Butoh film premiere at Antonin Artaud Centre , UK

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

After two dance and motion-design workshops held at Brunel University (West London) and Keio University (Tokyo)
in 2009, the third cross-cultural UKIYO lab held at Brunel’s Antonin
Artaud Centre ended on June 6, 2010, with the premiere of a new film
shot on location during the cross-cultural encounter between artists
and researchers from the UK and Japan.

The UKIYO project was directed by choreographer and media artist Johannes Birringer and involved collaborative
experimentation conjoining artistic and techno-scientific disciplines.
Based on a design libretto for the composition of a mixed reality
installation
– Ukiyo: Moveable World – Birringer’s DAP-Lab ensemble
has developed innovative performance concepts for linking physical
spaces
with online virtual worlds, mediated by a diverse range of innovative
wearable designs and intelligent sensing.

The Japanese team visiting Brunel University included researchers from Keio University and a group
of butoh dancers from the renowned Maison d’Artaud led by Hironobu
Oikawa, a master teacher and director who had studied Artaud’s visionary

theatrical ideas in Paris in the 1950s and later taught his own method
alongside Japan’s butoh founders Tatsumi
Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The DAP-lab members had been received
at Oikawa’s studio last December, and a lively process of cultural
exchange was initiated.

It was a sad coincidence that the visiting dancers, Biyo Kikuchi, Yumi Sagara, and Jun Makime learnt of the death
of their 103-year old master, Kazuo Ohno, on the day of their arrival
in London, whereupon the lab decided to create a special film as a
tribute
to Ohno and incorporate the filmed dance in the creation of UKIYO.

In a remarkable historical convergence, the Japanese dancers from the Maison d’Artaud
(Tokyo) thus featured in the creation of a new installation staged

at Brunel’s new performing arts centre named after Antonin Artaud. The building was inaugurated
in 2009 under the tutelage of Steve Dixon, the former head of the School

of Arts.

The DAP ensemble is now taking the new work to Slovenia, with public exhibitions of UKIYO and a workshop held at KIBLA Media Arts Centre in Maribor. In the winter

of 2010-11, the new production and wearable designs will have their
London premiere, with the participation of the Maison d’Artaud
performers
and Yoko Higashino (Baby Q Contemporary Dance Company), one of the
rising
stars of Japan’s contemporary dance scene. The full version of the
UKIYO butoh film dedicated to Kazuo Ohno, directed and edited by
Birringer
and featuring the Japanese dancers with conceptual fashion design by
Michèle Danjoux and music by Alexander Finlayson, will be released
this summer.

Website: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/ukiyo.html

For further information, call [phone]

Or email: [e-mail]

The UKIYO project is supported by a PMi2/connect British Council research cooperation

Award, a grant by The
Japan Foundation, The Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance
at Brunel University, and the Ministry of Culture & Municipality
of Maribor.