Think: Pokemon. Think: Hello Kitty. Think: American Cutting Edge Multi-media Performance Art.
No, it’s not a figment of my imagination.
American director and choreographer (currently living in Berlin) Jeremy Wade was commissioned to create his own individual take on The Land of the Rising Sun by the Japan Society.
The result is “There Is No End to More,” part of the Andy Warhol Museum’s Off the Wall series on Saturday. Depending on what wall serves as the jumping off point, Wade has already racked up some serious New York interest. His “Glory,” a nude duet, received a Bessie Award (the dance equivalent of the Oscar, Emmy, etc.) in 2006. It was his first evening-length work after graduating from the School for New Dance Development (SNDD) Amsterdam in 2000.
That was enough to attract the eye of Japan Society’s artistic director Yoko Shioya. “It’s often been said that my work is butoh-esque,” explains Wade, former swimmer and rave dancer, over the phone from New York. “I found that flattering.”
He had never studied the Japanese art form born of the atomic bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II in the Pacific. “But my work is quite grotesque and quite an actionist, extreme monstrous body at times.”
Soon Wade and a few collaborators were on their way to Japan for a month-long stay in the cities of Tokyo and Kanazawa during Sakura, the flowering of the cherry blossoms, in April of 2009.
First impressions? “I was totally overwhelmed,” Wade concedes. Then he adds, “I was slightly claustrophobic — I felt like I was on another planet with remnants of Western capitalism that I had never seen before. Capitalism on steroids. Consumerism beyond your imagination.”
Wade found himself “walking through Tokyo and having 4,000 people cross Shibuya [train] Station every ten minutes, floating in a sea of numbers. This I found really fascinating and it became the basis for the work.”
Although Wade had a prior interest in Japanese manga (a variation on comic books), he instead filtered those impressions through another interest, “kawaii” or “cute” culture, most noticably symbolized by Pokeman and Hello Kitty. Wade found himself wallowing in “this kind of overwhelming nightmarish sense of infinity,” which translated into never-ending layers of text, movement, sound and imagery.
“The whole structure is really lessons in a children’s show,” he explains. “But these lessons end up having adult subjects.”
Wade likes to “compose an event that is made of two oppositional aesthetics.” That might mean arrogance and groveling.” In the case of “There Is No End No More,” he was fascinated by the ideas of beauty and disgust. “When I put them together, they begin to blur and it’s that blur that I really love.”
Wade kept asking himself, “Is it Japanese enough?” In the end, he stuck to his own process noting that “it has the influence of Japanese, but it’s its own beast — it’s how I see the world.”
For more information, click on Andy Warhol Museum.
Recent Comments