Voice of Session House 2020 — Mitsutake Kasai

Mitsutake Kasai: “Facing a Year of Great Change”

2020 was a year of great change. The novel coronavirus completely transformed our lives. Many dance performances were canceled, and a new form of presentation, online streaming, also emerged. Many people involved with theaters were profoundly affected. Here I would like to write about my activities over the past year, how I felt about this year of change, and how I approached dance. In mid-February last year, I took part in a dance festival called “HOT POT,” held at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse, with a duet work with Yukio Suzuki (鈴木ユキオ). This was a newly reworked version of a piece that had premiered at Session House. We stayed in Yokohama for a week to participate in the festival. At that very time, the Diamond Princess was docked in Yokohama Port. I feel that this was the beginning of the world that would change moment by moment from then on. The day after my HOT POT performance, I went to Melbourne, Australia, to present my solo performance “Pollen Revolution.” My flight left Haneda Airport for Melbourne via a connection in Hong Kong. I remember being astonished by how few people there were at Hong Kong Airport.

 

In March, I choreographed a piece for the University of Tsukuba dance club. Ten university students committed themselves to two months of rehearsals. Three days before the performance, we were told it would be postponed. In the end, that performance went from postponement to cancellation. That same month, the first and second days of my “DUO no Kai” performances at KAAT took place, but the third and fourth days were canceled. A dance work is built over time, and on its performance day it is born, letting out its first cry. Having it canceled before it could give that first cry left me filled with an unbearable sense of frustration. Then, two weeks later, on April 7, the first state of emergency was declared. Around then, various performances and events began to be canceled. Theaters closed, and I began to feel the changing world keenly, on my skin.

 

That April, with no exit yet in sight, I started rehearsals for a new performance to be held in August. It began with a discussion with Naoko Ito around January about doing a project at the time of the Olympics. Of course, at that point we had not imagined that we would be in a situation like this. We started rehearsing without knowing whether the performance could take place. I asked all the members of the Kasai family, including Akira (叡), to appear. I supervised the work as a whole, and we basically divided up the creation of the scenes. To express how we would face the problem of the coronavirus from here on, I gave it the title “Loosing Four Arrows at the End of the World.” It is precisely when we encounter great difficulties that we possess the power to overcome them. That power is the power to create dance and the power to bring works into being.

 

In December, we also held “Dance Bridge,” which I participate in every year. This year’s presentation took an online form. I asked Yukio Suzuki (鈴木ユキオ) and Hiroyuki Miura (三浦宏之), who had started their dance careers at the same Asbestos-kan, to perform with me. Although we were there at different times, it was a very strange feeling for people who had come out of the same rehearsal studio to dance together 20 years later. As we keep dancing, the scenery changes, but it also creates new encounters. I am very grateful to have been able to reunite in this way.
I have no idea how the world will change from here on. But I hope it will become a world in which dancing can continue to give us some kind of connection with society.

 

Mitsutake Kasai

Excerpt from Voice of Session House 2020