Koichiro Tamura

Dance that born of the relationship between “object and the body”
Irradiating society, the choreographic art of Koichiro Tamura

March 13, 2023

Koichiro Tamura

Koichiro Tamura (born 1992) commanded the attention of the dance world by winning consecutive awards at the 2016 and 2018 Yokohama Dance Collection. Born in Niigata Prefecture, where Noism is based, Tamura went from dance club activities in high school to beginning artistic activities in Kyoto, with its culture rich in opportunities for genre-crossing exchange. As in his representative work “F BRIDGE” which has male dancers in dirty jeans and T-shirts pacing with concrete blocks on their backs, and in the duo piece “goes” which makes use of car tires, Tamura presents works born of the relationship between “object and the body.”

In this interview we seek to unveil Tamura’s reality, which is also seen in his other face as an after-school instructor for children, giving them daily opportunities to interact through dance.
Interviewer: Takao Norikoshi (dance critic)

F/BRIDGE
(at Coronet Theatre’s “Electric Japan 2022”, May. 2022)

I heard that you are from Niigata. How did you first encounter dance?: I was born in 1992 in Nishi-ku (Niigata City). When I was in elementary school, I liked to draw, and my parents thought that I would become a painter someday, and they kept all the pictures I had done. Even now, there are about 20 thick scrapbooks of pictures I drew when I was five years old.

I was in Niigata until I was 18 years old, and I went to the local Niigata Commercial High School, and the person who danced at the welcome party for new students was Kazuma Yamamoto (active now as a choreographer and dancer). He was the only boy in the dance club, and his “animation dance” (dance making use of optical illusions such moving as if sliding across the floor) looked so cool. That was my first encounter with dance, and he invited me to join the dance club. I really wanted to do animation dance, but I was forced to do cheer dances with pom-poms and modern ballet. I thought, “What?” [laughs]. So, I taught myself break dance as well as animation dance.
In Niigata, there is Noism (now Noism Company Niigata), led by Jo Kanamori, which was founded in 2004 as the first affiliated dance company belonging to a Japanese public theater.: Ryutopia (Niigata City Performing Arts Center), where Noism is based, was rather near to my house, and with the enthusiastic recommendation of our dance club teacher, I went to watch performances there frequently. But for me, my encounter with creative dance in high school was more important. Seeing male college students dancing hard at the nationwide high school and university dance festival (All Japan Dance Festival – KOBE)(*1) made something new well up inside me.
You won the Excellence Award at the Niigata Dance Prefectural Competition and the Jury Award at AJDF.: When I was in my second and third years of high school, I participated as one of the dancers. At that time, I never thought that I would be creating dance pieces of my own. One day, the Niigata Prefecture Federation of High School Dance Clubs invited Kim Ito-san to hold a workshop for about 100 high school students aspiring to become dancers. It was then that I first encountered contemporary dance. I had never seen a movement like Kim-san’s before, and I was really surprised by it. So, I decided to go to the Kyoto University of Art and Design, where Kim was teaching.
What major course did you enter to study in?: It was the dance course at the Department of Performing Arts, and my dance teachers there were Kim Ito-san and Misako Terada-san. At that time, I was still hoping to participate in AJDF, so I gathered friends to form a team to participate with, but it didn’t work out. In high school, I was able to dance because of the school’s dance club environment, but even though I was studying under Kim-san and Misako-san, there was no place to actually dance. I was so frustrated by that situation, and I even thought about quitting the university. But around that time, my solo dance work Intravenous drip won an award at a dance competition, so I decided to try to do my best again.

