Sacred City on Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskuksen ja japanilaisten esitystaiteilijoiden välinen yhteistyöhanke, joka tutkii urbaaneja pyhän kokemuksia. Viisi TTK:n jäsentä ja viisi taiteilijaa Tokiosta hakee pyhän käsitteelle uusia määritelmiä, tavoitteenaan irtaantua annetuista kulttuurisista ja uskonnollisista merkityksistä ja lähestyä pyhyyttä omakohtaisesta kokemuksesta käsin. Esitys on heidän tulkintansa nykyaikaisesta temppelistä – pyhästä paikasta, joka on samanaikaisesti henkilökohtainen, yleismaailmallinen ja verkostomainen. Se levittäytyy kaupunkiin kohtaamisten ja jaettujen kokemusten muodossa.
Projektin ensimmäinen vaihe toteutettiin Helsingissä kansainvälisillä Baltic Circle -teatterifestivaaleilla (www.balticcircle.fi) marraskuussa 2010. Työryhmä kokoontui yhdeksän päivän työpajaan, jonka aikana syntyi Sacred City -esitys Espan lavalle Helsinkiin. Viisituntista esitystä esitettiin 19. ja 20.11. klo 17-22. Katsojia esityksissä kävi yhteensä 162.
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SACRED CITY YOKOHAMASSA 18.-20.2.2011
Projektin toinen vaihe tapahtuu Yokohamassa. Se alkaa yhteisellä työpajajaksolla 6.-15.2.2011, jonka pohjalta rakennetaan uusi versio esityksestä Zou-No-Hana Terraceen, Yokohaman satama-alueella toimivaan kulttuurikeskukseen. Esitys on sekä TPAM (Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, entinen Tokyo Performing Arts Market, www.tpam.or.jp) -tapahtuman että IETM (International network for contemporary performing arts, www.ietm.org) -satelliittikokouksen ohjelmassa 18.-20.2.2011.
TPAM on kansainvälinen areena esittävän taiteen ammattilaisille. Edelliseen, maaliskuussa 2010 järjestettyyn TPAM:iin osallistui 1100 japanilaista ja 230 kansainvälistä taiteilijaa, yleisön kokonaismäärän ollessa 25000. Ohjelmaan sisältyy esitysten lisäksi presentaatioita, keskusteluja, showcaseja ym.
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TYÖRYHMÄ
Natsuko Tezuka, Megumi Kamimura, Taiyo Tochiaki, Daisuke Kishii, Yoko Ishiguro, Saara Hannula, Pekko Koskinen, Tuomas Laitinen, Julius Elo ja Minja Mertanen
TUOTANTO
Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskus (Suomi) ja Keizo Maeda (Japani).
Keizo Maeda on aikaisemmin työskennellyt mm. Meredith Monkin, Laurie Anderssonin, Robert Wilsonin, Trisha Brownin, Anne Teresa De Keesmaekelin, Needcompanyn, La Fura Dels Bausin, Steve Reichin, Arvo Pärtin, Kronos Quartetin, John McLaughlinin, Cesaria Evoran, Buena Vista Social Clubin, Michael Nymanin ja Jan Garbarekin kanssa.
YHTEISTYÖKUMPPANIT
Kansainvälinen Baltic Circle -teatterifestivaali www.balticcircle.fi
Suomen Japanin Instituutti www.finstitute.gr.jp/index-en.html
TPAM – Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting www.tpam.or.jp
IETM – international network for contemporary performing arts www.ietm.org
Zou-No-Hana www.zounohana.com
Teatterin tiedotuskeskus www.teatteri.org
HIAP – Helsinki International Artist-in-residence Programme www.hiap.fi
TEX – Finnish Theatre Export Project
MUUT TUKIJAT
Taiteen keskustoimikunta
Suomen Kulttuurirahasto
Helsingin kaupunki
Alfred Kordelinin rahasto
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PARTICIPANTS IN ENGLISH
Japan
Natsuko Tezuka started her career as a solo dancer in 1996. She produced her first Anatomical Experiment with the theme of body observation in 2001. This was followed by a series of variations, where she was giving particular sets of orders to the different parts of her body, thus researching the unrecognized connections and relations between them. During the past ten years, she has performed the series in various cities including New York, Sydney, Berlin and Jakarta, receiving international recognition and awards for her unprecedented work. Since 2005, Natsuko has been organizing the Dojo-Yaburi-project – a practice of studying and sharing methods of dancing among artists.
