Voyage Junkie

Yesterday I had the pleasure of performing in a Full Moon Festival in Hashima, a small town just outside of Gifu.  Modern Dance You Co. performed a small, relaxed dance that featured a kid's number to a song about onigiri (rice balls), Sachiko as the princess from the moon, and the rest of us as kunoichi , or female ninjas.  This is the year of the rabbit by the Chinese zodiac, so the two little girls were dressed as rabbits, and had a very important role in taking the princess back to her home on the moon.  It was adorable, and quite a lot of fun. Rie teaches me how to take tea. We spent the day at the cultural center getting ready for the performance.  We were able to take a break before the show started, and we went upstairs to take part in the tea ceremony.  There were manju  decorated like rabbits and delicious bowls of macha , otherwise known as green tea.  I couldn't eat the manju , because although some people will swear it contains no wh...

  On June 12th I took part in another dance concert.  This one was more of a recital than a professional venture like last week's, which meant it was a little more relaxed.  I did still have to go for crazy amounts of rehearsal and tech in one weekend, but at least it was only two days of crazy!  I got to meet a lot of really interesting people from all corners of Gifu and Nagoya.  I'm pictured to the left with my itty bitty fan club. I danced in an improvisational workshop piece set by Haruna and Mikiko of Tokyo.  They have an interesting company called KiriCollage , which you check out via the link (although it is mostly in Japanese).  There's a lot of pictures and video on the site, understandable in any language.  They are both very impressive movers and have spectacular improvisational flow together.  I took two workshops with them back in April, and they came back to Gifu to set a workshop dance with the participants.  I got to ...