What’s hot at the greatest show in town
Japanese ensemble bend time and space in a South African first
To create a production like
Voyager
required artistry — and a lot of it.
The hour-long dance piece is the first contribution to a National Arts Festival by Tokyobased performing arts company enra.
The Japanese performing arts group was started in 2012 by artistic director Nobuyuki Hanabusa and has since enthralled worldwide audiences with gravity-defying performances which blend dance and digital art.
Though the group have performed at well known events including the opening ceremony of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and toured more than 30 countries over the years,
Voyager
is the company’s first offering to South African audiences.
Combining the skills of dancers with backgrounds in classical ballet, gymnastics, martial arts, animation dance, juggling and street dance with projected digital art, enra tests the limits, making for performances that need to be watched to be believed.
Defying physics and all we know about space and gravity, enra’s is surreal and
Voyager magical, taking audiences on a journey through the Milky Way and beyond, to a place where we can dance among the planets, hold the light of the stars or the fire of the sun in our hands, and where time and space can be bent to our will.
To date enra’s productions have been presented as a variety of different or separate pieces arranged together, but
Voyager seems to be the company’s first concept show where each dance scene is connected to the next to create one story.
And while the story is simply that of a voyage through the unending reaches of time and space, the seamless synchronisation of the dancers’ movements and digital art projections are awe-inspiring.
Each pirouette, body roll, hand flick, jeté (jump) and leg kick is perfectly timed to manipulate and interact with the motion graphics on screen.
Accompanied by a live band, under the guidance of musical director and well-known Japanese drummer Nobuaki Kaneko, the dancers move into and through the chaos of the universe.
As much as the dancers are voyagers, so are the audience as we journey through the odyssey of our existence with each of the dancer’s steps.
Although we watch
Voyager on some kind of digital device with a flat screen, the production ’ s 3D effects are not entirely lost on a virtual audience.
There are moments of simplicity and quiet, but interesting props, creative light displays and an ever-changing backdrop are incorporated into almost every scene and sometimes all at once.
The movements of the dancers are, however, never overshadowed. Rather, they are complemented by the added effects. In fact, without the fascinating tech displays, the show would not be as wondrous and captivating as it is.
But if beautiful lines, precise movements, graceful leaps and flexibility are what you are after, offers that too in
Voyager the form of contemporary dancers Saya Watatani, Maki Yokoyama and Takako Morimoto.
For those wanting to see neat tricks, juggling dancers and animation and street style movers including Yusaku Mochizuki, Tsuyoshi Kaseda and Kazunori Ishide are the ones to watch.
is a beautifully expressed
Voyager fusion of movement and digital graphics — one that offers a celebration of life at times and thrusts audiences into another dimension at others. All the while tempting us to join in on the exploration of the universe and our place in it.