Megumi Kamimura started to present her solo works in 2004, and has performed in various occasions, such as Yokohama Triennale, Japan-Korea Dance Festival, and Indonesian Dance Festival. She launched Kamimura megumi company in 2006, and her first group work Mountain range was presented in 2007 at Komaba Agora Theater. In 2008, the fourth company work Placement and forest was presented at ST Spot, in collaboration with the installation work by Go Ideta, which was recreated and presented in Dec 2009 at Super Deluxe. In 2008, she participated in the launch of Experimental Unit with two other choreographers and one musician.
Taiyo Tochiaki (b. 1973) is a Tokyo-based dancer and performer, who originally studied psychology at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He took part in the butoh company Sankaijuku between 1998 and 2008, after which he has worked as a freelancer, performing in works by Toshiki Okada and Megumi Kamimura among others. Recently, he has focused on questions related to time, space and existence, combining improvised movement with mixed sounds and video images. Tochiaki’s works include a series of one-on-one sessions Love Love Umbrella and Good Wave; The space-time session at the flotage and undulation. With thorough abolishment of literary or theatrical effect, avoiding reliance on established formats of dance or choreography, he sees dance as a means of communication in itself.
Daisuke Kishii is a playwright, who creates playworks that question the conditions of the play using creation methods inspired by other art genres. He is the artistic director of Playworks since 2008.
Some of his major works include: P (1995-2001), an investigation of the conditions of acting; Potalive (2000-2008), questioning the conditions of theater; Lobby (2005-2008), looking at the conditions of the audience; and Kakikotoba (ongoing since 2006), an inquiry of the conditions of Japanese acting. He has also made Create Playworks (ongoing since 2007) and a performance series based on Meetings (since 2009). Since 2009, he presented the Tokyo Condition -series as part of Tokyo Metropolitan governement’s project Tokyo Art Point Plan. He does activities which create actual public spaces in Tokyo, inspired by notions set forth in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.
Yoko Ishiguro (b. 1978) is a performance maker, performer and actress. In 2005, after she had performed in experimental theater companies, she started to make her own/collaboration pieces in/outside of Japan. Mostly, her works are site-specific and time-specific and performed to look at “existence”, “time and distance” and “memory” at some meaningful spaces (toilets, a rice field, etc.), totally distorting their meanings. She makes one-on-one interventions as well as the other styles of performances with her physical existence and some daily items and technologies such as the Internet. Currently she lives in Tokyo and is showing her works in the UK remotely via Skype to consider our existence and relationships in telecommunication.
Finland
Saara Hannula (b. 1978) is a Helsinki-based artist working at the intersection of architecture, visual art and performance. The focal point of her work lies in the connection between the human body and the architectural surroundings, a theme which she has researched through different media, e.g. by constructing space- and experience-oriented performances and installations both in public space and in alternative performance spaces. She is interested in performance as a means of attaining altered states of body, mind and consciousness. Currently, Saara is working both as an independent artist with a number of collaborative projects, and as a performer and spatial designer at the Reality Research Center. Her own works, ranging from performative installations to urban interventions, have been shown at several festivals both in Finland and abroad.
Pekko Koskinen designs reality games and plays around with more traditional forms of art. His works include fictional religions, ways of living, made-up societies… most of them within life at large, outside art circles. Within sanctified arts, he’s created several gallery installations, dance pieces and performances. For his work on conventional games, he’s won some international awards – for his more experimental work, he hasn’t won much of anything. He’s a member of Reality Research Center, and YKON, an advocacy group for utopian thought.
Tuomas Laitinen is a director, performance artist and writer who works with new performative concepts in the grey area between theater, performance art and reality. Human encounters, embodied philosophy and spiritual practice are central for Laitinen’s work. For him the best places to experience and study these things are live situations. Laitinen has worked as a research/artistic director of RRC in 2008 (with Julius Elo, under the theme Body of the Spectator) and 2010 (Can the Sacred Be Performed?). He is also a co-founder and writer of the finnish performance magazine Esitys.
