Yoh Morishita

Definitely, it's a symbol of change for me as well, but it means more than that.

The butterfly appears in the scientific field in relation to Chaos Theory. Also in the traditional Japanese context, it was a symbol of “immortality” and was popular amongst samurai to use it as a family crest. But it can also symbolise beauty because of its short life.

Yoh Morishita

I decided to work with the idea of the butterfly, because of my intuitive attraction to that creature. In the process, it helped me to create materials by inspiring me conceptually and choreographically. I like its complexity, which opens the possibilities of interpreting it in different ways.

Yoh Morishita

As an artist who uses the body as media, I’m interested in what makes us perceive things as “alive”. For example, you see a human body and a doll next to each other. Of course, you think the doll is an object and the body is a life form intuitively. But why is it like that? This very obvious fact fascinates me a lot and makes me wonder what this “thing” is, coming out of a life form. Maybe it’s what eastern medicine calls “Qi”…?

There is a book on my shelf in Vienna, “Between the inanimate and biological” written by Japanese biologist Shinichi Fukuoka. I needed to read this book when I was a high school student in Japan. Back then, the book didn’t resonate with me, but in the time my thoughts about a new piece were taking shape, I came across it and I read it again.

He explains in the book that our body looks stable, but actually it’s continuously changing on the cell level. This might be such an obvious thing for some people, but I find it so crazy that it’s in a flow and circulating. The body is constantly deconstructed and created. All cells are replaced in a certain period of time, and on a material level, you’re a completely new person. He says this “dynamic equilibrium” is what makes things alive. I was so inspired by this theory.

On the other hand, metamorphosis is a biological process where the change is explicitly visible. We humans don’t metamorphose drastically like butterflies do, but we also change over time, on our body cell level, personality, our way of thinking, through experiences, cultures, technologies, and people we encounter. 

And I found the chrysalis is embodying this phenomena well. From the outside it looks settled as one entity, but what's actually going on inside is a hyperactive cell movement, generating a new body, combining its various elements, compound eyes, thorax, legs, a straw-like mouth, and wings. The process of metamorphosis is beautiful, yet slightly uncanny and science fictional.

Yoh Morishita

During the creation process, I came across the works of the South Korean artist Lee Bul, whose sculpture “Chrysalis” (2000) might have been named after the book.

I was so moved by John Wyndham’s sentences from the novel, like “The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.” For me, this quote resonated with what Fukuoka claims.

Also, this novel had a strong impact on me performing in the piece, to be a mutant on the stage. The question arose about how we humans deal with ”change” and “unknown”, dramaturgically, the relationship between an audience and a performer.

I think it was an interesting coincidence that I met this novel through this project, as I'm coming from the country where the atomic bombs were dropped, and the nuclear power plant tragedy of Fukushima happened. At that time, I was a high school student living in Japan. Well, maybe I'm literally a mutant.

Yoh Morishita

The material draws heavily from the music of Marija Jociūtė. Her music offers me a variety of rhythms. It enables me to generate the dialogue between music and dance. This project is our first collaboration, but we spent a lot of time together through a year, looking into scientific theories, especially quantum physics and creating movement and music individually in the process. We shared this curiosity towards science. Sometimes I find her like a witch, someone who knows very well about science and nature, generating music with her machines and voice. I think you can feel it from her music, it's technological yet something organic. I'm very happy to work with her, especially for this project she is really the right person.

I played Marija’s music in the studio and started moving along it. Searching for sensual impulses in my body intuitively and at the same time, looking for duality in the movement. I tried to create movement and poses that had ambivalent qualities: Something artificial and organic. Human and un-human. Empathic and unsympathetic. Familiar and unfamiliar. Funny and scary.

Yoh Morishita

My way of choreographing is very simple. I overload on information that I find interesting and inspiring related to the topic I'm working on at that moment. I collect many texts, theories, stories, images, songs, and have them around me in the studio. Then I start to move, shifting my focus from brain to body and the moment itself. Recording, watching, evaluating, editing, and reproducing. Sometimes I struggle to reproduce the material, especially the mood is a very sensitive element to tune. Therefore, it needs work to materialize the movement, bridging the gap between feeling and form.