So, I launched REVO in 2011 with the aim of creating a company in which I would lead and choreograph pieces. I took the REVO name from the word revolution because at the time I felt like I wanted to, “Start a revolution!” in dance. I was 19 years old at the time. I worked hard with the goal of participating in AJDF and we eventually made it to the finals. Looking back, I think I was longing more for the joy of performing as a team, than just the joy of dancing.
AJDF is for group dances by a large number of people, which is originally a specialty of the dance teams of physical education universities, and it is completely different from the style you currently work in.: Well, while I was learning about the essence of physical expression from Kim-san and Misako-san, I also watched dance as a form of physical education at AJDF, and in my mind I looked at the two separately. The worldview of the works in our university course presentations and those presented at AJDF were just so different that I simply had to divide them as separate things. Still, I wanted to incorporate the essence of physical expression I was learning about into the dance I had come to know as a form of physical education. I have absolutely no skills to base myself on like the skills that can be acquired from doing classical ballet since childhood. I can boast that I don’t have such a base of technique, except for the creative dance and modern ballet I did in my high school days, and street dance that I taught myself. Instead, I attend workshops by various people and then bring that back to build into my own original method. If I do have any strength, I guess I’d have to say it is that my movement might be close to street dance.
In 2011, when you formed REVO, your work The Vulture and the Little Girl won the Special Prize in the “Artistic Movement in Toyama” (a competition held in Toyama Prefecture for small-group creative dances by the university and junior college students from all over Japan). This title is also the title of a photograph taken by photographer Kevin Carter during the Sudanese Civil War (*2). A vulture stands behind a crouching, famine-stricken girl as if waiting to feed on her. Your work was highly praised as one that contained strong anger and violence and was thus not typical of a newcomer.: Judge Fumio Hamano-san (Senior Editor, Dance Magazine) recommended that we enter the Yokohama Dance Collection (Japan’s leading contemporary dance competition and festival). I won the Jury Prize in Artistic Movement in Toyama in 2013.

After graduating from university in 2015, you have been based in Kyoto, during which time you won awards at the Yokohama Dance Collection and continued to perform in Japan and overseas. In 2016, your solo piece Zoo Keeper won the Outstanding New Artist Award in Competition II. In 2017, you presented Yard in the prize-winner performances, and in 2018, F/BRIDGE won the French Embassy Prize for Young Choreographers and the Sibiu International Theater Festival Award. After living in Paris in 2019, you presented your residency work MUTT in 2020. And in 2021, you presented the duo piece goes with Mizuki Taka, which was performed in Sibiu. So, your activities have continued very prominently.: In 2016, I performed my first solo performance after graduation, Yoyu no Asa (Morning with Leeway), at Kagurazaka Session House in Tokyo. It was presented as a fringe work of KYOTO EXPERIMENT, and it was a work that even I, myself didn’t understand [laughs]. But I was very happy that it was appreciated by my dancer friends.
Over the past 20 years or so, the way contemporary dance artists are nurtured has changed in a number of ways. You started in Niigata, where Noism is located, and your encounter with AJDF and the environment of Kyoto with its avant-garde art festival KYOTO EXPERIMENT, and then your university life where students from various genres could interact, as well as the reputation you gained at the Yokohama Dance Collection, which is known as a gateway to success for young choreographers and a stepping stone to overseas opportunities, all provided you with an environment unique to those born in the 90s.: I think it was very good for me. If I hadn’t encountered dance in Niigata, I might have gone on to do painting. Especially when I was in college, I was stimulated by so much of what I experienced. I also had many classmates who are doing interesting things in spatial art and video. I think that what I am doing now is a mix of the know-how I came in contact with then.
Yard is a man and woman duo piece, and when the two, in clothes and shoes streaked in white powder walk, white footprints form on the stage. Most of the performance was done in silence, and I was impressed by the strange sense of viscosity in the slow movement of the dancers, and thanks to elements like the lighting, the performance embraced and filled the entire space.: The critic Tatsuro Ishii-san praised this in a review of Dance Magazine, saying, “There are very few young artists who make performances using such silence.” I haven’t made many works like this anymore, have I?

