Freeway Dance

“Freeway Dance” is a four-hour performance hymn to dance as a place of encounter where memories, people, geographies and different forms of freedom converge. 

 

“My body,” says Ayaka Nakama, “cannot dance without choreography, and it has the property that it wants to dance a lot, so it needs much more choreography (like food). In this project, I treated memories as choreography. I stack multiple choreographies in my body without replacing them.” 

 

What is our first memory of dancing? For “Freeway Dance”, the Japanese choreographer and performance artist Ayaka Nakama asked a neighbour, her father and her friends to describe their memories of their first dance. Based on these descriptions, she re­constructs the movements with her own body. To do this, she invites people to a garden – a place where you can sit, swing on the swing or eat something at one of the food stalls. Although the choreography is fixed, the music changes every evening.

 

 

Beforehand, the audience receives an email asking them to choose a song that they associate with a particular moment in the past, a song they danced to or heard while driving. In this way, the dances that others remembered are danced to the memories of those present in the room.  

 

 

Ayaka Nakama is a dancer and choreographer based in Kobe, Japan. She has worked with Mika Kurosawa, Reina Kimura, Toshiki Okada (chelfitsch) and contact Gonzo, among others. She has been a Fellow at the Saison Foundation in Tokyo since 2022.