Julius Elo (b.1969) is an artist and director working in the field of Live Art. He aims to create unconventional performance concepts, where the audience and its interaction with the performers are focal points of the piece. His current interests include experiential performances for one spectator at a time, bodily installations, where spectators need to take radical steps to become participants, as well as intimate encounters between the participant and performers. He has particularly focused on the effects of a performance on the spectator’s consciousness and body. Elo is a co-founder of Reality Research Center. He has graduated from the MA Degree Program in Performance and Theory at Theatre Academy of Finland. He is currently working on his doctoral studies on The spectator´s body in performance.
Minja Mertanen (b.1981) has been a member of RRC since 2008. Mertanen graduated as a dance teacher in 2006, but has mainly been working as a dancer and performer. She has a strong background in traditional danceforms such as ballet and contemporary dance, but her personal interests have led her to specialize in butoh dance. She has created a number of solos and duets, combining butoh with participatory performance, physical theatre and circus. In butoh she is especially interested in broadening the possibilities of the body and the alteration of time and concsiousness.
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SACRED CITY PROJECT
Sacred City is a collective quest for an experience of the sacred in the urban environment. Five artists from Reality Research Center and five from Tokyo set out to reinvent the concept, approaching it from a personal, firsthand perspective rather than through the prevailing religious and cultural contexts. The performance can be seen as their vision of a contemporary temple – a sacred place that is simultaneously subjective, cross-cultural and weblike.
The first phase of the project was realized in November 2010, at the Baltic Circle Festival (www.balticcircle.fi) in Helsinki. The ten artists involved worked together for 9 days, exploring, discussing and preparing for the performance. The 5-hour performance was presented in the centre of Helsinki on Nov 19th&20th 2010.
Sacred City in Yokohama, Feb 18th–20th 2011
The second phase of the project takes place in Yokohama, Japan. During the second workshop, a new version of the performance is created and finally performed at Zou-No-Hana Terrace, a cultural center in the Yokohama harbour area. Sacred City is part of TPAM (Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, former Tokyo Performing Arts Market, www.tpam.or.jp) and the IETM (International network for contemporary performing arts, www.ietm.org) satellite meeting.
Participants
Yoko Ishiguro (performance artist, JP)
Megumi Kamimura (choreographer/dancer, JP)
Daisuke Kishii (director/playwright, JP)
Natsuko Tezuka (choreographer/dancer, JP)
Taiyo Tochiaki (choreographer/dancer/media artist, JP)
Julius Elo (director/performer, FIN)
Saara Hannula (artist/performer, FIN)
Pekko Koskinen (game designer/director, FIN)
Tuomas Laitinen (director/performance artist, FIN)
Minja Mertanen (dancer, FIN)
Production
Reality Research Center (Finland) and Keizo Maeda (Japan).
Keizo Maeda has previously worked with for example Meredith Monk, Laurie Andersson, Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown, Anne Teresa De Keesmaekel, Needcompany, La Fura Dels Baus, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, Kronos Quartet, John McLaughlin, Cesaria Evora, Buena Vista Social Club, Michael Nyman and Jan Garbarek.
Partners
Baltic Circle international thater festival www.balticcircle.fi
Finnish Institute in Japan www.finstitute.gr.jp/index-en.html
TPAM – Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting www.tpam.or.jp
IETM – international network for contemporary performing arts www.ietm.org
Zou-No-Hana www.zounohana.com
Finnish Theatre Information Center www.teatteri.org
HIAP – Helsinki International Artist-in-residence Programme www.hiap.fi
TEX – Finnish Theatre Export Project
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SACRED CITY PROJECT
Sacred City is a collective quest for an experience of the sacred in the urban environment. Five artists from Reality Research Center and five from Tokyo set out to reinvent the concept, approaching it from a personal, firsthand perspective rather than through the prevailing religious and cultural contexts. The performance can be seen as their vision of a contemporary temple – a sacred place that is simultaneously subjective, cross-cultural and weblike.
