Thrills in Tokyo !

Although they were all trained in classical ballet from early childhood, the five young women who make up Project Oh!Yama are far from being your straight up ballet rats. They have always wanted to keep a distance between their art and professional careers (to preserve the pleasure of dancing intact?). They got to know each other on the lecture hall benches of the “Litterature and education” course at the “Art, expression and activities” department, option “Teaching choreography”. So it isn’t altogether by chance that they’re doing what they’re doing! That said, Project Oh!Yama was first conceived among girlfriends, as a way of keeping in touch after finishing college.

Project Oh! choreographer, Yuri Furuie, lives to be creative. Books of images, little ditties on the piano, choreography, no matter; it’s the creative act itself that’s important. With an almost social approach she says: “I have never believed that age or lack of experience are a handicap; nothing prevents anyone from creating anything.” Her choreographies often come from sensations or images. An example: “two cornered crabs that can’t escape”. Then the girls play around with what she has given them, invent poses, try out moves. The choreographic ideas distil themselves into gestures that are then selected, discarded, repeated and put together into routines.

Project Oh!Yama shy away from conceptualisation, as if the idea of attaching words to their work would automatically limit it, throw a net over the imagination. Yuri Furuie’s artistic intention is nevertheless unambiguous: “I simply aim to produce unexpected happenings on stage and give the public things to see that they don’t get to see in everyday life. I want to wake the sleepers!” No real critical dimension to the onstage clowning there then, or at least not consciously.

Project Oh!Yama’s choreographic impact is undeniable. The speed and precision of their bodies, the faultless orchestration of movement, their liveliness and spark. The stage is bare. They ornament it themselves; frank, straight up, uninhibited, unhampered. Their rapidity is astonishing, the juxtaposition of situations frontal, then absurd. To the point where you ask yourself if the Project Oh! girls might not, by some mysterious filiation, be the direct descendants of Dada.

© 2008 text: Franck Stofer, translation: Jack Sims, photo: Eric Bossick

Kentaro!! surprised everyone at Yokohama Dance Collection R 2008, by walking away with the French Embassy Prize for Young Choreographers. He also snapped up both the Audience Award and the Nextage Special Award in the Toyota Choreography Award 2008. All died hair, skateboarder clothes and false nonchalance, Kentaro!! is a young dancer blurring the edges in the Tokyo contemporary dance world. “Direct expressivity” or “crude spirituality”; the critics are still struggling to define this new phenomenon. Totally imbibed in urban electro culture, Kentaro!! hasn’t put a step wrong over the last few months, dancing in all the right places.

He got bitten young, watching the TV show “Dance Koshien”, Takeshi Kitano presenting a high school street dance competition. Kentaro!! was only 11 but made his decision. He trained endlessly in front of a video of Michael Jackson, imitating moves in front of the telly. At the beginning of the 1990s, hip-hop and breakbeat had only just been introduced into Japan. Kentaro!! found his way to the only studio in Tokyo giving classes in hip hop. Eager to learn, he also took house and lock dance classes; he was 13.

He quickly assimilated the different techniques. During his teens his tastes matured as he mined this American genre, getting to know more New York hip-hop: Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest. He also saw that he had to find his own style. Kentaro!! wasn’t an African American from the projects. He was Japanese and he had to learn how to use his own physique, his build.

Kentaro!! mixes hip-hop with a sort of Japanese spirituality. He adapts rap motifs and moves into the dance without ever losing sight of who he is. Very acute musically, with faultless technique, he projects his body into the mix. Electro, pop rock, hip-hop, he doesn’t simply use the beats as a canvas; his moves are extreme and penetrate the music like a needle on the record.

© 2008 text : Franck Stofer, translation: Jack Sims, photo : Eric Bossick

Like a fragile dancer who would like to invoke a demon, Chikanari Shukuka abandons the forms of classical contemporary choreography for a mythical trance and reinvents a bacchanal with hints of gothic, against a rhythm of heavy sonorous footsteps and sensual glossolalia.

Chikanari Shukuka was born in the 60s of a tea ceremony teacher who certainly help her taste for solemnity. In the 90s she starts painting. Abstract and seemingly unhindered, her compositions are executed after having meticulously painted the background color. The painting is quick and focused, the result of a resoluteness that pervades in her present day dancing style.

The urge to dance came to her in a very brutal way. A personal drama in the late 90s left her defenseless and almost unable to move. Chikanari's body literally took over her conscience to free her from the spiraling breakdown and expressed an irrepressible need to move. She attended butoh legend Kazuo Ohno's workshop where concentration and reappropriation of her body let her step away from the shell-shock and resurface.

In 2003 she answers an advert on the internet from laptop artist Marqido who is then looking for a visual accompaniment to his first unit. Joined by singer Atsushi Kinoshita they focus exclusively on live performances and for one year experiment a fusion of sound and dance before splitting up. This experience nourished Chikanari's interest in sound and she then challenges herself to perform alone producing the music accompanying her dance herself.

