The bliss of working with friends

We informally talked about both being countryside kids, but never about your history in dance before your time at PARTS.

I was doing ballet from age 6 onwards. After high school, I went to Tama Art University in Tokyo for a specialisation in ‘Art on Stage’, where I mainly studied dance. But somewhere along the way, I felt that my body was not exactly made for ballet and Japan has quite a different approach to dance as a profession; it’s harder to make a living off of dance. 

I painfully realised that I would not become a ballerina and even quit dancing for a while. It was depressing, I lost a part of myself. I ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos of dance instead… 

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Countryside kids really need the internet as a window to the world. 

[laughs] Exactly! I discovered Forsythe, Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown and eventually Rosas. It dawned on me that ‘this kind of dance exists’ while I was watching the Rosas danst Rosas film. At one point I heard that Fumiyo (Ikeda, longtime Rosas performer and teacher at PARTS who recently quit the company) was going to give a workshop in Tokyo and I saved up to go. 

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I can imagine Fumiyo telling you to audition for PARTS?

Yes, I did the first audition in Tokyo and then went to Brussels for the final auditions. Many ‘firsts’: doing an all-English audition, getting a passport to travel outside of Japan, and making the trip alone. Everything was so new.

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Fast forward to Lurker, your first solo performance!

I have spent so much time with it since it is so DIY. I have really been counting on my friends more than on institutional support in Germany (where Hanako lives now most of the time). Luckily, Michiel (Vandevelde, DE SINGEL) has been supporting my work for a while now and I am happy to show Lurkerat DE SINGEL. 2 Dogs Company gave me a technical residency and you helped me out with photos, Simon (Van Schuylenbergh, artist-performer) was an outside eye,… I am so grateful that the piece was made under these circumstances. It wasn’t the easiest path, but I like that about it.

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What is a lurker and what inspired you for this work?

I asked myself how to make a piece as a dancer, often being a human-shaped vessel for other artists’ ideas. When I create, my mind-body connection is much more direct, but I still had all these ideas about vessels. Materials that hold things but aren’t much in and of themselves. I got obsessed with wrapping paper and containers after that. Dancers’ conditions are often about being open and flexible while shifting between locations and collaborations. There is an element of unsettlement, of being uprooted,… ‘My’ lurker is more nuanced than someone passively ‘hanging around’ online. They’re always the frontline of receiving information about the world but never starting the revolution. There’s a sense of indecision, cowardice, not-knowing. Lurker is about curiosity and alienation. The good and the bad. Being one anonymous face in the masses at a protest for example. 

Materials that hold things but aren’t much in and of themselves

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Do you feel it ties in with your story of migration as well?

For sure, migration is part of it. But even for people who never leave their birth country, the amount of information fired at us 24/7 requires us to renew our identities again and again. Who are we and what do we believe in? 

Lurker is about curiosity and alienation. The good and the bad. Being one anonymous face in the masses at a protest for example

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I start to feel like maybe we are unsure about everything except about who our friends are. How have Para Para and Nō-theatre become your friends in this process?

Upon graduating I needed to digest everything I had learned, and Para Para was a way of returning to my dance roots, even from before the ballet years. It’s a very communal thing and not highbrow at all, everyone joining Para Para events has learned these fixed choreographies to hundreds of Eurobeat tracks, from the 80s to the early 2000s. The events are super intergenerational. It is dancing, but also just about feeling pleasure in moving together with people, and hiding amongst those other people, it feels safe, too. Nō-theatre on the other hand felt very elitist to me at first. I had to try and stay curious about it, but then during one performance, I got it. It’s a storytelling tradition and to me, it is very much about the vibe rather than the plot. I felt like I was floating along with the other spectators. The performers wear masks, they are revealing story elements without revealing themselves. There are different kinds of lurkers inhabiting these dance styles.

The amount of information fired at us 24/7 requires us to renew our identities again and again

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<div class="editorial-banner"> <div class=“editorial-credits”> @hana_k0 <br/> Photos shot by Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe on iPhone <br/> 11.10 & 12.10.2024 - BLISS #1, Platform for new performance practices - Antwerp, De Singel </div></div>

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