Riku Yamakawa | Dance and Theater Work "Dance of the Dance Judges" (Ueda Performance / Part 1)
Toshinori Okada's "Dance of the Dance Judges" is a work combining dance and theater, exploring dance theory from multiple perspectives.Summary
This is a review of the first part of the Ueda performance of "Dance of the Dance Judges," a work that is both a dance piece and a play, written, directed, and choreographed by Toshinori Okada. The work posits itself as a dance performed by dance judges that is simultaneously a piece of theater, emphasizing that things possess multiple meanings concurrently. The performers embody characters who discuss dance theory based on keywords like "groove" or "liquid" regarding a fictional work, yet they also reveal that their speech and actions are part of the production's direction, thus addressing the act of performing itself. Notably, Utana Kobayashi also performs improvised music as a musician and switches roles, including playing a spider. Okada's characteristic lyrics, where the pauses in speech do not always align with sentence structure, lead the audience to receive the structure of the exchange rather than the literal meaning of the content. The performance, held with the house lights on, creates a discrepancy between the setting of a public judging session and the intimate judging session on stage, highlighting the deepening performances and relationships among the cast members.
(Source：artscape)