YOHEI HAMADA 踊る人/dance artist

Yokai - yet unknown begins from a simple question: how can we dance with the unknown?

Yokai is a broad term in Japanese folklore for beings and phenomena that resist ordinary explanation. At the centre of the work is Hamada's self-built tensegrity structure made of 30 bamboo sticks and ropes. Hamada has been working with tensegrity over a decade, mostly with a 6-stick version. But making this 30-stick version made him realise that the structure he thought he understood had become unfamiliar to him again.

At first, Hamada's body assembles, plays with and twists the structure; gradually, the structure begins to twist his body, until it almost seems to manipulate him. Hamada finds dance in this tension, where the relationship can reverse and what he thought he was manipulating can begin to manipulate him.