Yoh Morishita

It’s a good question. There is a small part that I left for the improvisation. The mood and the character of the movements are fixed, but not precisely choreographed with the music, even if I personally tend to fix the movements, as I feel more secure with a fixed choreography. I also like the process of polishing up the movement material through repetition.

For me, keeping a part as improvisation is a risk, scary yet exciting. It appears differently depending on the condition of the audience and me. It's a special moment of “unknown” for everybody. I find it interesting that the piece itself keeps mutating through time and space.

Yoh Morishita

The movement vocabulary for "Chrysalis" was gradually cultivated in a way I mentioned above through different phases in the process. The opening sequence came out at the end of the summer. A single improvisation to Marija’s music in one go was completed and kept without any further editing. The beginning of the scene embodies a subtle, rather static approach to express the idea.
The energetic movement in the last scene embodies what actually happens inside of the chrysalis, dynamic flow and circulation. A barrage of movements that almost feels like it’s never stopping.

In "Chrysalis", I was not looking for something dreamy, indeed. I was particularly interested in the notion of the unknown, which makes people sceptical, scared, afraid, careful, curious, attracted, fascinated, but we actually don’t exactly know what it does to us. As a performer, I was looking for a character who embodies this. 

Being an Asian in Europe, I tend to forget, but I definitely look different from Europeans. For good and bad, we mostly can’t escape from how we look like – and if something looks different, you’re curious and you want to see it. Like children do. Other times people are just openly racist. But I chose to be a performer and be on the stage to be seen by people in Europe. I acknowledge this fact and didn’t want to pretend this is not a topic. My body on the stage is political. I wanted to take this opportunity to face that reality and experiment with it, exaggerating it with dance.

Yoh Morishita

I’d be happy if the audience could perceive it in this way. Being in Europe, creating my own piece, or performing for others, the fact of me being Japanese is always ghosting around.

I started to get a proper dance education in Austria. I somewhat couldn't imagine myself studying dance in Japan. I felt too ashamed not to continue studying architecture after my bachelor’s, and transitioning to become a dancer would not fulfil the expectations of an “adult" career in my home country. I needed a safe place where no one knows and cares about me, where I can freely be myself and experiment with what I can do. Being a foreigner is not always easy, but a certain detachedness can make one feel at ease.

Yoh Morishita

In "Chrysalis", I worked with science fiction and futuristic elements. In my new work, “Dog Star”, I will dive into the past, looking at Japanese traditional aesthetics from a distant perspective as a Japanese living in Europe.

“In Praise of Shadow” written by Junichiro Tanizaki is another book from my shelf, which I got when I was studying architecture in Kyoto. Tanizaki says that beauty grows from the realities of life. The traditional architecture was designed to suit the climate, with flat, large roofs and dimly lit interiors that rarely receive direct sunlight. He states that traditional Japanese culture shows its full beauty in this dim light, and that's what characterizes the mysterious Orient from the perspective of Westerners. Moreover, he goes on to say that who dwells in the middle of the shadow is often a woman.

Written in 1933, when traditional houses got more westernized with convenient industrial technologies, I imagine that he felt an urge to analyze the fading Japanese aesthetics. In the book, he talks about Japanese culture by comparing it with western culture. His opinions are sometimes too radical and probably not based on reality, but his "imaginary West" enabled him to give a deep insight into traditional Japanese beauty.

Yoh Morishita

Living abroad, my relationship with Japanese culture got changed. I respect and appreciate my own culture more, but came to think about "what is Japaneseness?" The things which didn't appeal to me before I left my country started to attract me. Maybe I'm just getting old, or seriously homesick, or gaining an objective perspective. The version of me in Europe wants to learn from Japanese traditional culture and experiment with its translation into a western environment of performance and art.