Dance Exclamation: A Review of Kentaro's performance

Born in 1980, Kentaro!! is one of the most promising young contemporary dancers in Japan. Deeply impressed by street dance culture as a child, he then discovered contemporary dance and its improvisational aspects. He started to work on pieces combining street dance techniques and dramatic elements of contemporary dance. His performances are lyrical, reflecting the experiences of young people living in modern Japanese society.

Kentaro!! in After Rain it Will be Sunny at the Chinmaya Mission, New Delhi, on the 16th of March, performed hope post the tragedy of the earthquake in Japan. His swift and lucid movements set an optimistic tone for the future that will bring about brightness and joy even though the mood be gray and melancholic now. 

He adopts a fused style of  hip-hop and  contemporary that combine everyday movement and emotions. Kentaro's expression has a very personal and sensitive tone, which resonates among the audience with his own story lines and self-composed music. His music is all self-composed and he breaks the performance into two to sing a song of a broken heart. In his free-flowing and unstylized performance Kentaro!! articulates anger, joy and fatigue with performing a repetitive motion. 

The performance itself keep changing hue and texture and Kentaro!! added an interactive moment with the audience when he spoke to the audience directly like a singer in a live performance would. He touches the audience with his simplicity and directness and practices a complete absence of pretense in his performance and his attitude.

Matter of Art & Death: A Review of Aki Sasamoto's performance 'Centrifugal March'

This is review was first published in ArtSlant
Centrifugal March, a Performance by Aki Sasamoto

by Manjari Kaul

Centrifugal March was performed by Aki Sasamoto at Lalit Kala Academy, 
On the 21^st of January as part of the exhibition, Omnilogue: Journey to the West

According to ancient Egyptian burial practice, the dead were buried with certain goods that were thought to accompany them through their afterlife. These objects could range from everyday goods such as pottery and grain to luxury items such as furniture and even jewels. In certain Mongolian Buddhist traditions, after death the body is taken away from the village and laid out in the open with a stone outline placed around it.  Once natural predators have consumed the body, the stone outline forms a referent to the dead person. In contemporary Buddhist traditions in Japan, the corpse is put on dry ice contained in a casket with a selection of items that the deceased was fond of such as candies or even cigarettes. Hence it feels almost universal that after a person's death certain objects become referents to the deceased one.  The nature of this transference may be so complete that it begins to feel that in her afterlife she is the rocking chair she would sit on while she told us tales of her childhood adventures or that he somehow is the black umbrella that he never ventured out without even on clear days.

(Aki Sasamoto, Photo by Daisuke Yamashiro; Courtesy of Kaisuke Yamashiro and the artist.)

When you are in the midst of a chaotic arrangement of unrelated objects suspended from the ceiling, strewn on the floor, or jutting out of the wall, you hardly imagine what appears to be a physics   experiment will turn out to be a deliberation on death and memory. Aki Sasamoto, in her performance,Centrifugal March, yokes Classical mechanics with the philosophy of death as she explains the phenomenon under whose influence “Humans become Objects with its Centrifugal Force.”(1)

Lumps of ice tied from the ceiling with colourful shoe-laces melt, water droplets falling into steel bowls placed below the ice. With the background score of the dripping water, Sasamoto darts across the room with her marker, at one point assuming the role of a school-teacher-like character, explaining centrifugal and centripetal force by drawing a spiral diagram on the wall.  At another moment in the performance, she gracefully steered a discomfortingly coffin-like cupboard with wheels around the room, breathlessly talking about death, funeral rituals and remembrance of the deceased through their possessions. Sasamoto engages her audience as she deliriously bores holes through a
 huge bar of ice and talks of the ritual of the body of the dead being preserved on ice. In her staccato movements around the room she threw a dart at the spiral diagram on the wall and almost hit an audience member.  Watching her furiously stab ice blobs arranged in the room, one gets the sense that she is not aware of her audience. Sasamoto talks of her grandmother's pearl necklace as something that she prizes and treasures after the relative's demise. The object becomes more than a memorial, it somehow takes the place of the person altogether.

(Aki Sasamoto, Photo by Daisuke Yamashiro; Courtesy of Kaisuke Yamashiro and the artist.)

In her research of death rituals in India, the U.S.-based Japanese artist visited crematoriums, doctors and astrologers to note the matter-of-fact way in which death is dealt with in the country. In her spiral diagram she seemed to depict her perception of this attitude through its origin in the common Hindu and Buddhist belief that life and death are an unending cycle. The performance worked as a meta-critical piece as it pointed towards the very nature of performance art -- a life lived twice over.  The characteristics of a live performance are akin to human life in Sasamoto's philosophy – lived through a mortal body and then embodied in a material object that becomes a referent to the deceased. A performance must be ephemeral, yet the second time around the performance is lived through memory. Thus performance is a kind of death. Aki Sasamoto's performance writes as epitaph for an art form that must perform its own death to be remembered ad infinitum.

