Random

Dance

Sofiane Ouissi and dove from "Bird," photo © by Pol Guillard

Photo © by Pol Guillard, L’Art Rue-Dream City 2025

Dancing with a Dove

At the Aichi Triennale 2025, one experience stood out as a shared highlight for our group of thirteen: Bird by the brother-and-sister team Selma and Sofiane Ouissi. Doves make no effort to “collaborate” or to “create a good work.” For this reason, Sofiane must have needed a radically different reconstruction of bodily context than in dancing solo or with another human. That was what I wanted to witness.

Ro Hasegawa 長谷川朗and Hitomi Nishiyama 西山瞳 at Sub Jazz Cafe, 4/19/24

Photo © by Christopher Pelham

Dance Japan Travel Music

The Sound of Freedom: Pianist Hitomi Nishiyama at SUB (Osaka, 4/18/24)

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.

Dancer Chizuko Kotani and 5-string fretless bass player Hajime Totani at UrBANGUILD FOuR DANCERS vol.281, 4/16/24

Music Dance Japan Travel

Facing Death, Finding Oneself at UrBANGUILD, Kyoto (April 16, 2024)

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.