Two dancers from ballet and Butoh meet; starting from their polarity and through their shared female experience, DIVINE is created.

Butoh dancer Yuko Kaseki and ballet-based Megumi Eda present their first collaborative dance work, DIVINE, inspired by tragic tales of two wronged and resilient women: ballet’s “Giselle” and the classic Kabuki ghost story “Oiwa.”

These two dancers, with their radically different approaches to movement, assume characters plagued with discomfort and instability in unfamiliar, distorted bodies. As these two figures from different worlds meet, they cross paths in sympathy with each other but are filled with confusion and feel the dissonance of their different realities. Their suffering and persistence echo the paths of Giselle and Oiwa and countless other women whose divine spirits have endured objectification, coercion, and violence in images and lives not of their own choosing or making.

Yuko Kaseki is a Director, choreographer, Butoh dancer, performer, and teacher in Berlin. She has performed and taught in over 30 countries. Those creations are the accumulation of poetic and vivid images that incorporate the spirit of Butoh, performance, and live art. Her performance aims to reflect the outsider’s existence. She has been searching for a way to penetrate the space between physical and spiritual expression. Collaboration with mixed-ability artists overturns the concept of her dance and has a great influence on subsequent activities. Her strong interest in breaking borders of physical expression.
cokaseki.com

Megumi Eda is a dancer and filmmaker. Her career started with the Hamburg Ballet when
she was 17, and over the next 15 years she went on to join the Dutch National Ballet and the
Rambert Dance Company where she worked with many choreographers. In 2004, she moved
to New York as a founding member of Armitage Gone! Dance. She has also collaborated with
Yoshiko Chuma as a Performer/Filmmaker. Her current focus is on combining dance with film and video to create live online performance art. She moved to Berlin in 2019. “Please Cry,” co-produced by DOCK 11/ DOCKART, presented in Fall 2022, was her first solo performance in Berlin using this hybrid approach.
megumieda.com

[Source: dock11-berlin.de]

TFB Nr. 1768