What kind of experience did you have during the Bangkok tour?

Ito : Well, I think this time of DANCE DANCE ASIA is about cultural exchange and interaction, with people in lots of different Asian countries seeing Japanese dance and getting inspired by it, and with us, the Japanese dancers, getting inspired as well.

I had been concerned for a while about how our performances would go down overseas. After all, the music we use is J-Pop, and the settings and narratives are ones that are familiar to Japanese audiences, but how accessible is this music and culture to people in other countries? This seemed like a great opportunity to find out. We were glad to have the chance to participate, and hoped it would help us grow as artists.

Did you also manage to get your primary message across during the workshop?

Ito : In Japan, I work as an actor as well, and I’ve taken part in acting workshops. Based on my insights about workshops, I felt like what I wanted to communicate here was the importance of emotion, the emotions that are generated when you’re dancing. Usually when you dance, you do the choreographed steps, and then you sort of layer emotion on top of that, but here we were after the opposite process, dancing from your emotions. Like, you feel a certain way about another person, and that makes you dance with your arms extended widely outward, or something is worrying you, so you clutch your head.

In most dance workshops, people try their very hardest to do the steps as they’re choreographed and to follow the instructions they’re given. This was different, though. It was OK if people forgot the steps, as long as they were invested in it emotionally. Even if you skip some steps, there will be continuity as long as you keep the emotion going, and the audience will connect to the dancers on stage.
That was the main point we tried to convey in the workshop.

The participants were having a great time, taking on new challenges enthusiastically with no holds barred, and we were very happy about that.

Tell us about the outlook for the future.

Ito : Our group is working on putting together performances, and we’re doing shows around 90 minutes long twice a year or so. It’s going to be tough to keep doing this in Japan, though, mainly for financial reasons. We want to make UMEBOU into a team that can keep performing indefinitely.

The reality in Japan is that just doing great work is not enough to enable you to expand your range of opportunities to present it. Quite the opposite, most people end up quitting because they lack these opportunities. We want to change that somehow.

But that is something we can’t do on our own. What we do hope to do is put together solid performances, polish and hone them, and obtain the cooperation of both older mentors and younger kids in the dance scene so that we can keep on performing for as many people as possible.