The Berlin-based butoh dancer and choreographer Yuko Kaseki arrives in Australia this month for the 2011 Big In Japan events in Sydney and Melbourne …

Here is one of the new members of hiphop dancer Taku Obata’s BBoyism sculpture crew, currently showing at Ginza Mitsukoshi in Tokyo. Below are the photos I took at his Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo exhibition in 2009.

Yuko Kamei’s images provide a meeting point for the motion and temporality of dance and the freezing of movement and time that characterizes photography. Focusing on release-based techniques and contact improvisation, she had spent many years training in classical ballet, martial arts including aikido and capoeira, and modern dance schools of Limón and Cunningham before she moved into photography.

“Initially I was working with video,” she says, “but my works gradually became short and looped, and finally settled in a photographic space.” This photographic space she conceives of functions as a stage for exploring the interaction between bodies and built environments. In 2009 she took to the new ‘burbs of Tokyo for her Brand New Town series (above), intervening the excessively paved and planned lifeless streets by walking through them, armed (legged?) with wooden stilts.

Prior to that her in the grid project (below) focused on the ubiquitous straight lines of urban spaces with the lines of the human body. “I think both human body and architecture are intentional constructions which reflect our ideals,” she says. “The built environment regulates how we move and behave, but at the same time we can be active and creative in utilising the structure. The simple presence of a human body can bring up numerous unexpected aspects of any given space.”

Yuko’s most recent series (below) has focused on the movement of balance, which she defines as a continuous adjustment between structure and gravity. The act of balancing requires you to get the right alignment and then settle on it, allowing your attention to travel outwards. “You can see what is out there while the body anchors you where you are,” she says, “and I think the experience of looking at the photographs is similar – you see what the body does, then look at the space around it and come back to the body again, making connections in between. The body continues to balance in the same position while the viewer’s eyes travel across the surface, and the brief moment of performative action expands as long as the viewer’s attention exists.”

Yuko is currently completing a one-year residency at Tokyo Wonder Site.

All images copyright Yuko Kamei:

1. Brand New Town, Mogusaen, Japan, c-type print, 2009.

2. Brand New Town, Higashimurayama 2, Japan, c-type print, 2009.

3. in the grid_#2, silver gelatin print, 2008.

4. in the grid_#3, silver gelatin print, 2008

5. in the grid_#4, silver gelatin print, 2008.

6. Untitled, c-type print, 2009.

7. Untitled, c-type print, 2009.

Anyone who says you don’t find straight lines in nature needs to be straightened out. Besides many naturally rectilinear cell and crystal formations, straight lines are to be found in such ubiquitous things as rays of light and gravity’s pull. Since the time of ancient Egypt small weights on strings have been used to mark true vertical lines. Today in place of plump bobs carpenters use laser beams, and it was at a construction site that architect Hiroshi Naito was first taken by the beauty of straight lines of light projected on a rough concrete surface.

When he was invited to do an installation for MOMAT’s current Where Is Architecture? exhibition, he decided to return to this image. In an otherwise completely dark room, 200 straight, parallel red laser beams form a rectangle on the floor. It is a curious property of light that we only see it in what it illuminates. In transit it is invisible, but when it reaches a surface it can appear to have its own mass. Looking at the red lines on the floor it is unclear whether we are seeing an object or image.

Forms appear abruptly from the darkness as people pass through the beams, so the ways in which bodies inform space and architecture are literally brought to light. There is an interplay of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality as the flat lines respond to the contours of the human forms moving through them, and to fully exploit this several dance performances with JunJun SCIENCE and Hiroaki Umeda are scheduled throughout the exhibition.

The set of the latest Ishinha production Roji-shiki is comprised of a multitude of cubic frames containing skeletal forms and fragments or shoes, bicycle wheels and other everyday objects. These are arranged and rearranged by the performers to take us through ever evolving worlds, each as atmospheric and surreal as the last.

Like the module stage set, the whitewashed dancers are individual parts of a greater whole who are systematically arranged and choreographed with the overall effect of being mere cogs in the most strange and magnificent machine imaginable. The unique chanting and refined movement come from a zen-like focus, with mathematical precision and repetition used to create a whole new system of rhythm.

