Freeway Dance
Thursday, April 27, 20236:00 PM Sunday, April 30, 20236:00 PM
Partners
Venue
On the Boards
100 West Roy Street, Lower Queen Anne, Seattle
Close your eyes and think back to the first time you remember dancing.
What is our first memory of dancing? To write and choreograph Freeway Dance, Japanese dancer Ayaka Nakama asked a number of people close to her — a neighbor, her father, her friends — to describe their first memory of themselves dancing. Nakama treats these memories as choreography in order to reconstruct these movements with her own body.
Duration: This is an installation which provides audience members 4 hour to sit, stand, and wander, to take everything in.
More About This Piece
Ayaka Nakama is a dancer. She wants to be choreographed by everything that exists in the world. Freeway Dance is a time and place where she considers “other people’s memories (of their first dance)” as her choreography and lets her body dance. The running time is four hours including food break. The space is an indoor planted garden in which a swing, bookshelf and capsule-toy vending machine find their places. Audience can walk around the garden freely (they can also lie on the floor) to encounter Nakama’s solo dance. Phenomena that induce new dance, stimulated by her dance, lurk everywhere in the garden. Audience move spontaneously to discover them. We start from deconstructing what constitutes the power system of the current production system, one element after another, apparently pastorally. And then we want to extract the outline of dance, connecting dance and infinite non-dance phenomena, through which to reflect on the “dance to come.”
"I have worked on the stage with countless choreographers, believing that it is the dancer's job to launch choreography as a dance and let the choreographed body dance. My body cannot dance without choreography, and it has the property that it wants to dance a lot, so it needs much more choreography (like food). Choreography exists in various forms anytime and anywhere. I have long wanted to dance to all the choreography that exists in this world.” - Ayaka Nakama
”In this project, I asked people who are not specialists in dance or performing arts about "a memory of when they danced for the first time in their lives", and I treated those memories as choreography. I stack multiple choreographies in my body without replacing them. Let's dance with a plump and luxurious body that has stored many foods." - Ayaka Nakama
