Yumiko Yoshioka

" The body is a receptacle of space and time - vibrating with memories amplified, these vibrations provoke a resonance that expands and opens doorways to the ever-changing world inside and outside of us- metamorphosis."
-Yumiko Yoshioka

Dancer, Choreographer, Art Director and Instructor

Born in Tokyo, living in Germany since 1988

She founded an art-formation group "TEN PEN CHii art labor" in 1995 with a visual artist, Joachim Manger from Germany and a musician, Zam Johnson from USA. It's a resident group at Schloss Bröllin (Castle of Bröllin), International Theater Research Location, which lies in the utmost northeastern part of former East Germany.

She has been in research of an interactivity between dance and installation with her partner. They created a number of works, such as "N. YOiN", "DA-PPi", "i-ki" and "Test Labor", each of which won the highest praise in experimental art scenes. Besides international tours throughout Europe and North America, she is an art director of the Butoh Related Art Project "Ex...it!" with Delta Ra'i, held at Schloss Bröllin every 4 years since 1995.

In the early seventies and eighties, she was a member of the first Japanese women's Butoh dance theater, ARIADONE. In 1978, she performed with Ko Murobushi and Carlotta Ikeda in "Le Dernier Eden", Europe's first Butoh performance in Paris. From 1988 to 1994, she was an active member of German-Japanese dance theatre group "tatoeba-THEATRE DANSE GROTESQUE" with Minako Seki and Delta Ra'i, touring in Japan, Europe and North America.

On top of numberless workshops in the world, her experience in choreography and art-direction in workshop performance with different levels of participants deserves full acclaim. Till now, she led workshop performance in Berlin, Italy, Austria, and North America.

Yumiko is presenting i-ki interactive body-dance-machine, an improv dance with original inflated plastic sculpture installation by Joachim Manger (see above). The solo-dance-performance i-ki shows the interaction between the female dancer (Yumiko Yoshioka) and an installation constructed by Joachim Manger. The Japanese word iki on the one hand means "breath". On the other hand it can be translated as "life" or "will to live". The installation of Joachim Manger can be described as a transparent housing system consisting of plastic which is filled with air. The dancer first encounters this system with fear, but also with curiosity. Then she cautiosly enters this plastic world, accustoms to it and begins to feel at home. But after a while she realizes that this system has a life for ist own and breathes like a human being. As soon as it breathes out, the dancer is confronted with a loss of oxygen and the danger of suffocation which is shown as a real one on stage. As with regard to the contents the performance reflects the threat to man by (technical) systems as well as the impossibility to exist without them. Esthetically the performance demonstrates the sad beauty of transparence: As one of Berlin's newspapers wrote, the female dancer seems to live in that breathing plastic world "like an insect captured in amber". The performance is accompanied by the music of Zam Johnson and the Light of Rainer Groenhagen.

www.ne.jp/asahi/butoh/itto/yumiko.htm

§ Performance in the 2nd theater 4.6 at 22:30
Yumiko will be performing with Ten Pen Chii in the Cathedral of Energy 28, 29, 30 Mai : 20:00, 31 Mai, 1 Juni : 21:00 §