In fact, when she performs today as Chikanari Shukuka Solo music is in no measure a mere accompaniment, it is inextricably bonded to the dance, and both are at the same time origin and outcome. Although the set-up is ever changing, she usually uses a hi-hat cymbal, little bells which are attached to her wrists, a mic, effector and rhythm machine. As natural as breathing, dance is in each of her movements, whether rolling the cymbal with the tip of her fingers, jumping across the stage or graciously disentangling the mic cable curled up around her legs. Despite the class she attended with Ohno's workshop her style is very much self-taught, fusing elements of flamenco, theatre or gymnastics. Despite these reference points the audience faces a show without any true precursor, overcome by an unexplainable inconvenience only amplified by the performance's discipline and resoluteness. Rather than a dance, it is more some kind of personal exorcism ceremony, a choreographed self-analysis session which basic elements are the body and sound.

Every performance (she does around 50 shows a year) is improvised, beat by jerky and rather simple movements that seem to bear an extraordinary but elusive meaning. She swings the mic in the air before hitting it on the cymbal, unleashing howls and hisses swirling in space like the arms of an octopus, before whispering with her ghostly voice, a siren's call addressed to no one. For what makes these performances so unique is the striking paradox between the complete charm under which the audience is immediately cast, and the sense that Chikanari Shukuka dances essentially for herself.

© 2006 text: Franck Stofer, photo: Albane Laure

Monstrosity, sexuality and the separation of the masculine and feminine are recurrent themes in the work of Yoko Higashino, dancer and choreographer in the company Baby-Q. They are however treated without any real “feminist” intent. In her new piece, Watashi wa sosorareru/I am aroused, she allows us a glimpse of a world between dream and reality, a space charged with scenes from our fantasies played out on smudged mirrors and screens and weighted with crimson velvet curtains. Yoko Higashino invents a spasmodic universe of deaf brutality through which radiate the beauty and androgyny of her double-jointed dancers.

Baby-Q opened for business in the comfortable but something restrictive Osaka in 2000. Tokyo, concentrating more artistic energy, professionally more stimulating, beckoned. The time was right when Yoko Higashino won first the Toyota Choreography Award in 2004, then the Yokohama Dance Collection R in 2005. Several members of Baby-Q followed her and the whole company relocated in 2005.

One of Yoko Higashino’s aims is to make dance more accessible. “In contrast to cinema or music, dance is still a largely misunderstood art form in today’s Japan”, Yoko says, always busy with lessons both in the Baby-Q Dance Lab studio and outside. She has invented a double: Kemumaki Yoko (literally “Yoko disappearing in smoke”), who, dressed in a blonde wig, descends into the depths of Tokyo clubs to improvise cathartic performances with noise artists and touring avant-garde musicians. Always on the same mission, her goal is to bridge the gap, get contemporary dance on the map.

In Baby Q shows, different scenographic elements come together to combine forces. Dance, costumes, music, lighting and sometimes robotic or medical technology are all managed with the same precision. There is always a strong central theme, like in Alarm!, Geeeeek (deformity) or Watashi wa sosorareru/I am aroused. The titles alone are enough to call powerful imagery to mind and on this Yoko’s choreography is constructed, critical and liberating of our unconscious desires. Baby-Q throws back a vision of our own decadence, a world in which wars, marital violence and the most unbridled sensuality are part of a single whole, the everyday, televised, banal.

© 2008 text: Franck Stofer, translation: Jack Sims, photo: Eric Bossick

Exo-Chica, fiery blond, incisors bared, poses in front of a heavy velvet drape. Raveman stares out from behind her, all electric-red stare. This Tokyo-based outfit are Aural Vampire, a classic beauty-and-the-beast pairing who’re behind some highly contagious tunes and well on the way to conquering the planet.

The meeting between vampire songstress, Exo-Chica, and the manic-electronic Raveman (think Jason from Friday the 13th, think an uptight Darth Vader, but uptight!) was always going to be explosive. After a maxi, Vampire Ecstasy, in 2004 and a single release, Death Folder, in 2005, Aural Vampire have now brought out their first album, Zoltank (2010) on Japanese major Avex.

Labelled synth pop / dark wave, Aural Vampire’s work is a real mash-up. Exo-Chica is a fan of popular Japanese song genres such as kayokyoku or enka, while Raveman finds inspiration in German techno and dance. The formula makes for a weird, catchy mix, some sort of of J-pop electronica that contrasts with their macabre imagery to give an exhilarating live show. On stage, Raveman plays the rascal, lining up absurd gags to knock the beautiful Exo-Chica out of her stride.

Aural Vampire are perfectionists and leave nothing to chance. From the conception of the graphics for their discs, to their stage dress, everything is given careful consideration. While at times they’re reminiscent of Japanese comic book characters, Exo-Chica and Raveman shouldn’t be confused with role players from the world of cosplay. Think, rather, industrial and goth. Think cross-dressing, fetishism and horror.

“In horror films, you obviously get all those cries of fear but there’s also a certain beauty and tension. It’s this ensemble we want to express. If any one of these elements were missing, the balance would be gone,” says Raveman. Raveman’s music is chiselled and precise, techno-pop that makes references to 1980s new wave, giving, at times, unrelenting results: see tracks such as ‘Shonan Zoku’ or ‘Darkwave Surfer’.

To get more of an idea of where he’s coming from, it’s also worth giving Raveman’s solo project, Futon Disco, a listen. “Aural Vampire is consciously pop. Futon Disco’s personal. Futon Disco gives him the outlet he needs to stop him burning up. It’s crucial for his mental health.” (Exo-Chica).

Text: Franck Stofer

Translation: Jack Sims

Photo: Eric Bossick