Yuya Tsukahara

Post Punk Performance

“I wish to create something we’ve never seen before, which touches on and deconstructs the frame of ‘performing’ in a playful way.”

Japanese performer, director, and choreographer Yuya Tsukahara is a co-founder, together with dancer Masaru Kakio, of the improvisational performance collective contact Gonzo. Formed in 2006 in Osaka, contact Gonzo developed an improvisational style of physical practice in which fluid movements are accompanied by blows and slaps that resemble physical altercations, thereby blurring the boundaries between violence and trust.

Tsukahara and Kakio describe their approach as “Philosophy of pain, technique of contact,” radically deconstructing the idea of conventional performances. The collective, which currently consists of five members, performs in public space, nature, galleries, museums, theaters, dance festivals, and also stages urban interventions in cities around the world.

Uthis Haemamool and Toshiki Okada, Pratthana: a portrait of possession, 2018. Photo: Takuya Matsumi

Besides performances, contact Gonzo creates and exhibits installations made with video, photography, and zines. Tsukahara additionally works as a solo artist and directs performance programs for festivals. He was the scenographer and choreographer for the theater piece Prathana, which was directed by Toshiki Okada and based on a novel by Uthis Haemamool. Since 2020, he is a co-director of KYOTO EXPERIMENT, an international theater arts festival. Tsukahara also teaches at art schools in Kyoto.

contact Gonzo and YCAM BIO RESEARCH, Wow, see you in the next life. Photo: Yuki Moriya

As a mentor, Tsukahara seeks applicants who are interested in creating performative work, whether they come with a background in dance or theater, or from entirely different artistic disciplines. He intends to explore the very form of performance with potential candidates, considering together the power of improvisation, errors, and failed attempts, and the murky distinctions between humor and play and somber performativity. “Hanging out and playing becomes part of your job,” he says.

“I wish to create something we’ve never seen before, which touches on and deconstructs the frame of ‘performing’ in a playful way. I would like to meet people who want to create a new value set in the performing art scene, something that hasn’t yet been understood as art.”

Watch Yuya Tsukahara’s video statement:

Nominees

Fabian Krestel

The Labyrinth

Fabian Krestel is a Brussels-based dancer and choreographer with formal training as a circus performer. His proposal, which functions as research on the relation between process and product, includes a performance and an installation focused on abstracting circus-related practices such as juggling. In The Labyrinth, Krestel seeks playful ways to translate movement patterns into visual traces within controlled frameworks—yet ones in which randomness may occur. He is looking to carve a space for spectacle, playfulness, complexity, simplicity, and beauty. By exploring physical necessities that are related to movement—for example balancing objects or provoking imbalance—he examines formats that evoke both visual and experiential results; both a trace and an event. Krestel is intrigued by the search for organic forms, near-perfect structures rendered human by a mistake (intentional or not). He wants to share his creative process, and give the public the means to attend and participate in the creation of his works.

Richard McReynolds

Visceral Mindfulness

Richard McReynolds is a Belfast-born composer and multimedia artist living in Cardiff, Wales who explores the ways in which technology blurs the distinctions between artistic mediums. His work includes visualizing sound, generating still images from sonic input, creating electronic instruments to track physical movement, and designing light-tracking installations. McReynolds invites the audience to play with sound, movement, and digital control in active and embodied ways. In his project Visceral Mindfulness, he proposes a performance piece comprising movement and sound, which increasingly grows into an overpowering cacophony. McReynolds, as the performer in the piece, will struggle to endure against the noise, while a webcam will track his movements. The more he moves, the more silence he is able to create. A physical reaction to mental overstimulation, his motions will become more and more aggressive and combative. But battling the onslaught of information is a fight that the performer can’t win.

Victor Artiga Rodriguez

Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages

Hailing from El Salvador, Victor Artiga Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the convergence of poetry, the body, and digital technologies. Through multimedia installations and performances, he explores new forms of narration that touch upon themes of decolonization, climate crisis, and nostalgia. Often interweaving electronics with organic materials such as clay and ceramics, his installations invite the performers and viewers to critically reflect on our condition as a techno-consumer society. Rodriguez aims to create a performative inquiry into methods for communicating the empathy needed to respond to the climate crisis. He proposes a piece that examines how bodies, human and nonhuman, are subject to experience climate changes on a micropolitical scale. Acting out different scenarios, participants will explore, through somatic and sound exercises, how bodies respond to the contamination of water sources. The performances will generate a comprehensive narration-installation that is activated through the moving body and uses maps as an inspiration for its patterns.