Yard
(at Yokohama Dance Colletction “Dance Cross + Asian Selection”)
(Feb.2017 at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse No.1, 3rd Floor Hall)
Performer: Rino Yamamoto, Koichiro Tamura
Photo: bozzo
https://youtu.be/lMT1d7089QU

One of your representative works is F/BRIDGE which premiered in 2015 and was your graduation work of the university. This work won the “French Embassy Prize for Young Choreographers” at the 2018 Yokohama Dance Collection Competition I and the “Sibiu International Theater Festival Award.” It was a work with a unique worldview in which you made a dance of men in dirty jeans and T-shirts pacing back and forth with concrete blocks on their backs, and it made us feel the act of labor. The “meaningless suffering” it depicted was even reminiscent of the myth of Sisyphus. It was a unique work that pursued the theme of the relationship between objects and the body.: During the three months I was making F/BRIDGE, it was a time when I was struggling with various thoughts before graduation. And when I went to the campus garden with my friends for a change, I happened to find a dirty concrete block that had been left there. When I tried lifting it on my body, it felt good. So, I thought about what I could do in a piece with concrete blocks and the body. To be honest, when I first made it, I didn’t fully understand what was good about the concept.

After graduating, I was also thinking about an academic career, and I also had a desire to devote myself to choreography and to further pursue physical expression in dance. Since REVO’s activities were beginning to draw attention, I wanted to continue working as a company, so I continued to create dance while working at part-time jobs in Kyoto. Rather than appearing in other people’s works as a dancer, I felt that it was more rewarding to create new works that expressed what I was thinking. By the way, REVO does not have any fixed members, it is just a company where I produce things by myself.
In the history of contemporary dance, there has been an idea that when you feel the limits of movement created by the body alone, various attempts have been made to create dance based on the reaction of the body when it is put under stress. Like Philippe Decouflé, who deliberately dressed dancers in costumes that made it difficult for them to move, and in things like contemporary circus which has dramatically expanded the range of expression based on the idea that “the body that moves things is also moved by those things.” Is exploring the relationship between objects and the body a theme that existed for you before this work?: At the time, I was attracted to the collision of bodies we saw in the works of contact Gonzo. I was also moved by the work Mental Activity by Argentina’s Luis Garay (a work invited to KYOTO EXPERIMENT in which six dancers performed in a space like a construction site where concrete blocks, wood, scrap iron, rocks, plastic bottles, etc., were thrown into). So, I had been thinking about “objects and the body,” and “the body as an object” for a long time.
Rather than pursuing a single dance style, I feel that you are considering various forms of expression using objects, including the body.: Well, my ideal is that a work should make people think, “It’s like I’m looking at art, but after it’s over, I feel that what I saw was dance.”

F/BRIDGE
(Jul. 2020 at Kinosaki International Arts Center)

