Notes on Life
In this dance project, Pau Aran came together with performers Junya Ishii and Kaho Kogure, and collage artist Noriko Okaku who also provided the sound design for the piece. Artists with unique perspectives, personalities, and bodies.
They all worked towards sharing a process for envisioning a positive future and also to create a space for experimentation: what they called the middle spaces that connect inside and outside, East and West. A meeting point. A piece of Tanztheater on the themes of traveling and being adrift found in philosopher Kiyoshi Miki’s Notes on Life.
The process began when Pau Aran took detailed notes of conversations in Barcelona with Junya Ishii in 2017.
Later, during a residence in Tokyo, Pau Aran determined 15 key words to toss like cards at Kaho Kogure and Junya Ishii. The list of keywords included ‘heart’, ‘dilemma’, ‘emotion’, ‘doubt’, ‘water’, ‘garden’ among others.
Using methods resembling automatic writing techniques, they composed a piece made up of a number of scenes exploring the hearts of a man and a woman. Where they portrayed the landscape and the time in which their two straight lines intersect for a moment before falling away from each other.
Notes on Life
2019
Yokohama
25 minutes
DIRECTION Junya IshiI, Pau Aran CREATED WITH & PERFORMED BY Kaho Kogure, Junya Ishii DRAMATURGY Pau Aran MUSIC Noriko Okaku LIGHTING DESIGN Noriko Okaku, Pau Aran SET DESIGN Noriko Okaku, Junya Ishii, Pau Aran VIDEO Noriko Okaku, Charlie Cattrall PHOTOGRAPHY Kentaro Takahashi, Mika Kitamura COLLABORATORS/SPECIAL THANKS Eriko Kusuda SUPPORT The Saison Foundation, PLATAUX, Incline LLP, Casa Asia, Embassy of Spain in Japan, Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, TPAM Fringe Festival – YCC Yokohama Creativecity Center