Japan Tour ’26 Chapter 3: “Contact Dance”
Leave a comment
A few months before traveling to Japan, I was browsing a Facebook group for Kyoto expats when I came across a post about Contact Improvisation dance sessions with live music.
I immediately sent a message introducing The Kyoto Connection and explaining that we would be in Kyoto in September. I asked if they might be interested in having us play live music for one of their sessions, and the answer came back very quickly: yes.
That is how I got in touch with Kanami, the teacher behind CI Brisa Kyoto, an artist involved in Contact Improvisation, aerial dance, theater and other performing arts in Kyoto. We exchanged a few messages before our arrival, and she gave us some general ideas about the dynamics of the class and the kind of experience they were looking for.
On September 24 at 7 PM, we arrived at a community center in Kyoto with our instruments, ready to play.
We were also a little nervous.
We have improvised live many times before, but we had never created music continuously for a Contact Improvisation session. We didn’t really know what was going to happen, which also meant that we had to pay attention to the room, the dancers and whatever was developing in front of us.
The group itself was wonderfully diverse, with people from Japan and several other countries, including France, Germany and Thailand. We began the session by creating a very deep and minimal atmosphere, combining field recordings and sounds from Kyoto with long, ethereal textures, synthesizers and Jesica’s violin.
For a while, the music remained introspective and spacious as the dancers slowly began moving and interacting with each other.
And then Cielo joined the class.
Little by little, she started moving around the room, interacting with the dancers and with Kanami. They began playing with her and she began playing with them. The energy of the entire room started to change, and naturally, our music changed with it.
What had begun as something deep and meditative gradually became playful, joyful and sometimes even funny. We weren’t following a plan anymore. We were simply watching what was happening and responding through music.
Jesica started singing and eventually left her violin for a while and joined the dance herself. At another point, one of the participants, Michiru, decided to sing while I was playing the Tenori-on, and suddenly we found ourselves doing an improvised duet in the middle of the session.
Everything became part of the same game.
For an entire hour we played continuously without stopping, improvising every second of the music according to what was happening in the room. For us, it was a beautiful musical exercise: listening, reacting, changing direction and allowing the dancers to influence what we played just as much as our music influenced their movements.
By the end of the session, the nervousness we had felt when we arrived had completely disappeared. We left energized, happy and grateful for having been invited into an artistic practice that was new to us.
One of the things we are enjoying most about this tour is precisely this possibility of taking our music outside the places where we would normally expect to find it. Not only concerts and stages, but cafés, community spaces, dance classes and encounters with artists whose disciplines are completely different from ours.
Thank you to Kanami and everyone at CI Brisa Kyoto for welcoming us, playing with us and giving us the opportunity to be the live soundtrack for your Contact Improvisation session.
It was our first time doing something like this.
Hopefully, it won’t be the last.