The first phase of the project was realized in November 2010, at the Baltic Circle Festival (www.balticcircle.fi) in Helsinki. The ten artists involved worked together for 9 days, exploring, discussing and preparing for the performance. The 5-hour performance was presented in the centre of Helsinki on Nov 19th&20th 2010.
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SACRED CITY IN YOKOHAMA, Feb 18th-20th 2011
The second phase of the project takes place in Yokohama, Japan. During the second workshop, a new version of the performance is created and finally performed at Zou-No-Hana Terrace, a cultural center in the Yokohama harbour area. Sacred City is part of TPAM (Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, former Tokyo Performing Arts Market, www.tpam.or.jp) and the IETM (International network for contemporary performing arts, www.ietm.org) satellite meeting.
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Participants
Yoko Ishiguro (performance artist, JP)
Megumi Kamimura (choreographer/dancer, JP)
Daisuke Kishii (director/playwright, JP)
Natsuko Tezuka (choreographer/dancer, JP)
Taiyo Tochiaki (choreographer/dancer/media artist, JP)
Julius Elo (director/performer, FIN)
Saara Hannula (artist/performer, FIN)
Pekko Koskinen (game designer/director, FIN)
Tuomas Laitinen (director/performance artist, FIN)
Minja Mertanen (dancer, FIN)
Production
Reality Research Center (Finland) and Keizo Maeda (Japan).
Keizo Maeda has previously worked with for example Meredith Monk, Laurie Andersson, Robert Wilson, Trisha Brown, Anne Teresa De Keesmaekel, Needcompany, La Fura Dels Baus, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, Kronos Quartet, John McLaughlin, Cesaria Evora, Buena Vista Social Club, Michael Nyman and Jan Garbarek.
Partners
Baltic Circle international thater festival www.balticcircle.fi
Finnish Institute in Japan www.finstitute.gr.jp/index-en.html
TPAM – Yokohama Performing Arts Meeting www.tpam.or.jp
IETM – international network for contemporary performing arts www.ietm.org
Zou-No-Hana www.zounohana.com
Finnish Theatre Information Center www.teatteri.org
HIAP – Helsinki International Artist-in-residence Programme www.hiap.fi
TEX – Finnish Theatre Export Project
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PARTICIPANTS IN ENGLISH
Japan
Natsuko Tezuka started her career as a solo dancer in 1996. She produced her first Anatomical Experiment with the theme of body observation in 2001. This was followed by a series of variations, where she was giving particular sets of orders to the different parts of her body, thus researching the unrecognized connections and relations between them. During the past ten years, she has performed the series in various cities including New York, Sydney, Berlin and Jakarta, receiving international recognition and awards for her unprecedented work. Since 2005, Natsuko has been organizing the Dojo-Yaburi-project – a practice of studying and sharing methods of dancing among artists.
Megumi Kamimura started to present her solo works in 2004, and has performed in various occasions, such as Yokohama Triennale, Japan-Korea Dance Festival, and Indonesian Dance Festival. She launched Kamimura megumi company in 2006, and her first group work Mountain range was presented in 2007 at Komaba Agora Theater. In 2008, the fourth company work Placement and forest was presented at ST Spot, in collaboration with the installation work by Go Ideta, which was recreated and presented in Dec 2009 at Super Deluxe. In 2008, she participated in the launch of Experimental Unit with two other choreographers and one musician.
Taiyo Tochiaki (b. 1973) is a Tokyo-based dancer and performer, who originally studied psychology at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He took part in the butoh company Sankaijuku between 1998 and 2008, after which he has worked as a freelancer, performing in works by Toshiki Okada and Megumi Kamimura among others. Recently, he has focused on questions related to time, space and existence, combining improvised movement with mixed sounds and video images. Tochiaki’s works include a series of one-on-one sessions Love Love Umbrella and Good Wave; The space-time session at the flotage and undulation. With thorough abolishment of literary or theatrical effect, avoiding reliance on established formats of dance or choreography, he sees dance as a means of communication in itself.
Daisuke Kishii is a playwright, who creates playworks that question the conditions of the play using creation methods inspired by other art genres. He is the artistic director of Playworks since 2008.