1. Aki Sasamoto in her artist's statement on the performance piece, Centrifugal March.

Courtesy: www.artslant.com

When Japan Designed to Design: A Review of "Design Today 100"

By Manjari Kaul

In his curatorial note for Design 100 Hiroshi Kashigawi writes, "Upon arriving in an unfamiliar city, we notice its topography and vegetation and observe the characteristics of its natural environment. We also look at the buildings and equipment people use in everyday life to get an idea of the local culture."

If the central tenets of Japanese design corresponds to what defines Japanese culture then the Japanese can be said to be minimalists, efficient and futuristic. With the legacy of the best workmanship in the world and invention of several machines and everyday objects that have made our lives simpler and faster, the Japanese have have been torchbearers of the design industry.

Design 100, an exhibition of Japanese designs brings for the people of Delhi, carefully annotated exhibits of household goods like the Toshiba rice cooker to designs of cars like the Subaru 360. A majority of the exhibit are contemporary designs, with a few post World War II ones like the Nikon F camera and the Subaru 360 car. The Nikon F was Nikon's first SLR, a leader in 1959. The utility of the camera was doubled by an X-Ray mapping device to create its indelible mark in the area of camera design.

The Sony walkman and the Subaru 360 car have particular relevance in the Indian context. The Sony walkman achieved huge success in the Indian market and rose to become a much coveted commodity. In the explanation of the social, historical and economic relevance of the design of the small car, Subaru 360 is mentioned the fact that it was designed by the Fuji company in 1959, a precursor to the Maruti 800 (brought to India by Suzuki) that zipped through  Indian roads in the 80s.


The designs at the exhibition were sleek and stylish, yet achieving maximum utility through their cleverly crafted designs. These Japanese designs and everyday products contain a sensibility that has many a lesson in store for the Indian industry- most of all, the idea of a minutely detailed object that fits in the palm of your hand that unfolds to hold the awe and admiration of the world.


The exhibition, Design Today 100 is on at Japan Foundation, New Delhi till the 15th of January, 2012, from 12pm to 8pm.

Silent Serenation: A Review of 'The Water Station'

By Manjari Kaul

The Water Station, a play performed by the group, Theatre Roots & Wings, Kerala is commissioned by The Japan Foundation, was performed on the 14^th of January 2012 at Bharat Rang Mahotsav, organized by National School of Drama, New Delhi.

The play info brochure reads: 'The Water Station is a two-hour, wordless performance. Walking through a barren landscape, eighteen travellers stop by at a dripping water faucet. They drink, soak, meet, love, fight, weep, separate and in the end, leave, while a man living in junk pile observes their action from above. Abounding in images of fragmentation and decay, the play depicts the decline and fall of human civilization. The play is about loneliness, the need for sustenance and the fragility of love.'

The travellers etch out their “being” as they perform in slow motion, in silence (apart from the constant trickle of the tap and a few musical interjections). The absence of dialogue and slowness of the actors' movement triggers off the imagination of the audience. Every moment is stretched out to bring to the audience's notice, the weight of time that one often attempts to fill up with the illusion of love, happiness and significance.

All the travellers who pass by try to create their own relationship with the water faucet in attempts to define or shrug off their identities. Each of them plays out as if a stage of human life. It opens with the girl in a frock carrying a satchel who drinks water and then watches the two middle aged men kiss as they fight for the water; followed by a woman with a parasol; then enters a couple carrying a pram filled with junk who's urgent lovemaking is interrupted by an old woman who dies after quenching her thirst; a family of travellers experience a deeply stirring moment in which makes them let out a silent scream; a man and woman who bathe at the tap and attempt to fill the void in their beings with an embrace, end up in the woman experiencing a violation which is stifled by the man; a man with a huge load brushes his teeth at the tap to the rhythm of arabesque music that stops abruptly. In a rare moment of brightness on a dimly lit stage, the actors are struck by shock and grief. Their agony is immense but they must keep walking on.

The pile of rubbish on stage symbolizes the decay of life. The pile comprises a walker, suitcase, table fan, bicycle wheel – a heap of human discards. The actors work out a mechanics of symmetry and rhythm- a tight rope walk performed immaculately in their journey that seems like still music.

The play ends where it began- with the little girl wearing the satchel. This draws our attention to the cyclical nature of life. The Water Station is a metaphor for life that plays out in a loop of events to a melancholic tune and the monotonous dripping of a water tap. The play challenges our notions of theatre, its role and connect with basic human existence.

-Manjari Kaul

Cast and Crew of The Water Station:

Playwright: Shogo Ohta

Director: Shankar Venkateswaran

Cast: Moon Moon Singh, Ravindra Vijay, Sunil Bannur, Asha Ponikiewska, Anirudh Nair, Kavita Srinivasan, Yeshwanth Kuchabal, Scherazade Kaikobad, Smitha P., Kavita Srinivasan, Ishwari Bose-Bhattacharya, Mandakini Goswami, Sunil Bannur, Vinu Joseph, Sunitha, Siddharth Mishra, Shankar Venkateswaran.

Scenography and photography: Delijo Thekkekkara

Set Advice: Sujathan

Lights: Jose Koshy

Sound: Shankar Venkateswaran

Technical Direction: Prabhath Bhaskaran

Production: Anil Ramachandra, Anish Victor, Satoko Tsurudome

Images courtesy Delijo Thekkekkara