Performance on Stage, The 10th Expo Festival, English Theatre Berlin, 45 mins
The score of Chōri Dance functions as a collaborative structure where three Asian performers bring forth the entangled histories embedded within their own bodies. The performance begins outside the stage at a bar, where audience are handed a menu. Each course on this menu outlines the story of a different performer, and the experience opens as guests are served wine drawn from these narratives. At the sound of a clinking glass, the audience enters the stage to encounter the first course: a performer enacting national gymnastics to a repeating count.
Within this metaphorical stage-pot, the three performers introduce three choreographic ingredients: national gymnastics intertwined with East Asian colonial history, a waltz with wine trees from France, and trees nurtured by light. Placed at the very end of the piece is a tree-body standing before a screen. Through their own mobile phones, audience members can illuminate the tree via a screen connected to TouchDesigner, becoming active participants in the collective process of chōri. This is a recipe for a long winter, inviting the audience to activate the score of the hot pot and bring it into the shared present.
