Dance

On my first night in Kyoto, I attended FOUR DANCERS vol281 at UrBANGUILD, a cafe/bar and multidisciplinary performance space in the heart of Kyoto. Like an old-school club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it’s dark, grungy, and covered in flyers. UrBANGUILD presents a wide variety of younger and older artists and draws an extremely diverse audience as well, making it a beloved oasis for contemporary and experimental performing artists in the otherwise more traditional and conservative-minded Kyoto. I came to see two artists in particular, Chizuko Kotani / 小谷ちず子 and Miwako Inagaki / 稲垣美輪子.

My encounter with the well-known — but new to me — pianist Hitomi Nishiyama 西山瞳 at SUB Jazz Cafe, a seminal jazz club in Osaka, took me to places I never expected. Although she was playing jazz standards with a makeshift band, her music and career, characterized by curious changes in direction and exquisite elaborations on connections previously unrecognized, set us free.