HISTORY

Minako Seki’s most important past creations and projects

Dancing Between

To sit between the chairs, who doesn’t know that state? Here is one side, there the other. You can see both sides, you know them, maybe all too well, but you are not able, or rather: not willing to make up your mind. It is the classical dilemma, no matter which side you will choose, you will loose something, often times a person, that you will hurt, who will then feel betrayed. But you don’t want this and therefore you stay somewhere in the middle till, yes, till something happens and brings along the decision; sometimes you are involved actively, sometimes passively. It has evolved and the situation finds a resolution. But till that moment there is this strange state, you simply feel in between.

Cosmos

I see many points that are connecting into a circle. These points are spaces, feelings, memories, images and imaginations.

In between these points there are other points, endlessly. With my dance I want to find the moments in between these points. That is offering endless possibilities to my dance.

Minako Seki aspires with her dance to the space inbetween. It is not only title of her work but the request of her dance and choreography. With her dance she explores the mystery between body, space, time and human soul. She is interested in perception and effects of energy -potentials, like they exist in the state before a avalanche breaks through or a pendular swings back. Transfered to the human being this can be the moment of expectation, the margin between wish and fullfilment. What happens, if this unstable balance, filled with perception and illusion, imaginations and knowledge will ease off?

Minako Seki: dance and choreography

Shinichi Momo Koga: Co-choreography

Mido Kawamura: costume design

Zam Johnson: music composition

Nils Willers: light design and music realisation

SCHICHT

We follow the dancer. How does she breaks through her own layers, searching for her own self?  Or are we experiencing our own layers of perception? Who knows what is inside and what is outside?

In Schicht, we wander through the sedimentary layers of evolution, stored in our cells over the last millions of years, where they are still in formation.

1996

EX ORIENTE LUX

In Memoriam
Gustav Gisiger Lightpainter
(1949-2002)

Socrates: … it has to be considered, that there are two kinds of visual disturbances and two kinds of causes for them: When you come from the light into the dark and when you come from the dark into the light.

Platon “The Parable of The Caves”

Am I awake or am I dreaming? The worlds presented on this peep-show stage are farytaile grotesque, wavering and vulnerable. It is the theatre as a series of magic picture frames, with doubles and human marionettes tumbling out of them in strange clothes; or weird, floating, turning objects full of visual, acoustic and intellectual illusions and irritations. A poetic game with associations familiar to everyone, associations that can nevertheless change direction from one moment to the next. It is a type of theatre in which light, colours and images dance nimbly with one another, provoking the question of whether this world might indeed be the true world and whether we might merely be living in its shadows.

2002
Idea, choreography & dance : Minako Seki / Music : Zam Johnson

BORDERLESS SPLIT BRAIN

BSB is a research journey into the human consciousness. Split in logical thoughts and illogical associations it penetrates our life like the tides, like a fleeting dream. The production oscillates between dance and theatre, left and right, east and west. It is a piece of struggling dance systems. On one side Japanese Butoh ‘ “expression of the soul”, on the other the contemporary dance of the western world. We don’t know who will be the winner of this wrestling bout. We only know about the question that is influencing the events: Who am I and how many am I actually?

Inspired by a story by Stanislaw Lem where a man’s brain is split into left and right by an accident Minako Seki puts “The duplication” on stage as a dance theatre piece full of images and associations. It’s about perception, illustration, division, left and right, light, shadows, reality and illusion, existence and consciousness.

“I can’t say that I am or I am doing something. It’s only the left half of my brain. With the second one I have to compromise”

 

Choreography and dance: Minako Seki

Dancers: Martina Heim, Jasmine Morand, Jiska Morgenthal, Abdré M. Schober, Minako Seki, Alexander Sieber