Square and art expression

The other day, we performed a contemporary dance for about 30 minutes on the outdoor stage at "Hibiya Festival" held at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya.

We usually perform our work in the closed space like theaters to invite audience to extraordinary experience. Through our concept and body conditions, we decide what situations and landscape to show.

However, we jumped into the open space without partition, where is complete everyday life.

In the open space surrounded by audience in the four aspects (There were some people watching from the upper floor of Midtown, so it was five aspects.), we dared to create and embodied the concept and the state of "a locked room and people meeting for the first time".

As we also wanted people who first came across with contemporary dance to stop to see it, we prepared scenes to move dancing with our body and sound linked, as well as we created, on the contrary, abstractive and quiet scenes.

There are people who were interested in the work, who were not and various ways to take our work. They very simply jumped into our eyes. After the performance, some people asked us "What kind of performance is this?" "What did you express?". It was the communication that did not come out by playing in a closed space.

It is very creative to find out expressions under limited conditions.

The open space can never be a blackout. We cannot create lighting effect either (during the daytime). Noise is overflowing, too. By making an attempt to create art in a such space, we could find various challenges and possibilities.

For example, a slow abstract scene sometimes interrupts the concentration of audience, while when shadows are beautifully colored in the evening, they reflect as an impressive scene.
Rather than creating works on a 30 minutes time axis, it may be interesting to change the staging and choreography on the environment that changes with time.

It was an attractive day that Hibiya Square made choreographers find new potential expressions. This experience will be a hint to lead to a new creation.

Mamoru Sakata and Maiko Hasegawa（Tarinof dance company）