SPOTLIGHT

<< Back to SPOTLIGHT Live Showcase Program

EnTrance
Yumi Umiumare

Venue: Dunstan Playhouse
When: Wed 29 Feb 11:05 AM - 11:30 AM
Genre: Interdisciplinary / Hybrid Arts
Main Audience: Adults (18+)
No. in touring party: 4

EnTrance

‘A mystical collision of butoh and theatre.’ - The Age

‘EnTrance opens heart, body and soul to the transformations that direct the human spirit.’ – Canberra Times

EnTrance is a critically-acclaimed full-length solo work with multimedia and installations, within the metaphor of 'the near shore' of life and 'the far shore' of death. Using electronic costumes – television mask, fairy light fabric – plus karaoke and the decay to nothingness of the flour-encrusted Butoh body, award-winning dancer Yumi Umiumare performs the mystical conundrum of 'the space between' amid the hubbub of our city-life. White, vaulting installation splits the space into the real and imagined. Umiumare can play with the audience in fun karaoke near-space or recede into the psychological claustrophobia of mirrored city-scapes where full-wall media projections crowd. Umiumare performs six scenes exploring the personal and universal; like cultural distinctions of crying, depersonalisation in the metropolis, public/personal identity and transcending through death. The soundscape of the city isolates the living, accompanies the dead.

EnTrance assembles award-winning collaborators Moira Finucane, Bambang Nurcahyadi, Naomi Ota and Ian Kitney and was nominated for 3 Green Room Awards. EnTrance is the culmination of Umiumare’s collaborations, a diva focusing her powers for audiences to share in transcendence.

Yumi Umiumare

From her many performances of her diverse repertoires, Yumi Umiumare's electrifying performance style is in demand the world over. Yumi is a dancer, choreographer and the creator of Butoh Cabaret and visceral dance theatre works. Originally a member of the seminal Butoh Company DaiRakudakan in Tokyo, she is only Japanese Butoh Dancer living in Australia. Yumi has been creating her distinctive style of hybrid works over the last 20 years and her works have been seen in numerous festivals in dance, theatre and film productions throughout Australia, Japan, Europe, New Zealand and South Eastern Asia. Through her unique experience of living both in Japan and Australia, she has created a new genre, Butoh Cabaret, which explores cultural identities through narratives and abstraction. Her works have received critical acclaim and garnered her and her collaborators several Australian Green Room awards.

Her performance credits include awards winning Fleeting Moments, Tokyo DasSHOKU Girl, DasSHOKU Cultivations!! and DasSHOKU Hora! Her solo dance works include INORI-in-visible, Dis-Oriental, Sakasama and How could you even begin to understand? with Tony Yap. She choreographed many cross cultural physical theatre productions including most recent Not Just My Story as a part of Human Rights Festival (2011).

Photo: Garth Oriander