Pulling back from being together

In the last twenty years, most of my work in Japan has been concerned with leading improvisation workshops or choreographing community projects with disabled and non-disabled dance students; my last visit, however, was to choreograph for the newly established Integrated Dance Company-Kyo, based in Tokyo. ¹ The piece I made with the company was titled Open State and premiered at the Tokyo Arts Centre in July 2015. During the creation period, I worked with composer/architect Mathew Emmett (Plymouth University), who combined the technique of spectralism to explore the interiority of the human voice (Benjamin & Emmett, 2016). Mat magnified edited ‘slices’ of words spoken by the dancers to create acoustic landscapes that we could use to fill the surrounding space, and which in turn generated new possibilities for choreographic exploration. ²