Some of his major works include: P (1995-2001), an investigation of the conditions of acting; Potalive (2000-2008), questioning the conditions of theater; Lobby (2005-2008), looking at the conditions of the audience; and Kakikotoba (ongoing since 2006), an inquiry of the conditions of Japanese acting. He has also made Create Playworks (ongoing since 2007) and a performance series based on Meetings (since 2009). Since 2009, he presented the Tokyo Condition -series as part of Tokyo Metropolitan governement’s project Tokyo Art Point Plan. He does activities which create actual public spaces in Tokyo, inspired by notions set forth in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.
Yoko Ishiguro (b. 1978) is a performance maker, performer and actress. In 2005, after she had performed in experimental theater companies, she started to make her own/collaboration pieces in/outside of Japan. Mostly, her works are site-specific and time-specific and performed to look at “existence”, “time and distance” and “memory” at some meaningful spaces (toilets, a rice field, etc.), totally distorting their meanings. She makes one-on-one interventions as well as the other styles of performances with her physical existence and some daily items and technologies such as the Internet. Currently she lives in Tokyo and is showing her works in the UK remotely via Skype to consider our existence and relationships in telecommunication.
Finland
Saara Hannula (b. 1978) is a Helsinki-based artist working at the intersection of architecture, visual art and performance. The focal point of her work lies in the connection between the human body and the architectural surroundings, a theme which she has researched through different media, e.g. by constructing space- and experience-oriented performances and installations both in public space and in alternative performance spaces. She is interested in performance as a means of attaining altered states of body, mind and consciousness. Currently, Saara is working both as an independent artist with a number of collaborative projects, and as a performer and spatial designer at the Reality Research Center. Her own works, ranging from performative installations to urban interventions, have been shown at several festivals both in Finland and abroad.
Pekko Koskinen designs reality games and plays around with more traditional forms of art. His works include fictional religions, ways of living, made-up societies… most of them within life at large, outside art circles. Within sanctified arts, he’s created several gallery installations, dance pieces and performances. For his work on conventional games, he’s won some international awards – for his more experimental work, he hasn’t won much of anything. He’s a member of Reality Research Center, and YKON, an advocacy group for utopian thought.
Tuomas Laitinen is a director, performance artist and writer who works with new performative concepts in the grey area between theater, performance art and reality. Human encounters, embodied philosophy and spiritual practice are central for Laitinen’s work. For him the best places to experience and study these things are live situations. Laitinen has worked as a research/artistic director of RRC in 2008 (with Julius Elo, under the theme Body of the Spectator) and 2010 (Can the Sacred Be Performed?). He is also a co-founder and writer of the finnish performance magazine Esitys.
Julius Elo (b.1969) is an artist and director working in the field of Live Art. He aims to create unconventional performance concepts, where the audience and its interaction with the performers are focal points of the piece. His current interests include experiential performances for one spectator at a time, bodily installations, where spectators need to take radical steps to become participants, as well as intimate encounters between the participant and performers. He has particularly focused on the effects of a performance on the spectator’s consciousness and body. Elo is a co-founder of Reality Research Center. He has graduated from the MA Degree Program in Performance and Theory at Theatre Academy of Finland. He is currently working on his doctoral studies on The spectator´s body in performance.
Minja Mertanen (b.1981) has been a member of RRC since 2008. Mertanen graduated as a dance teacher in 2006, but has mainly been working as a dancer and performer. She has a strong background in traditional danceforms such as ballet and contemporary dance, but her personal interests have led her to specialize in butoh dance. She has created a number of solos and duets, combining butoh with participatory performance, physical theatre and circus. In butoh she is especially interested in broadening the possibilities of the body and the alteration of time and concsiousness.
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Workspace # 2: Five Rooms of Civilisation 4.-6.5.2009, Lappeenranta, Suomi; järjestäjä: Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskus & Lappeenrannan kaupunginteatteri; julkinen demo 5.5. Lappeenrannan kaupunginteatterissa
Workspace # 3: Civilisation Virus 19. – 23.11.2009, Helsinki, Suomi; järjestäjä: Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskus & Baltic Circle -festivaali; julkinen demo Q-teatterissa 22.11.http://civilisation.blogit.fi/