What better place to explore modern humanity’s disconnection from nature than an abandoned mall parking lot.
Late one night during the COVID pandemic, Joshua Kohl, Haruko Crow Nishimura and their collaborators, including cinematographers Leo Mayberry and Ian Lucero, sneaked into the concrete complex in Shoreline. In front of a “mysterious, alien-looking Sears,” as Nishimura remembers it, they filmed her dancing, circled slowly by cars.
This film became a building block for “Anima Mundi,” the latest work from longtime Seattle interdisciplinary artists Degenerate Art Ensemble, debuting in a one-night-only performance at The Moore Theatre on Feb. 14.
The work blends live dance and music with filmed segments — “film-based ceremonies,” as DAE describes them — along with text from local writer Shin Yu Pai and projection mapping and “interactive sculptural elements” that build a rich visual world and allow Nishimura to play with her own shadow.
Human animals
Kohl and Nishimura, who are the co-founders and co-directors of DAE, began work on what would become “Anima Mundi” some six years ago, when the pandemic canceled live performances and the world changed around us.
“The city got really quiet,” Nishimura said. Suddenly, they could hear birds. The urban landscape hushed, and they were reminded, she said, that “we are actually animals in a natural world.”
This idea is a central precept of “Anima Mundi.” Nishimura’s dance work draws on Butoh and Noguchi Taiso, Japanese movement traditions born in the wake of World War II that reject rigid traditional dance and respond more intuitively to the body.
Early in this show’s development process, Nishimura reflected on the Shinto and Buddhist traditions of her Japanese culture, which went on to inform the world of “Anima.”
“Somehow, I arrived at the feminine and masculine balance in a masculine world,” Nishimura said. “The innovation, the progress, the competition … maybe it turns into excessive force and violence. What is devalued is the feminine values of mending, healing or nurturing.”
Though Nishimura mostly performs alone in the piece, she also dances intermittently with an otherworldly creature (performed by Ezra Dickinson) inspired by Japanese marebito, “divine beings who come from another world bearing gifts and wisdoms and spiritual knowledge,” Nishimura said.
To build the show’s aural landscape, Kohl, who performs the music live alongside Mako Kikuchi, collected natural sounds from the show’s film locations which, along with their two voices, he processed electronically and turned into instruments.
The filmed segments have a ritual energy, whether they were made within echoey, soulless concrete or the soft lushness of a Pacific Northwest forest (in this case, the Morse Wildlife Preserve in Graham, Pierce County).
“A huge part of making this piece is being in your body and being in your senses,” Kohl said.
Critical balance
Kohl and Nishimura met as students at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and have been making work together, as Degenerate Art Ensemble, for more than 25 years.
They adopted the name “Degenerate Art Ensemble” in 1999, as they worked on a performance piece about white supremacy. The name references the 1937 Nazi art exhibition “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art,” which featured hundreds of works by great 20th-century contemporary artists that Hitler and the Nazi machine considered “degenerate.”
“He believed that art should only reflect the ‘ideal,’ not the realities of human suffering and complexity,” Kohl said.
DAE doesn’t shy away from complexity. Over the years, their large-scale multimedia pieces have evolved as the group has toured the world and pushed their own boundaries, both artistically and technologically.
Along the way, they’ve assembled a cohort of adored collaborators, plenty of accolades — including, recently, a prestigious Bessie Award, for their interdisciplinary work “Boy mother / faceless bloom” — and a loyal fan base here in Seattle.
As a company that seeks out new artistic tools, Kohl said, “We’re not really in a place to say, ‘Technology is bad, live is good.’ We’re more like, as RuPaul says, ‘Use all the crayons in the crayon box.’ There’s so much to explore.”
Like many artists who play with abstraction, Kohl and Nishimura feel both a push to communicate their ideas explicitly and a pull to leave room for audiences to draw their own conclusions.
In one particularly stunning visual in “Anima,” Nishimura performs folded up inside a miniature house, an idea Kohl said was born from discussions of factory farming and the horrific conditions of veal farms. In the end, whether or not audiences take away a literal understanding of that idea is out of their control.
As American art seems to shift toward easily digestible, algorithm-driven content, DAE embraces contradiction.
“One of the things we keep talking about is animism being alive in our technical future,” Kohl said. “We’re moving into this crazy digital future where our ideas are being created by machines, our cars are being driven by machines, and we’re doing less and less.”
“In this piece,” he continued, “we’re playing around with those mysterious, unknowable human things like ghost stories or sensorial intuitions. Things that just can’t be explained.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
