Kenzo Kusuda’s choreographic style - subjective overview

(Text based on my recent participation in a rehearsal for Kenzo’s latest and currently toured piece “Honey Crypto”)

When working in rehearsals with dancers, kenzo looks and cares for their true and felt engagement in movement. The precision of the felt comes first; it precedes the performance, and gets incorporated in a true form. He is not looking for the suggested movement interpretation or its best copy but its frank realization.

The creation of the true (to the dancers themselves first, then shared with the audience) dance reality gets supported by techniques of visualization. Kenzo makes the dancers interact, imaginatively, with objects or make believe emotions, etc. to create a more powerful movement realization. Shared relationships and sensations are the base for sequential gestures.

Even the passionate phases of released, wild movement are preconfigured upon a relationship with the audience, they are not free-floating. The wild always seems to have its controlled end, be it in an established eye contact with the audience or the ways the space is being explored, creating a selection of close up or perspective relations. Those, both physical and visual relationships evolve during the course of the piece and round up viewing expectations.

Again, the invitation to the spatial, visual and felt relationship is much deeper than a give-and-take game, more involving than a performer – recipient interrelationship. The dancers are expected (by Kenzo) NOT to show the brilliance of the performance BUT to invite the audience to feel the brilliance of movement itself, as a phenomenon. The feeling, I mean here, is the sort that lets one lose him/herself in the motion. The dancers are not performing per se but inviting to their world of movement through the shared joy of action. It is that act and true feel for that enchanting thrill of action (in both adventure and quiver sense!), and its momentous spin, that shapes the atmosphere and that matters at all.

It is the invitation to shared ‘forgetting’ oneself in motion with little recollection of ‘what have just happened?’. Metaphorically speaking, what Kenzo proposes to experience is dancing on traces of memory, played out upon contrasted energies, and causing triggers strong enough to wake up the senses yet on the expense of losing oneself in the movement performance. It is a ride on a roller-coaster that combines heavy windy climbing with throws into the underground leaving us with sensations only.

When I watch Kenzo’s work I feel his dance is much less about formatted images, staged positions or choreographic stances, but more about embracing artificial splits and inventing vivid connections. He has an ability to unite opposites and to combine energetic potentiality with softness. He creates rich metaphorical and somewhat juxtapositional associations in my head when I watch his pieces, like those of a splashy soaked sponge or a drooling pinscher. So it just might be that the movement quality of what he presents and what I associate with ‘animal sliminess’ is what Kenzo calls ‘eloquence in dumbness’.