In 2018, you were invited to the Hong Kong Dance Exchange to perform Yard. This was your first performance overseas.: I was very nervous, and I don’t know if the performance itself went well, but there was a very large poster of us in the gallery space of the theater. I felt the difference in scale and that made me feel that I wanted to work overseas.
In the same year, you stayed in Seoul for two months and created your work on an exchange between Kyoto Art Center and Seoul Dance Center.: All the Korean dancers had great technical skills and it was very stimulating for me. I also loved Modern Table (an internationally active Korean dance company led by Kim Jaeduk). However, when a choreographer who is active internationally named Choi Seung Min said, “All Korean dance is too traditional and outdated,” that also struck me as something to consider.
What kind of work was the piece Chopsticks! that you created during your stay in Korea? Judging from the title, is it a work based on the theme of chopsticks and the different materials they are made from in Japan and Korea?: We auditioned with the cooperation of the Seoul Dance Center and I chose a physically strong dancer named Yunjoo Ssong. It was a work that included things I learned while studying Korean dance, which draws its core from traditional dance. As you said, I thought the work I created drew on the difference in the two countries’ food culture, but the response showed that the audience didn’t really understand that intent.
With the awards you won for F/BRIDGE, you also got opportunities to visit France and Sibiu in Romania. A lot has changed due to COVID-19, but you went to France in 2019 and Sibiu in 2021.: I was able to go to France before the pandemic got worse, so I was there for three months beginning in April 2019, and I was able to do creative work there based at the French National Dance Center (CND) in Paris. In between, a French street dancer who saw my performance at the Palais de Tokyo / Site de création contemporaine at a national gallery asked me to work with him, and a Chinese filmmaker shot a video work with us. Based on the fact that artists don’t have money, they do things together in a give-and-take process, and the circle of artists I was able to work with began to grow. I thought that was one of the good things about France.
After returning to Japan, in February 2020 you performed the solo work titled MUTT that you made in France at the Yokohama Dance Collection. For that performance, you divided the stage floor with a cross of yellow tape, and you lay on the stage with your eyes blocked by tape. The piece began quietly, and gradually anger and madness exceed the limits and your body begins to twist and turn violently. It is a work on the theme of a young artist who has become “lost in art” wandering in search of a place to be.: A friend of mine who lives in France told me about the state of art in Europe, and he said, “London has a strong media art scene, while Germany has a lot of avant-garde and edgy things. In France, there are many people who are playful and are particularly into handmade things.” He had a tendency toward dogmatism and prejudice, but it was interesting. For MUTT, I wanted to create a work based on what I felt in France, so I also incorporated that kind of handmade feeling.
In Sibiu, you and Mizuki Taka performed your duo work goes. It is a work using car tires, in which a man and a woman put their bodies through tires and bump into things or roll the tires. In addition to your theme of the relationship between “things and the body,” the work also showed the relationship between men and women (there is also a version for two men). What was the response?: I didn’t feel very good about the performance, but there were people laughing and the response was good. However, in the second half, there was a scene where we were talking in Japanese without subtitles, and because the audience probably couldn’t understand what was going on, some members of the audience got up and left in the middle, which left me quite discouraged.
The meaning of performing overseas is that you will be exposed to a different axis of evaluation from performances in Japan, and it gives you the opportunity to see your work from a different perspective. So, I don’t think you need to be discouraged at all.

goes
At Yokohama Dance Collection 2021 “Master class for Choreographers”
(Feb. 2021 at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse No.1-Steep Slope Studio)
Photo: Yulia Skogoreva

In STUMP PUMP (premiered in Kobe in 2019), which deals with the damage caused by a typhoon that blew down many trees on Mt. Kurama in Kyoto in 2018, you used a large number of cardboard boxes.: At that time, reconstruction was not progressing at all, so I made that piece with a strong feeling that I would stand the fallen trees back up by myself. Among the fallen trees was a large cedar tree that was 500 years old, and I wanted to represent the thickness and greatness of that tree with an overwhelming mass. So, we ended up deciding on cardboard boxes as a material that could be stacked up and knocked down again repeatedly. This time, I wanted to stress the “height” aspect, so in the Tokyo performance, I built it up to a height of about 7 meters.
The cardboard was both a thing and a partner that you danced with. The image of fallen trees being piled high and knocked down again was a powerful one, and then there was the inherent weakness that is unique to a cardboard box, and I thought it turned out to be excellent as a material for stage design. The overall impression it created was that of a construction site.: Yes. After that, the restoration from the damage to Mt. Kurama gradually proceeded. In the second half of the Tokyo performance, we added a scene in which they danced while making lantern baskets out of cardboard boxes and arranging them. In the end, the Kurama Fire Festival, which is known as one of Kyoto’s three grand and unusual festivals, was reproduced on stage, and the excitement of the moment was livened up with the festival’s unique “Saireya, Sairyo” chant.
In 2020, you presented your work Kubochi (nostalgia), which features a group dance by six people. The Japanese title is unusual. The use of plastic bags also became a focus of attention.: At that time, I thought that the Japanese term kubochi (a depression in the ground or landscape) was a very beautiful one. Being in a situation where we couldn’t dance due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my desire to create a work of creative dance, which had been my starting point in dance, was revived, and I also made a unison dance for the first time in a long time. By the way, plastic bags were not used in the premiere, but from the subsequent re-staging of the work.

