- Concept -

Omit the body and expand.
People use technologies that allow them to move as little as possible. I have no quarrel with these technologies, which make life easier for all. But when the body is omitted to this extent, it is a little unsettling. Our imagination tries to bring occurrences of the distant past and times from the past or future to the front of our minds, as if they were actually here in the present. Nevertheless, people cannot even imagine the tragedies of long ago, and cannot share the bodies which experienced them.
We stand at places that are empty, spend time that is not real, listen to voices without speech, and encounter people without bodies. Death is right before us, unlimited, and decisive. Life is here and now, limited, and with an uncertain future.
The work explores corporality that can be really felt by us who live in an age in which the body is no longer needed.

- Review -

"A Genuine Attitude toward the Times and Cogency" Akiko Tachiki, Dance Critic

The Internet instantly links us with the other side of the globe. A speed nullifying time and space is beginning to exert an influence on human cognition. In the glut of information, the pain of an other is merely a distant image. The new work by Nibroll, a group of artists in heterogenous fields arrayed around choreographer Mikuni Yanaihara, focuses on the dangers and shadiness of an age marked by faded corporeality. Mobile art (Takuya Kamiike), cutting-edge visuals (Keisuki Takahashi), physically moving music (SKANK), and the choreography of Yanaihara, who extensively incorporates everyday gestures and moves, smoothly mesh and synergistically generate a very cogent piece.
A space enclosed with white walls. Running with all her might, Yanaihara crashes into the wall at top speed. The flow of numerals and information that continues to race before our eyes is unintelligible. The sound of speech confessing ignorance is joined with looped footage of a dancer hanging herself. These stand in sharp contrast to a totally exhausted man swinging a tennis racket and the freewheeling dance by young women. Meanwhile, objects are thrown away, and the old clothes worn by dancers are piled up on stage. This juxtaposition of the breathing of flesh-and-blood dancers with the debris of life is a device for cutting through the membrane covering the real. Suddenly, we are connected to the memory of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the visuals shift to neutral colors. Living time does not permit us to go back. Symbolic expression imbued with allegory awakens the buried memories.
In the final act, pieces of ominous black cloth that continue to fall on the stage call to mind the black rain that fell on Hiroshima after the atomic blast. The dancers pick them up along with the objects and clothes scattered around the stage as if hinting at the mass-consumption bent of contemporary society, put them into a box, and push the box to the rear. It has been 70 years since the end of the Second World War and four since the earthquake disaster. One wonders if there is any way to stop the erosion of memory. While there is some room for exercise of more ingenuity in aspects such as presentation of the physical reality of the dancers grouped by age, the work is a good one that squarely confronts the times.

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