Coinciding with the new production, the Museum of Osaka University is holding an exhibition and symposium on the art of Ishina, including recreations from Roji-shiki. The exhibition runs until December 12.

Roji-shiki was the opening production of Festival/Tokyo, a performing arts program that continues until the end of December. For more information check the website.

Photos 2-4 by Jun Ishikawa

What if the Power Rangers reformed as a Japanese hiphop crew with degrees in sculpture? Taku Obata’s new show at Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo, It’s Just Begun, suggests the result would be rather awesome.

Obata formed the hiphop group UNITYSELECTIONS (who performed at the exhibition opening on Saturday night) in the late 90s, and since then he has been refining their tongue-almost-in-cheek styles of dance, music, street art and design, in recent years setting up the sister project HIPHOP SENTAI BBOYGER. Meanwhile he also graduated in sculpture at Tokyo National University, and is proving himself to be as skilled with the chisel as he is with the mic.

His background in dance and hiphop has evidently given him great insight into the form of the human body and the way it moves; the wooden sculptures currently on show have a remarkable sense of motion and energy about them.

See more from UNITYSELECTIONS here.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

The act of carving a traditional noh mask is referred to as “omote wo utsu” (to strike the surface). The sacred and supremely refined art of noh – which is said to be the world’s oldest form of theatre and to have remained unchanged for over six centuries – has at its heart the notion of masks and illusion; and the impulse towards complete body transformation is carried through to many areas of performance and life in contemporary Japan.

With choreography by Yuka Kobayashi and costumes by Taisuke Abe, She de cusu oh chee! is another Japanese performance troupe based on disguise and escapist alter egos – watch out for their super kawaii public interventions which can happen anywhere at any time …

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, with 20-odd cutting edge productions taking place over the next two months.

The festival opens with the world premiere of Rojishiki by Yukichi Matsumoto’s innovative company Ishinha, which has possibly the best flyer for a theatre production ever (above) and promises to be a feast of seamless choreography, Balinese rhythmic chanting, symmetry and whitewashed bodies.

Since forming in the early ‘70s the 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. Rojishiki is taking place in an old junior high school which will be temporarily set up like an alley (’roji’) complete with food stalls. As the ensemble has been busy making appearances around the world (including the Adelaide and Perth Festivals in Australia) this will mark their first performance in Tokyo for many years.

Other highlights in the program include the Butoh company Sankai Juku’s Unetsu which uses water, sand, light and movement, as well as several documentary/tour performances including Rimini Protokoll’s Cargo Tokyo (which takes place in the back of a moving truck with some truck drivers sharing stories about their lives) and Compartment City by Port B  (which takes the audience around Nishiguchi Park in Ikebukuro to investigate, through talks and video instillations, the uniquely Japanese phenomena of private refuges within public spaces, such as the omnipresent ‘manga café’).

Woo! Here are some images from a few of Ishinha’s past productions …

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.” (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1933)

Before coming into the world dance at the ripe old age of 20, Hiroaki Umeda had been studying photography, which helped him cultivate an acute understanding of light and shadow. Recalling that he always found photography stressful, he explains how he became drawn to performance: “With photography I felt I had to be away from the environment and situation I was photographing. I couldn’t experience the situation. I think I wanted to experience and to be there more. I was also interested in changing time and space, but if I had to be away from a situation, I couldn’t feel or experience the change. So I was looking for a style of expression that could give experience and a changing space/time.”

He studied various dance styles before realising none of them really fitted the movements he wanted to do, and after less than a year he abandoned all formal training. Now one of Japan’s most acclaimed young performers/choreographers, and director of his own company S20, he continues to work in a highly independent and autonomous way – not only doing all the choreography and movement in his shows but also designing the sets, lighting, video projections and musical scores. “I cannot think only of dance,” he says, “in my thought, dance is to be made with the surrounding elements because the body is an element of the environment. For me, to make a dance piece is to make a space, including choreography, sound, light and so on.”

Hiroaki will be making his first trip to Australia in September to present his While going to a condition and Accumulated layout for four nights only at the Sydney Opera House, as part of their Spring Dance program.