Butterfly Dream

“SETSU ASAKURA An Avant-garde Girl”
BankART 1929 Studio NYK, Yokohama2010(1)
“TPAM showcase”
BankART 1929 Studio NYK, Yokohama2011(2)

A woman arrives, coming from somewhere far away, dragging a chair with loads of luggage piled up on top of it. There she finds a man hanging himself again and again with a rope hanging from above. In time, she ends up assisting him in the act.
ARICA’s work is always based on a minute reading of the space, the careful design of sounds, and the measuring of light. It is, however, the performers on stage who, in the end, make things happen there. The man who repetitively hangs himself daily and the woman who, fulfilled with profound consciousness, slowly walks around him, stalking him, together make something happen that lies beyond mediated planning.
The late Kubikukuri Takuzo, the Neck-Hanger, was an actionist who made close acquaintance in the 1960s with such eminences as the legendary fine artist Kazekura Takumi, Takamatsu Jiro and Matsuzawa Yutaka. Since 1997 till the last days of his life, for about 10 years, he continued executing himself by “hanging” every day in the garden of his own home in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Meanwhile, his counterpart, Ando Yoko, has been practicing her own, unique presentation of the body since the days of the Tenkei Gekijo, the theater company led by the late Ota Shogo in the 1980s. Butterfly Dream is a previously unheard-of, hilarious but sorrowful, incident in the performing arts history in which the two bodies, like a couple of comets, come to collide to release a bright spark in a fleeting moment.

DIRECTED BY: Yasuki Fujita
PERFORMED BY: Takuzo Kubikukuri Tomoko Ando
MUSIC COMPOSED AND PERFORMED BY : Osamu Saruyama Eijiro Takahashi
STAGE MANAGER: Koro Suzuki
LIGHTING DESIGNER : Ryosuke Saito (2)
SOUND DESIGNER : Yuichi Tanaka
COSTUME DESIGNER : Yoko Ando
COSTUME CREATOR: Naoya Watabe
PROPS MASTER : Naoya Watabe
GRAPHIC DESIGNER : Yuri Suyama
PHOTOGRAPHER : Ryuji Miyamoto
PRODUCER : Keizo Maeda