It just so happened that my parents were moving out of their house, and I needed to clear out my room. But that task suddenly made me sentimental, knowing that I would never be able to come back to this house. Finally, when I walked around the city for a while, I felt a mixture of nostalgia and sadness. In my representative work, F/Bridge, I was thinking about karoshi (death from overwork), which was a problem in Japan at the time, and in STUMP PUMP, I was concerned about Mt. Kurama. From dealing with such social issues, I found the desire to turn things negative into things positive had become a driving force behind my work. But with Kubochi (nostalgia), I wanted to make it purely about the feeling of personal nostalgia.

Four months later, in March 2021, it was decided to do a re-staged performance of it again, and that happened to be exactly 10 years since the Great East Japan Earthquake. At the time of the Earthquake, I was in my third year of high school, and there was almost no effect felt from the disaster where I lived in Niigata when it happened. Instead, I was preoccupied with going to Kyoto, where the university I would be going to was located. However, there was a new student from Fukushima who had just come to our same department, and he said, “My parents’ house is half washed away and we still haven’t found my sister (who was washed away by the tidal wave), but I still want to become an actor.” I was at a loss as to whether I should be doing art at that time. I’ve had a lot of experiences over the past 10 years, and REVO, which I launched in the year of the Great East Japan Earthquake, was then 10 years old. So, I thought that everything would be connected and that I would like to re-stage Kubochi with a focus on the concept of disaster. So, we remade it using a large number of plastic bags, which we hadn’t used in the premier reperformance.
Why did you choose plastic bags?: In my work goes, we used 10 kg tires, in F/BRIDGE we handled 12 kg concrete blocks as heavy objects with the image of “labor”. Plastic shopping bags, on the other hand, have an image of “daily life.” I thought that plastic bags are deeply involved in people’s lives both in everyday life and in disaster-stricken areas.

There was both the lack of substance of light plastic bags and also the lonely feeling of thinking about a lost hometown. When plastic shopping bags are placed on the floor, just having a person walk past will cause them to move faintly. It makes a noise when you wave them in the air, and there can also be a feeling of loneliness when the wind blows them around on the city streets, can’t there? From the standpoint of “things and bodies,” I thought that there could not only be a reaction to things of heavyweight but also there could a more delicate and subtle way of relating to things.

STUMP PUMP (first performance)
(Feb. 2019 at ArtTheater dB Kobe)

STUMP PUMP TOKYO
(Mar. 2022 at Kichijoji Theater)
Photo: Marika Ishida

Kubochi (nostalgia)
At “Contemporary Ballet of Asia 2022”
(Nov. 2022 at Gangdong Arts Center, Seoul)
Photo: Rachel Na

For the 10th anniversary of REVO, you staged a performance of two works, THUNDER THUNDER, and K92. THUNDER THUNDER was based on a story you had actually written yourself as a child. Copies of the story were also distributed to the audience, and the sense of wit we found in the names of the main characters, Mugonbei (a play on a man’s name written in the characters for “wordless man”) and Keshiro (another play on a man’s name written in the characters that could mean “erased boy”) was just extraordinary [laughs]. It is a 3,600-word epic in which the characters go to an electrical school to get the batteries they need for their video game sets and become involved in an incident. K92 was also an unusual work, involving a dance in which everyone was dressed like Buddha figures in a Mandala painting.: For a long time, I was negative about using words in dance works, but at this time I was interested in creating dance based on plays and other works. I happened to find an essay I had written when I was cleaning out my room in my parents’ house for their move, and I created the work at a time when a (COVID-19) state of emergency had been declared and the rehearsal studio could not be used after 8:00 pm.

Amida Buddha is always portrayed leaning slightly forward so that if there is someone in trouble, the Buddha can rush to them immediately in aid. In fact, my grandmother collapsed and was hospitalized while cleaning out my parents’ house, and she died at the age of 92. At the temple where her funeral was held, there was a statue of Amida Buddha leaning forward in a form that I thought looked like a “K”, so I titled my work K92. When I was in trouble, I felt that my grandmother would come and support me like Amida Buddha. Therefore, these two works are connected in my mind, and both of them carry deep meaning for me.

