Kizuna
2025
Site-responsive performance
Tokyo Biennale, Ebihara Shoten, Kanda, Tokyo, Japan
Developed in collaboration with Ida Uvaas as part of the ongoing STIM series
Kizuna is a site-responsive performance created across two floors of Ebihara Shoten, a former shop in Kanda. It is part of STIM, an ongoing collaboration with Ida Uvaas that uses a flexible choreographic structure built from tasks, repeated actions and relationships between performers, objects and the surrounding space. The structure is reworked through rehearsal for each new site, allowing its architecture and conditions to reorganize how the performance unfolds.
For Kizuna, rehearsals with performers in Tokyo developed this structure through the particular architecture of Ebihara Shoten. Performers moved simultaneously through different rooms while audiences moved freely between them. Actions could be encountered closely, glimpsed through an opening, or heard from another part of the building. Sliding shoji doors opened and closed throughout the performance, revealing and concealing bodies and actions and continually changing the relationship between performers, audience and space.
The dispersed choreography made it impossible to experience the work as a whole from a single position. Each audience member encountered a different configuration of the performance depending on where they moved, what they followed and what remained outside their view.
Concept and direction: Shahrzad Malekian and Ida Uvaas
Performers: Tsunoda Lisa, Sakai Minori, Satoko Hikasa, Keiko Tokuyasu, Yuko Tokuyasu, Yamada Hibiki, Takanari Mahoko
Photography: Hal Xing
Video/documentation: Naoyuki Sakai
Supported by: Nordic Culture Fund, Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)