Hiromi Miyakita
(Japan)

The Japanese choreographer and dancer Hiromi Miyakita draws with the same conviction as when she dances: “Once a line is drawn, it must be trusted. I am not able to watch myself dance. I trust my body, repeating my dialogue with it and disciplining it. For a dance only happens once. Once a line is drawn, I do not attempt to correct it. That is the way I draw. Life is also sometimes like that.” In “Soul Cleansing”, she is showing a series of her intriguing drawings done with pastel and ink pen on Japanese black paper, framed with a board.

Hiromi Miyakita is a dancer and choreographer from Itami city, Hyogo Prefecture. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Department of Dance, she started her dance career in Japan in the latter half of the 1990s. In dancing and choreographing, she emphasizes not only the body but also the place surrounding the performance. On the basis of the most fundamental human movements related to space such as sitting, standing and walking, she creates delicate yet bold movements capturing sensitively the surrounding light, sound, air and landscape.

She participated in Zan Yamashita dance piece ‘it is written there’, an inaugural performance of Art Theater dB Kobe, and Arkadi Zaides project. In 2010, she founded Hiromi Miyakita/Galapagos Band and presented the death of I.I.. In 2011, she started the Karappo Pong Poco Ring with sound artist Akio Suzuki to explore the place for both training and playing. This training activity led them to present their improvised performance Tabio X dance at the Japan Media Arts Festival in Kyoto, another improvisation for the exhibition tour at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, and further to Hiromi Miyakita first solo exhibition SPANK, thus extending the range of her dance expression.

In addition, Miyakita often makes experimental attempts concerning the relationship between body / space and things / sounds, giving workshops for the audience to experience enjoyment of small discoveries: Portable Music Player and Dance is a talk session in which participants can exchange dozens of different views after having appreciated Miyakita dance without music while individually listening to their favorite music on earphones, and in Put on your head, participants walk along with some fruit on their heads and discover from this simple act how their bodies are in the inactive state.

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photo ©Toshihiro Shimizu