Darkness Odyssey Part 3: Non-Opera, Becoming
Commissioned by and Premiered at New York Live Arts (NYC, 2019)
Performed by Jennifer Gonzalez, Joanna Kotze, Taketeru Kudo, Mina Nishimura, Alain Sinandja, Connor Voss and Kota Yamazaki
Music Composed by Masahiro Sugaya with additional scores by Ryoji Ikeda
Set Design by SO-IL
Lighting Design by Thomas Dunn
Costume Design by Kota Yamazaki
ABOUT
Darkness Odyssey is a series of dances inspired by the written words of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata’s notion of “dance of darkness”. This series explores the idea of the body as a black hole, which absorbs everything, even seemingly unrelated things equally.
Part 3: Non-Opera, Becoming, features a team of international dancers including Japanese dancer, Taketeru Kudo, one of the few remaining butoh performers to have trained in direct lineage of Hijikata, and African dancer Alain Sinandja from Togo. With an idea of the fluid, dissipated and schizophrenic nature of human subjectivity and identity, performers engage in the state of "becoming". Inspired and influenced by each other's presence, performers attempt to reform a sense of self while finding oneness and defining co-existence in the foggy and hazy landscape.
