while going to a condition + Accumulated Layout: a consummate feast

A sudden barrage, a wall of noise presents itself, omniscient in the theatre, like a big, fat, invisible sitting Buddha opening its mouth to let the world out. The sound is sustained… and sustained, testing the audience’s patience, allowing us to luxuriously soak in the saturated images. And at centre stage, as if by circumstance, a figure in black, perhaps bearing weight or witness stands, perhaps transmuting this ancient god gradually into a giant circuitry; now a deified current, it cuts a cold aspect shot across the wall upstage in blunt, bold projected archi-textures.

Or at any rate, these were some of the impressions first circulating my mind in Hiroaki Umeda’s *while going to a condition*, the first part of a two piece program that includes *Accumulated Layout*, part of this year’s Vancouver PuSh Festival at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Choreographed and performed by Hiroaki Umeda, with sound, lighting and projection design by Tokyo based S20, both pieces boldly push the boundaries of endurance and physical equilibrium. With viscerally dizzying strobe effects and a rhythmic fusion of percussive noise-light-projection and rapid hip hop phrases - all punctuated by uncanny stillness and silence (was it really silence?) – an older gentlemen beside me at one point dolefully commented: “I’m feeling the angst of the universe.” But I felt a unity of electric current and human-being, a connection to the ionic charge of a planet’s core. Caged, as if by a master magnet, Umeda rarely moved out of centre stage, only the extremities of his limbs at times a commination to escape.

Accumulated Layout continues the gradual build up of vocabulary almost seamlessly (from) *while going to a condition*. Weaving more butoh-esque movement into the choreography, Umeda emerges in a wet-scape that is more melodic, and slightly more variant in its use of light and projection. At one moment, beautifully connected to his core, a spot immediately above Umeda traces the light of a bird, or perhaps a winged sea creature at his feet, an image that dances an inverted duet with his floating, extended arms. At times the combined light and projection manifests in three dimensions, shadows created on three walls at once, even amidst the audience. Both these pieces seem created with design and choreography in communication from their inception - even in moments of disharmonic chaos they are melded. Both pieces, a consummate feast.

_while going to a condition; Choreographer & Dancer Hiroaki Umeda; Sound, Visual Creation and Production: S20. Accumulated Layout; Choreographer & Dancer Hiroaki Umeda; Sound, Visual Creation and Production: Théâtre national de Chaillot and S20 with the support of La Chaufferie (DCA), Saint-Denis. Dance “here”: http://pushfestival.ca/index.php?mpage=shows&spage=main&id=60#show for more information._