The day before this interview, I saw the workshop that doubled as an audition for a new work to be performed at Kichijoji Dance Rewrite vol.3. The workshop called “Museum of the Body?” that was being held was very interesting. Dancers (participants) are paired up, and one person used props (chairs, tables, brooms, etc.) in the studio and the other person to choreograph, or rather you might say, to create an “object and person” design. And we would all walk around as if we were looking at the exhibits in a museum.: You can sit still, or you can move around. The important thing is to treat the body as an object and to make the objects the main subject. This is a workshop where participants discover the relationship between the body and object and design space.

This is a workshop I developed for Korean dance students during my two-month residency in Seoul. Even if you don’t have a background in dance, this is a workshop that both adults and children can do, so I hold these workshops in various places. This time it was an audition, so I did it to make people understand that I am an artist who pursues the relationship between objects and the body.
You said, “Don’t do this,” and then you showed what might be called contemporary dance movements.: There are times when such body movements are expected, but I want to see unexpected body movements, and I think that things that put a strain on the body are beautiful. Instead of saying, “Look at my wonderful dance,” what I want is for people to be acutely aware of the body standing on stage, in public, as a spectacle.

After that, I am interested in people who are exposing their hearts and striking out powerfully with their souls. Before I am a dancer, I want to be interested as a person. I don’t want to see how well you trained your body or how well you can dance a movement you are given. What I want to see is you gritting your teeth. I often think that people who are doing that kind of strange theater are often more skilled.
Isn’t that a bit too inward-looking?: I find it attractive when there is a balance between theatrical strength and physical strength. There is a scene where the dancer is just staring at the front in Kubochi (nostalgia), but a dancer staring, and an actor staring are completely different. When you are concentrating only on your body as you move, many people will be thinking about how beautifully they can stand. But the actors can convey a message because they are thinking about the motives behind “why they are there” and move accordingly. I feel that there are many dancers who lack that aspect. Practicing dancing in unison is important, but lately I may be spending more time on practicing emotions and motivations. But in the end, I believe it leads to good works.

By the way, you have received the qualification to work with children as an after-school child guidance instructor and exercise instructor, and on weekdays you work at after-school clubs where you interact with children. It is unique that you can do this while also pursuing your career as a dance artist.: In my mind, I separate these as two different pursuits. Pursuing dance as I want no matter how few people understand it is good, but I also like dancing with children in a fun way. I want to be able to do everything I want to do.

The teachers and I have different perceptions of the children. Children with developmental disabilities and gray areas normally tend to be told when they are acting out of line, and that is stressful. When a child comes up to me while I am talking, they will usually be told by the teachers to stay in their seats. But with dance, even if you move differently from the choreography, I can say, “That’s good too!” I really value the opportunity to raise children’s self-esteem through dance.

Because I am involved in work to help in children’s growth by accepting all types of movements and different values, on the contrary, as a choreographer, I want to be thoroughly particular about my approach to the body.

*1 The All Japan Dance Festival – KOBE (AJDF)
AJDF was established in 1988 by the Japan Women’s Sports Federation, Kobe City, and the Kobe City Board of Education. It was the first nationwide creative dance competition in Japan for students enrolled in high schools, universities, and junior colleges. Held every August, there are two categories: the “Creative Competition Division” for creative dance pieces which have not been previously performed at other events and are performed by teams of five persons or more and less than 30 persons, and the “Participant Presentation Division” open to participants performing various types of dance. Among the participants are many professional dancers and choreographers.

*2 a photograph taken by photographer Kevin Carter during the Sudanese Civil War
Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for this but committed suicide one month later after being accused that “Should have helped the young girl.” Later, there was a controversy with testimony that the vulture just happened to be photographed at the moment it appeared, after which it immediately flew away.

Related Tags

Koichiro Tamura

Koichiro Tamura

Creative Dance and Contemporary Dance

Consecutive awards at the Yokohama Dance Collection

F/BRIDGE

Expanding Activities Overseas

Cardboard boxes and plastic shopping bags

Museum of the Body where anyone can become a choreographer

Activities as an after-school child guidance instructor