Videos

http://www.wexarts.org/pa/index.php?eventid=6739 With Holistic Strata Umeda has turned into a human screen, a dancing landscape, seemingly on the verge of being overwhelmed by pixels and dissolving into the electron flux.… Their power [is] enhanced by Umeda's own performance.”—Guardian (UK) Japanese artist Hiroaki Umeda is at the cutting edge of integrating advanced digital technology into his dynamic works for the stage. Umeda, whose company is called S20, is now recognized more as a visual artist than as a choreographer, a mover rather than a dancer. Creating tightly composed action that is minimal and radical, subtle and violent, Umeda also incorporates crackling digital soundscapes and awe-inspiring vistas of projected images and lighting. These designs are equal elements in his concepts, not just backdrops or secondary considerations. Drawing from butoh and street dance, he builds accumulations of electrifying physical activity that seem simultaneously constrained and explosive. He suggests an individual navigating and subsumed within vast fields of data, mirroring the accelerated pace of life in hyperurban Japan. When Hiroaki Umeda performed his first solo program in this country at the Wexner Center in 2007, his early work already revealed a fully formed vision well suited to our intimate Performance Space. For this program, we are presenting Umeda downtown in the Riffe Center’s Capitol Theatre to better suit the more expansive thrust he has pursued lately. In Holistic Strata you will see him totally immersed in shifting skeins of intense digital light patterns that respond directly to his charged movement. And in Haptic he steps away from digital imagery to explore a chromatic universe created with lighting to, as he expresses it, "focus on the physical aspect of the perception of color, not simply to show it, but to give substance to the relationship it has with dance." http://www.wexarts.org/pa/index.php?eventid=6739