[POSTPONED] Freeway Dance
Ayaka Nakama
We wholeheartedly regret to announce the postponement of Ayaka Nakama’s upcoming show Freeway Dance, which was scheduled to open at On the Boards beginning Thursday, April 27.
On the Boards and the production team behind the performance have mutually agreed that due to various unforeseen complications, it would not have been possible to deliver Freeway Dance in an uninhibited fashion this season. We look forward to working with Ayaka and her team to identify a more appropriate opportunity for the show as soon as possible.
We apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment this announcement has caused, and aim to address any questions or concerns in a timely fashion.
Close your eyes and think back to the first time you remember dancing.
What is our first memory of dancing? To write and choreograph Freeway Dance, Japanese dancer Ayaka Nakama asked a number of people close to her — a neighbor, her father, her friends — to describe their first memory of themselves dancing. Nakama treats these memories as choreography in order to reconstruct these movements with her own body.
Thursday, April 27 at 6pm
Friday, April 28 at 6pm
Saturday, April 29 at 6pm
Sunday, April 30 at 6pm
Duration: This is an installation which provides audience members 4 hour to sit, stand, and wander, to take everything in.
More About This Piece
Ayaka Nakama is a dancer. She wants to be choreographed by everything that exists in the world. Freeway Dance is a time and place where she considers “other people’s memories (of their first dance)” as her choreography and lets her body dance. The running time is four hours including food break. The space is an indoor planted garden in which a swing, bookshelf and capsule-toy vending machine find their places. Audience can walk around the garden freely (they can also lie on the floor) to encounter Nakama’s solo dance. Phenomena that induce new dance, stimulated by her dance, lurk everywhere in the garden. Audience move spontaneously to discover them. We start from deconstructing what constitutes the power system of the current production system, one element after another, apparently pastorally. And then we want to extract the outline of dance, connecting dance and infinite non-dance phenomena, through which to reflect on the “dance to come.”
"I have worked on the stage with countless choreographers, believing that it is the dancer's job to launch choreography as a dance and let the choreographed body dance. My body cannot dance without choreography, and it has the property that it wants to dance a lot, so it needs much more choreography (like food). Choreography exists in various forms anytime and anywhere. I have long wanted to dance to all the choreography that exists in this world.” - Ayaka Nakama
”In this project, I asked people who are not specialists in dance or performing arts about "a memory of when they danced for the first time in their lives", and I treated those memories as choreography. I stack multiple choreographies in my body without replacing them. Let's dance with a plump and luxurious body that has stored many foods." - Ayaka Nakama
Credits
By and with Ayaka Nakama
Dramaturgy Shunsuke Manabe, Tomonori Fujisawa
Memory /Choreography Chihiro Kano, Kimiaki Nakama, Tadasu Masuda, Tomonori Fujisawa, Tsubasa Ako, and others
Scenography Moenaing Aung, Mikio Tazoe
Technical Director Kazushi Ota
Lights Asako Miura
Sound Bunsho Nishikawa
Production Dance Box (Kobe - JP)
Tour Manager Satoko Shibata
Stage Assistant Kasumi Harada
Management and Distribution: Something Great (Berlin - DE) and Materialise (Honk Kong - HK)
Photos by Hideto Maezawa
About the artist
