REVOLUTION & RESILIENCE
Recently landed: Revolution & Resilience
Gracia’s written response to Akira Kasai’s Pollen Revolution presented by Dancehouse, and Victoria Chiu’s What Happened in Shanghai in the North Magdalen Laundry within the Abbotsford Convent precinct, for Fjord Review.
Pollen grains can be dispersed by wind, insect, bird, or animal, and in the case of Akira Kasai’s Pollen Revolution, they can even be liberated within and dispersed by a dancer. Kasai’s Pollen Revolution, one of three performances presented within Dancehouse’s Japan Focus, alongside Ruri Mito’s Matou and Takao Kawaguchi’s Good Luck, as part of the 2020 Asia TOPA: Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts dance program, pollinates and vibrates the imagination in a way that only the ‘Nijinsky of Butoh’ can.
Falling in abundance, falling to the ground, “mixed by atmospheric turbulence, resulting in a uniform pollen rain over a given area” within the Sylvia Staehli Theatre, analysis of this pollen rain gives us the essence of past, present, and future in a state of perpetual growth. In echo of the movement of pollen, dispersed within the theatre on Thursday night: ideas, cultures, ways and states of being, the exploration of elastic time—who said it was linear? perception, and the many scattered pathways it presents.
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28th of February, 2020
Mitsutake Kasai in Pollen Revolution by Akira Kasai (image credit: Daido Hiroyasu)
