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PERFOMANCE

Side/side

­Choreography / Concept: Shumpei Nemoto
Dance: Louise Perming, Javier Perez
Production support: Konstnärsnämnden/International Dance program, Choreographic Center Heidelberg
 
– A sound in space ­-
 
A composer John Cage once said “Let sounds be just sounds.” and I found this thought is very interesting and I tried to think from choreographer perspective and it will be like, “Let movement be just movement.”
I found it is very challenging and fascinating idea and I would like to explore it in choreography. My first approach is to explore the ways to eliminate the meaning of the movement and go away from ordinal construction of the choreography. I continued research about John Cage and I got to know the idea of chance operation. Which John Cage was used to use for his composition and it was also used by choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Chance operation is about having outer source to determine your decision and to led by it. And I thought my version of chance operation will be to create a list of numbers which are refer to different body parts and actions and by tossing a dice, it tells which body parts that you will use and which kind of action (swing, turn, hop, slide, flip or many other) that you will do. The movement quality that I will research in this process is accuracy and directness.
When I saw one of John Cage composition “Water walk”, I found his movement (turn on the mixer, place the flower base in bath tub, drinking the water and so on) to play the music was looked like a choreography. But yet, he was moving the object because of the music / score.
John Cage also mentioned that he wanted to sounds to follow one another in a free, artless sequence and works would be structured simply in terms of durations between events. And I thought if I concentrate to play the choreography only by the duration (time or counts that decided by chance operation) the movement might liberate from the performer’s interpretation and come close to the concept of “Let movement be just movement”.