PuPaa: Butoh, digital media and collaboration

Artists Statement

PuPaa is a multimedia performance, inspired by Butoh, a dance-scape of transformative states of body, mind and perception. In PuPaa, the dancers are entities living in obligatory symbiosis reminiscent of a Mixotricha Paradoxa, a micro-organism which can be determined as both one organism of five entities or five organisms. While each entity of PuPaa expresses unique species characteristics, they create a collective body with incorporeal connections using video and sound projection technology embedded in their costume, an outer layer of their body. The body later embraces the world of others as well, i.e. the audience: during the performance, a dancer, who was a part of an installation in the lobby, transported the audiences’ sound during intermission into the theatre. Furthermore, their faces were projected onto the dancer’s body. The entity of PuPaa signifies (or speaks) with their monstrous body embedded with technology, and participates in a de-territorialized collaboration process.