Voice of Naoko Ito
Naoko Ito, who has supervised Session House's dance programme and led its resident company Mademoiselle Cinema since 1991, talks about the hopes she put into the 2024 dance projects and what they achieved.
Naoko Ito: “Our Organisation Is Beginning to Take Shape”
Session House, founded in 1991, turns 34 this year! If it were a dancer, it would be at the “Dance Flower” stage! You could say it is in its prime! It is also time to think about our future activities. It is exciting, too, that Dance Flower has produced its first double award in a while: the “Best Award” and an invitation to Korea's NDA, awarded to Yako Omori (大森弥子) and Chinatsu Horikawa (堀川千夏). The Session House Planning Office, a group of volunteers responsible for Session House's own projects, became a general incorporated association in 2022, having previously been a voluntary nonprofit organisation. Active dancers Yasuyo Omoto, Taiju Matsumoto and Mitsutake Kasai became directors. They put their energies into nurturing younger dancers and also select the “Session Award” recipients. Satoshi Ishibuchi and Takahiro Mochizuki support younger dancers with their knowledge as researchers. How we can continue this “Young Dancer Support Project,” which we have run for two years with a grant from Arts Council Tokyo, is a major issue we must now tackle. Yet the unprecedented experiments we have undertaken with this organisation have left us with many experiences and outcomes, becoming a powerful driving force that urges us along the next stretch of our path.
The diversity of contemporary dance affects its development for better and for worse. When dance is left undefined as a concept, with anything allowed, there is no boundary between professionals and amateurs—and that, too, can be both good and bad. So in 2024 we planned “Dance Bridge,” asking artists to make their own distinctive qualities clear and declare, “This is my quality.” We presented work that crossed genres (Sengiku Bando), narratives in which eras and memories intersected (Naoko Ito / Mademoiselle Cinema), and the freedom brought by an unfettered mind and body crossing boundaries (Ryohei Kondo). This is the accumulation of dance that Session House has built up over many years.
Then there is “Dance Flower,” our project to support younger dancers. Here we see works and bodies still at an experimental stage, before they have developed a quality of their own. Although they did not win awards, the very fact that the works formed something like a trade fair of individuality and diversity made me feel that this, too, was an accumulation of the dance Session House has built up. It was only natural that Yako Omori's dance, with its outstanding degree of completion, was selected for the international NDA festival in Korea, but we were also deeply drawn to the other dancers' works, still at an experimental stage. Ishibuchi says that “cultivating audiences who can sense value and possibility there; the golden land of expressive possibilities that exists in the spaces between physical techniques, opened up by pioneers such as Pina Bausch; and our own history of confronting and fighting for that territory head-on”—these are precisely what open dance to everyone. I feel an affinity with these words from someone who continues to work as a dancer himself while warmly guiding younger dancers, and they encourage me to think: let's keep going, much further still.
Our great dream, as we create an independently run place and search for a path that will continue into the next generation, is for these dances, putting out their small shoots and beginning to breathe, to develop as “Japanese culture,” just as manga and anime have. My sense that this is the direction we should take grows ever stronger.
Naoko Ito
Excerpt from Voice of Session House 2024
Session Award Winners Announced
On February 1 this year, after the turn of the year, “Dance Flower,” part of the Young Dancer Support Project, presented six competing works, including work by Korean dancers. Following rigorous deliberations by Session House's three directors—Yasuyo Omoto, Taiju Matsumoto and Mitsutake Kasai—the pair of Yako Mori (森弥子) and Chinatsu Horikawa (堀川千夏) were selected as the winners of the 2024 Best Award. They received a double award, also earning an invitation to the NDA Dance Festival to be held in Daegu, Korea, this August (judge: Yu Hosik).
