Un Yamada

Photo: Ran Himeda

Un Yamada

Coming from a background of training in apparatus gymnastics, ballet and butoh, Un Yamada became active as a choreographer from 1996. She is an artist who uses music, art, literature, scholarship, fashion, and the bodies of varied dancers as resources for creating dance that is rich in intelligent wit. In 1995 she studied in the United States. Yamada won the French Embassy Prize for Young Choreographers and a scholarship to study in France in the solo and duo dance competition of the Yokohama Dance Collection in 2000. In 2002, she formed her own company Co. Yamada Un and has worked ambitiously presenting works as one of Japan’s few and unique contemporary dance companies. She has also won a reputation for artistic excellence as a solo dancer and performed her dances of great vitality and original imagination in her dance and talk “Solo Live Tour” around Japan. Also, in cooperation with local public halls around the country, she has been a pioneer of community dance, conducting many workshops for children, citizen groups, the elderly, people with disabilities and other groups, while creating works for public performance. Other activities include choreographing movement for theater and opera productions and creating children’s books, based on original and highly varied ideas and a common medium of the human body.