Live Arts Presents Kota Yamazaki's Final Installment Of Series

New York Live Arts (Live Arts) to present the world premiere of Kota Yamazaki/Fluid Hug-Hug's Darkness Odyssey Part 3: Non-Opera, Becoming, April 3-6, 2019, having commissioned the work as part of the Live Feed Residency Program. A co-presentation with Mount Tremper Arts, the final installment of Yamazaki's Darkness Odyssey series, is a non-operatic dance celebrating the bridge between "this self" and "the other self." Bessie Award winning Yamazaki magnifies the ever-changing state and process of "becoming" while encouraging exchange between performers from different dance practices, and cultural backgrounds.

Trained in Butoh and exploring how to expand its notions, fluidity and pace, Yamazaki ultimately aims to blur the distinction between individual dance forms by boiling them down to their most fundamental essence. 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 final section continues the series exploration of the body as a black hole, which absorbs everything, even seemingly unrelated things equally, and addresses how individuals deal with an ever-shifting sense of the subject and self-identity.

The performances at New York Live Arts theater feature dancers Connor Voss, Jennifer Gonzalez, Joanna Kotze, Taketeru Kudo, Mina Nishimura, Alain Sinandja and Kota Yamazaki. Music is composed by Masahiro Sugaya, with lighting design by Thomas Dunn, costume design by Kota Yamazaki, and set design by award-winning architecture firm SO-IL. A Stay Late Conversation will take place following the show on April 4.

Performances of Darkness Odyssey Part 3: Non-Opera, Becoming take place at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th St New York, NY 10011) April 3, 4, 5 and 6 at 7:30pm. Tickets start at $15/$20 and can be purchased here. The running time is approximately 70 minutes.

The Live Feed creative residency program is a laboratory for the development of new commissioned work directed toward the Live Arts theater. The Live Feed program is supported in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Partners for New Performance.

The creation of this work was supported in part by the Japan Foundation through the Performing Arts JAPAN program, Guggenheim Fellowship and by residencies at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and at Mount Tremper Arts Center through their Watershed Program.

Born in Niigata, Japan, Yamazaki was first introduced to butoh under the teaching of Akira Kasai, and graduated from Bunka Fashion College with BA in Fashion Design. With the invitation to make a new work with Senegal-based company Jant-bi, Yamazaki disbanded his Tokyo-based company rosy co. (1995-2001), and left Japan. Since 2003, Yamazaki with NY-based Fluid hug-hug has been presenting works. Yamazaki is a recipient of The New York Dance and Performance Awards (the Bessie Award) of 2007, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant award of 2013, NYFA Fellowship of 2016, and Guggenheim Fellowship of 2018. Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug has been performing at national and international venues including Melbourne International Arts Festival (Australia), PICA/TBA Festival (OR), EMPAC, Andy Warhol Museum (PA), NUS for the Arts (Singapore), Painted Bride Art Center (PA), Gammage at Arizona State University, Miami Light Project (FL), the Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago, Wesleyan University (CT), North Forth Art Center (NM), Globalize: Cologne (Germany), Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Japan Society among others. Throughout these years, Yamazaki has been teaching at various universities, institutions and for local communities. He also has been organizing cross-disciplinary Whenever Wherever Festival in Tokyo since 2009 while serving as Director for Body Arts Laboratory, a Tokyo-based artist-run organization.

SO-IL (Set Designer) is an idea-driven design office that brings together extensive experience from the fields of architecture, academia, and the arts. A creative catalyst involved in all scales and stages of the architectural process, SO-ILapproaches projects with an intellectual and artistic rigor fueled by a strong commitment to realizing ideas in the world. SO-IL is lead by partners Florian Idenburg, Jing Liu and Ilias Papageorgiou.SO-IL has worked on an array of projects ranging in scale from the master plan of a cultural campus in Shanghai, China to a series of prints for the Guggenheim Museum. Projects include the flagship store for Benetton in NYC, student housing in Athens, Greece, the Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California in Davis, the Frieze Art Fair in NYC, and Kukje Gallery in Seoul.

The work has received numerous awards, including the MoMAPS1 Young Architects Program, the AIA Young Practices Award and the Emerging Voices award by the Architectural League. SO-IL has been widely featured in international publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Domus, and in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urbanism, Studio-X in Beijing, Kunsthal KAdE in The Netherlands and the Benaki Museum in Greece. The work of SO-IL is part of the collections of the MoMA, the Art Institute Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum.

Thomas Dunn (Lighting Designer) designs lighting for architecture, dance, music, theater, and visual art venues in the US and abroad. Design credits include works with; The Civilians, Gone Missing and Paris Commune, DD Dorvillier/human future dance corps, Coming Out of the Night With Names, No Change or "freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill," Nottthing Is Importanttt (for which he received a 2007 Bessie Award) Choreography, a Prologue for the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready!, Sens Production/Noémie Lafrance, Noir, Agora, Melt, Rapture and Home, Trajal Harrell, Notes On Less Than Zero, Before Intermission, Showpony, and Quartet for the End of Time. Thomas is the recipient of a 2009 Kevin Kline Award for Outstanding Lighting Design, The Little Dog Laughed, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. He was educated at Bennington College and Yale School of Drama.

Masahiro Sugaya (Composer) is one of the standing composers in the field of contemporary music in Japan. After completing master program in composition under Joji Yuasa and Teizo Matsumura at Tokyo College of Music, he has worked as a musical director in wide range of fields, including stage, screen, television and contemporary art. He joined in the activities of the dance theater company 'Pappa TARAHUMARA' in 1987, and since then has composed and directed all musical activities. Three of his scores, Zoo of the Sea, Parade and The Bush of Ghosts have been released on CD. He also has composed original scores for dance performances choreographed by Kota Yamazaki including Picnic, Cholon, Chamisa 4, Ray of Space and Darkness Odyssey Part 1: Expose Your Feet to Dry Lights. His style of creations is involving from computer music to Japanese new tradition. He has been a guest faculty at Tohoku University of Art and Design.

Mina Nishimura (Project Assistant/ Performer), from Tokyo, was introduced to butoh and improvisational dance through Kota Yamazaki while studying at Merce Cunningham Studio. As performer, she has been fortunate to work with groundbreaking artists in dance, theater, music and film, such as Kota Yamazaki, Neil Greenberg, David Gordon, DD Dorvillier, Yoshiko Chuma, RoseAnne Spradlin, Daria Fain, Trajal Harrel, Mårten Spångberg, Cori Olinghouse, Moriah Evans, in most recently with John Jasperse, Dean Moss, Rashaun Mitchell+Silas Riener, Vicky Shick, Nami Yamamoto, Ursula Eagly and Ellen Fisher. She has also collaborated and performed with SIA on Saturday Night Live, in PRADA/Miu Miu Women's Tales film directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall and in MV of Late Sea in recent years. Her own choreographic works have been commissioned by NYU Skirball Center, Danspace Project, Gibney Dance, Mount Tremper Arts Center, UC Davis (CA), Dance Theater Workshop, Whenever Wherever Festival (Tokyo), The Kitchen/Dance and Process, among other dance organizations. She was the danceweb scholar at Impulse Tanz (Vienna) in 2009, and has been the Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in 2010-11, Chez Bushwick in 2013, Movement Research in 2013-15, and Camargo Foundation (France) in 2017. During these years, she has taught at Bennington College, UC Davis (CA), Ferris University (Japan) and Brooklyn Studios for Dance, and is a current Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and Movement Research. Nishimura is a 2019 recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award.

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