Looking back at 2020 - what we tried as a team

As Hiroaki does a lot of performances outside Japan, travelling is an essential part of our work. And like everyone else, we had a lot of negative impacts of covid in 2020 with travel restrictions and so many cancellations of performances. However we also tried something new that probably leads us to our future projects.

Online Performance

The online performance was one important challenge of 2020. Originally a festival in Estonia called elektron decided to do their festival online in April 2020 and invited Hiroaki to perform there. I think around April covid just started spreading but not many people thought that it would impact us for this long. While a lot of festivals made a decision to postpone it to autumn or to the next year, elektron decided to do it online and they even prepared the streaming system themselves. They were already discussing what elements a conventional theatre had and what elements the audiences would expect there (which were the topics discussed a lot around the world for the next 6 months after that) when building their streaming system. I was surprised that they were so quick to respond to the situation and to think ahead.

What Hiroaki presented then was very interesting. He reproduced his (existing) work in a virtual space, placed himself in the middle of the space and danced in real time. He did this performance in his small office in Tokyo.

In 2020 he did this kind of live online performances in several platforms in Estonia, Reunion Island and West Kowloon in Hong Kong. For West Kowloon he presented a work in progress of a new creation online too. The recorded version of online performances or video installations were also shown in Canada, Ireland and The Netherlands.

Online Workshop for Choreographers

Since 2017 we organise Workshop for Choreographers which consists of lectures and feedback sessions. Every year we rented a studio and held it there but this year we did it all online. There is time when the participants presented their works in progress so I was wondering how it would go, but it went smoothly with their help. For the organiser it was great that we managed to invite a guest from Taiwan so easily and that people could participate from anywhere they were. It was possible because people were getting used to learning, talking and meeting online by the time of the workshop.

Remote Rehearsals

I recently wrote a lot about remote rehearsals, but the remote rehearsal of an international collaboration was also a new attempt as a production. For Hiroaki it was not so new since he had started doing remote rehearsals many years ago, but it was the first time to do this much of rehearsals remotely. It was a very important step for the team and it definitely is leading us to the creation of the coming generation.

Jeep Real Hybrid Campaign

Probably not related so much to the situation of covid, but Hiroaki directed the performance part of Jeep Real Hybrid Campaign!

Like this, though there were a lot of cancellations, we managed to try different things in 2020. Thank you so much to those who gave us opportunities and those who made it possible!