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After two dance and motion-design workshops held at Brunel University (West London) and Keio University (Tokyo) in 2009, the third cross-cultural UKIYO lab held at Brunel’s Antonin Artaud Centre ended on June 6, 2010, with the premiere of a new film shot on location during the cross-cultural encounter between artists and researchers from the UK and Japan.

The UKIYO project was directed by choreographer and media artist Johannes Birringer and involved collaborative experimentation conjoining artistic and techno-scientific disciplines. Based on a design libretto for the composition of a mixed reality installation – Ukiyo: Moveable World – Birringer’s DAP-Lab ensemble has developed innovative performance concepts for linking physical spaces with online virtual worlds, mediated by a diverse range of innovative wearable designs and intelligent sensing.

The Japanese team visiting Brunel University included researchers from Keio University and a group of butoh dancers from the renowned Maison d’Artaud led by Hironobu Oikawa, a master teacher and director who had studied Artaud’s visionary theatrical ideas in Paris in the 1950s and later taught his own method alongside Japan’s butoh founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The DAP-lab members had been received at Oikawa’s studio last December, and a lively process of cultural exchange was initiated.

It was a sad coincidence that the visiting dancers, Biyo Kikuchi, Yumi Sagara, and Jun Makime learnt of the death of their 103-year old master, Kazuo Ohno, on the day of their arrival in London, whereupon the lab decided to create a special film as a tribute to Ohno and incorporate the filmed dance in the creation of UKIYO.

In a remarkable historical convergence, the Japanese dancers from the Maison d’Artaud (Tokyo) thus featured in the creation of a new installation staged

at Brunel’s new performing arts centre named after Antonin Artaud. The building was inaugurated in 2009 under the tutelage of Steve Dixon, the former head of the School of Arts.

The DAP ensemble is now taking the new work to Slovenia, with public exhibitions of UKIYO and a workshop held at KIBLA Media Arts Centre in Maribor. In the winter of 2010-11, the new production and wearable designs will have their London premiere, with the participation of the Maison d’Artaud performers and Yoko Higashino (Baby Q Contemporary Dance Company), one of the rising stars of Japan’s contemporary dance scene. The full version of the UKIYO butoh film dedicated to Kazuo Ohno, directed and edited by Birringer and featuring the Japanese dancers with conceptual fashion design by Michèle Danjoux and music by Alexander Finlayson, will be released this summer.

Website: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/ukiyo.html

For further information, call +44 (0)1895 267 343

Or email: Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk

The UKIYO project is supported by a PMi2/connect British Council research cooperation