Noism04
In 2004, Niigata City Performing Arts Center “Ryutopia” welcomed Jo Kanamori as art director of its dance division and subsequently established Japan’s first full-fledged public contemporary dance company, “Noism 04.” Ten dancers were selected for the company from nationwide applicants and are now performing as resident dancers in Niigata. The company performed its first production, SHIKAKU, in June and its second, “black ice” in October.
Niigata
City Performing Arts Center “Ryutopia”
Opened: Oct. 1998
This culture complex built by the city of Niigata includes a concert hall (1,900 seats), a theater (900 seats) and a Noh theater (380 seats). Ryutopia is administered by the Niigata Municipal Foundation for the Promotion of Arts and Culture as one comprehensive facility along with the adjoining Niigata Municipal Music Culture Center, which includes specialized music practice rooms and a performance hall. The Center’s theater division is led by the producer Hiroshi Sasabe as art director, with the director Yoshihiro Kurita serving as associate director. The art director for the dance division is Jo Kanamori. The total annual budget for the Center is about 400 million yen. The Music division has a Junior Orchestra for young students of music which is based at the Music Culture Center and it also operates a music school for elementary and middle school students and produces original musicals. The Center also creates original productions to tour Japan and has presented a Shakespeare series at its Noh theater featuring famous quest actors.
SHIKAKU
Premiere: June, 2004
This work is the product of a collaborative effort with the young architect, Tsuyoshi Tane, the musician Masahiro Hiramoto and others. The title, when written as it is in Roman letters can have various meanings in Japanese, ranging from a rectangle, a visual angle, a blind spot, a poet and a writer to an assassin, qualifications, poetic form, the sense of sight and enlightenment. This is an experimental piece in which the stages is divided at first into four chambers by white walls. As the dancers move in and out of the chambers, the audience is also free to walk around the stage viewing the performance from different angles. There are also ffective special manipulations such as the partitions being raised during a blackout of the stage lighting to produce one large, flat open space. For the duration of the piece the dancers move ceaselessly, playing out the various meanings harbored in the word shikaku: “There are walls and then there are none;” “Now you see, now you don’t;” “Now it is shown, now it is not” and “Now things can be communicated, now they can’t.”
©Niigata City Performing Arts Center
black ice
Premiere:October, 2004
This is a collaborative work with the contemporary artist Tadasu Takamine. The term “black ice” used in the title refers to a completely transparent ice and the expression comes from the appearance of black asphalt showing through a completely transparent film of ice on a road. The term is used figuratively to mean something that can’t be seen but still has an effect, as when a car slips on the unseen film of ice on the road. The production is an omnibus work consisting of three short pieces, each of a different type: black wind, which takes as its text a man facing imminent death, staged against a backdrop of video art by Takamine; “black ice”, which is a collaboration on the theme of points of contact (with the ground) involving dancers and special images created with the use of a thermograph; and black garden, in which the dancers search the depths of their own souls in a forest-like array of objet. This work also displays effective manipulations of the stage space such as creating a complete “black box” by spreading a black stage cloth on the floor which is usually never used in dance because of its slippery quality.