- Junnosuke Tada

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"RE/PLAY Dance Edit" is based on my play "RE/PLAY," which I created for my theatre company Tokyo Deathlock after the 2011 great earthquake of Northeastern Japan. The premier of “Dance Edit" was at the “We dance Kyoto 2012” dance festival, under the heading of "Theater and Dance/Interchange of Physicality." In this dance performance, I kept same themes of "unrepeatability" and "interruption." I also maintained the structure that expressed life and time ironically through relentless repetition. In the original, actors continued movements without interference from each other. They persistently created and destroyed images from pop music. However, it was indeed the change in physicality, the difference between actors and dancers, that transformed the play into a completely different piece. 

Actors, for example, are better at expressing a lonely human because they exist as a human on stage. Dance and dancers, on the other hand, can represent loneliness itself since they express through physicality. For “Dance Edit,” I introduced a new direction: to “dance/not dance.” Through their dance, dancers go back and forth between their humanity and physicality. They go from “person” to “body,” and then from “body” to “dance.” One of the objectives of this piece is to share with the audience performance as something beyond this gradation and preceding that, the contextualization of “theater” and “dance.” Within the framework of time that is constantly repeating and progressing, I also aim to share with audience the questions of “What is dance?” and “What is this world?” I think of the performing arts as a way of sharing questions.

This piece began from the border between theater and dance and then expanded across geographical borders by incorporating performers of various nationalities in Kyoto, Yokohama, Singapore and Cambodia. However, the essence of this piece is not to dismantle borders, but to move forward by overcoming various borders. Each dancer comes face to face with their own body and dance to develop their choreography and their own notions of “dance/not dance.” Diversity is maintained by our acceptance of the various borders that show we are different. The more diversity in bodies, dance perspectives, and cultural backgrounds among the performers, the more vibrant performance will come from the interruption and chaos.

The audience will observe scenes composed by the dancers with a focus on the differences and connections in the concepts of body and dance in Asia. I continue this working on this project in the hope that it provides the chance for not only dance fans, but also many other people in Asia to see various perspectives on what Asia is in the present and future. The performing arts are also a way to express our hopes for the future.

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