Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, België

A story of a meeting:

One lives in Tokyo and the other one in Brussels. They did not know each other personally, but they began to read each other’s online diaries. It was not only interesting, but also exciting to learn about somebody’s daily live, without ever having met before.
After a while one of them broke the silence and send the other an e-mail. From then onwards they started e-mailing regularly.

Questions came to the fore

“ I seem to know everything about this person’s live, but who is she actually? Does she even look like how she describes herself in her diary? Is it possible for me to know her? Does she exist even? It felt as if I knew her because of daily meetings, somebody that walked around somewhere, but was not really present. Maybe she is the one I could have been if I had not left Japan 16 years ago?”

The first real meeting took place in a bar in Tokyo in December 2004. They then decided to get to know each other in a more direct way in the dance studio.

The second meeting was in kaaitheaterstudio’s in Brussels in august 2005. This time they reserved two weeks for each other. They talked a lot, but also danced and ate together. They exchanged thoughts. For the first time, we became aware of each other’s identity. It became more and more clear why they wanted to work together. Two issues came to the fore: the notion of somebody’s body on the one hand, and the use of a habit as a starting point for new movements.

Working material: body notions and subject/object experiences

When Un Yamada was little, she did not understand where the outlines of her body were. She asked her mother “where do I begin?” She did see the ends of her arms and her legs, but she still had the sensation that she was longer than she perceived when looking at herself. The space at the outside of her arms still felt as being part of her arms. On top of that she was confused about who or what ‘managed’ her body: her limbs did not seem to be hers. When she got older, she continued to have these thoughts. When she became 13, she heard that she suffered from rheumatism.

“Since I have rheumatism, I wake up everyday with stiff joints. When it rains, fingers and legs get so painful as if someone is putting a needle in them. I have a feeling that it is not me who has pain but rather a part of my body. The part that has pain has nothing to do with me, only the fingers have pain. I believe I developed this idea of separating the emotions (I) and my body. I understand body parts literally as parts of my body that only exist as my body within the frame of my subject, my I. I feel this body, but it is never my body, maybe it is yours, or ours or nobody’s.”

Furthermore, this body I feel alienated from is just a small and unnamed organism (part) of this universe. I can’t help asking if there is any border between my body and the other’s body. If there are two bodies in a same space and time, it varies if we recognize those two bodies as two or one unit; it depends on the environment and timing. In our society, we are so trained to the idea to see them as two.

This duet is not meant to focus on the relationship between Yukiko and Un. It is not our intention to discover the relation or the distance of our personalities. it questions rather, how we can extend one’s body without distinguishing it from the other body.”

Also Shinozaki starts from a fragmented body notion. The latter can be described as a form of dissonant harmony, where all layers and elements of the body have contradictory relations with each other. When she moves she tries to subjectify certain parts while objectifying others. During her previous production (inner horizon) She also started to research the idea of an assimilation between space and body. Where does one’s self begin and where does space begins? In this production we consider consciousness as a form of energy that is determined through time. In this mode of thinking, the world does no longer exist out of objects, but it is made up out of overlapping energy fields (cfr dramaturgy of terminal and inner horizon).

Dramaturgical background

Shinozaki and Yamada look for inspiration in eastern movement theories that use the transfer of weight and energy in your body in an alternative way. On the other side there is the influence of quantum physics. Especially of David Bohm, one of its founders. He is being remembered as a theoretician that looked into the relations between particles and the idea of a ‘wave’ on another level. He emphasised the relative autonomy of the behaviour of these small particles. In Bohm’s view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary “subtotalities” derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogy of a flowing stream.
He is also known from the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Aharonov and Bohm found that in certain circumstances electrons are able to “feel” the presence of a nearby magnetic field even though they are travelling in regions of space where the field strength is zero.

“Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to ‘know’ another, and to what extent would this be possible?”
(D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p.ix)

The movements shall be developed by taking routine actions and habits as a point of departure. The latter shall be shifted in the scope of the afore mentioned mode of thinking. How can we expand our body, without making a distinction with another body? How can we avoid the audience’s question:” why are there two bodies on stage?”. This question cannot be avoided. Therefore the movement material shall exist out of an accumulation of transformations and mutations of daily movement throughout the piece. By continuously shifting the same movement, by changing its surroundings and its consciousness, we hope to be able to question and to blur the borderline between two bodies.

During 2006 Yamada and Shinozaki continue to exchange e-mails, thoughts. They will also send each other books, photo’s, video’s. the communication is followed by a dramaturg, Sara Jansen, who already worked for rosas productions.