off, starting with Rojishiki by Ishinha. Since forming in the early ‘70s the theatre/dance company has become renowned for their site-specific outdoor roaming performances – often set in the Muroji Temple in Nara or the isolated islands of Okayama – and this one is taking place in an old junior high school [read more]

Hiroaki Umeda will be lighting up The Studio at the Sydney Opera House next month when he brings his otherworldly moves and aesthetic to Australia for the first time  [read more]

Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki has been described as “a fuzzed-out educational multi-cultural psych rock opera,” “proto-psychedelic hip-hop with overweight drum beats and baselines,” “escargot sushi,” “absolute fucking genius”, and “better than a lot of other records.” The 1971 concept album was the brainchild of French pop composers Jean Kluger and Daniel Vangarde, who learnt Japanese before recording began and even enlisted the aid of a renowned black-belt Judo master to introduce the tracks, which were all sung in Japanese by a school choir [read more]