Push Pull Matters
a dance performance project with tools, body and structure by Yohei Hamada
Photo by Marthe Nyvoll
Push Pull Matters is a performance about standardized ways of moving the body throughout different cultures and time periods, focusing on the relationships between bodies and tools. The audience will see dancers exploring the movements by assembling and disassembling wearable structures; extended bodies made of rope, fishing nets, and wooden sticks. Dancers from different cultural backgrounds dance with the structure and it is consequently processed, dismantled, and respectfully misused in an attempt to discover a new standard.
A Norwegian planer is designed to push away, a Japanese planer to pull towards the body. They are both sophisticated tools, but they process the material from two directions and affect the body differently. Push Pull Matters is a performance about worldviews or cosmologies that have shaped standards, in the form of small and large cultural nuances that affect structures and networks as well as bodies and tools.
The play took shape during two summers at Bømlo, where the British anthropologist John Arundel Barnes originally developed the term "social network" to describe the western Norwegian prayer house culture. The audience sees a network on stage, a complex object, an extended and enlarged body made of rope, fishing nets, and logs. The structure dances with the dancers, is processed, dismantled, and works together with them.
The Japanese dance artist Yohei Hamada came up with the idea for the piece and developed it in collaboration with Norwegian Katarina Skår Lisa, Finnish Riina Kalmi, both dancers, and the Danish scenographer Olga Regitze Dyrløv Høegh. It has been a goal to create a meeting point for different cultural currents.
Push Pull Matters premiered at Norway's Fisheries Museum in Bergen in August 2023.
Artistic Team
Choreography and Scenic Construction: Yohei Hamada
Creation and performance: Katarina Skår Lisa, Riina Kalmi and Yohei Hamada
Scenography/Costume design: Olga Regitze
Sound design: John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal
Lighting design: Randiane Sandboe
Dramaturg: Cristian Stefanescu
Scenic advisor: John Audun Hauge
Scenic co-researcher: Masateru Miyazawa
Scenic assistant: Diego Belda
Artistic consultant: Danja Burchard, i.c.a.p.
Research coordinator: Mia Julie Wiland
Producer: Yohei Hamada and Sølvi Katrine Andersen (Bergen Dansesenter)
Co-produced by BIT Teatergarasjen and Carte Blanche - THE NORWEGIAN NATIONAL COMPANY OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE
Co-operated by Norges Fiskerimuseum, Bergen Dansesenter - kompetansesenter for dans i Vestland, WRAP, Vitlycke - Centre for Performing Arts and Davvi - Centre for Performing Arts
Supported by Norsk kulturfond, Fond for lyd og bilde, Nordisk Kulturfond, Vestland fylkeskommune, Bergen kommune, FFUK, Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture and Arts Promotion Centre Finland
