TodAncestor III
“TodAncestor is an intermediainstallation performance ritualfor vier and its homonymrelatives fear, poetry 詩 anddeath 死. A meditative ritual thatdeals with one’s own death, thatinevitably will come as part ofthe natural cycle of life.”
This four-hour durational performance and sound installation was created as part of the creative research for Yuko Kaseki's solo performance TodAncestor, which was performed later that year at DOC11 (Berlin, DE). During Musikfond's six-month scholarship programme, I invited Kaseki to mentor me and share her practice as a dancer. Through her teaching, I learned about the concept of "気 (ki)", which has many different meanings, such as feeling, spirit, energy and atmosphere, and is central to her practice to unite body, mind and spirit in her dance. She taught me this concept through Katsugen Undo (regenerative movement exercises), which is part of the comprehensive Seitai healing method developed by Haruchika Noguchi in the 1950s. Based on this concept of ki, Kaseki and I explored the theme of life and death from the perspective of sound, both audible and inaudible, visible and invisible. Sounds that vibrated the air in space in the past and still act like powerful energies. Searching and channelling, our bodies and ki begin to follow the traces of memories as the radio noise intervenes. The sound of interviews on the street, recorded on a tape at the beginning of the performance, begins to decay as the tape is pulled out of its cassette shell and stretched in all directions in the room, finally occupying the space as a visible form of sounds of the past.
In order to free my entire body from physically touching electronic instruments, I focused on usingsensors for this project. With the help of technical supervisor Francesco Della Toffola, I modified fourcassette tape players with LDR (Light Depended Resistor) which controlled the speed of the playersby measuring the intensity of the sunlight coming through the windows. The tapes were passed through hooks on the wall to which piezos were attached,allowing me to create a long sustained sound while moving through the room. I also attached LDR toa synthesiser to control pitch and filters with the movement of LED lights.
Performance/direction/lights: Yuko Kaseki and Tot Onyx
Technical supervisor: Francesco Della Toffol
Photo: Peter Zach