An encounter with mortality, written over a century ago, becomes a question for bodies today.

Inspired by Naoya Shiga’s 1917 short story At Kinosaki, AYAKA ONO AKIRA NAKAZAWA SPACENOTBLANK draws on the writer’s reflections on life and death, and his transformation of lived experience into literature.

Rather than retelling the story, this wordless dance piece explores how observation, memory, and relationships between performers can give rise to choreography. Through their original choreographic mechanism, Physical Catharsis, movement is generated, passed from body to body, and transformed along the way.

As the choreography is inherited by different performers, the work continues to evolve, inviting each viewer to discover a landscape of their own.

Duration: OFF-CINARS showcase version: approx. 35 minutes
Original full-length version: approx. 55 minutes
Performers: 3

This trio begins from a familiar sensation: fight back tears, and the body trembles. Beneath that trembling, the work traces a force like an electrical signal that acts before the will. It follows what the body can no longer contain, and where it goes.

The late butoh dancer Ko Murobushi threw himself into this force to break the norms that teach restraint. Yet he also pressed it down with his whole body, so as not to be swallowed. At the edge between surrender and suppression, he convulsed.

The three dancers take another path. They do not press the force down, but let it leak out through parts of the body. Moving between restraint and overflow, they sometimes weep, sometimes laugh. And the flesh becomes a soft machine that, like the gut, keeps working beyond the reach of the will.

Duration: 40 minutes / Performers: 3