ΛƬSUMOЯI - Catarina Miranda - One Dance Festival 2024

ΛƬSUMOЯI is an intersection between past and future, phantasmagoria and reality, dance and light. It is an unconventional meeting of one of the exemplars of Japanese Noh theatre with contemporary performing arts. ΛƬSUMOЯI is the name of a 15th-century Japanese play and the name of Portuguese choreographer Catarina Miranda's latest work, co-produced by One Dance Festival. Catarina's return to Plovdiv brings audiences a unique dance experience bathed in light.
At the heart of the performance is the story of the young samurai ΛƬSUMOЯI. He dies in battle, but his spirit returns to the battlefield, where he eventually manages to find reconciliation instead of reckoning with his killer. Studying the rigorous system and techniques of Kyoto's Noh Theatre, Catarina Miranda deviates from the original plot and develops the idea of the ghost's return with abstraction and aesthetics.
The scene is saturated with memories and rhythms from a fictional imagination. Dressed in armour-masks, the five dancers explore space as a territory to be conquered. They intertwine their joints and limbs, thus locking them or giving them unsuspected powers of movement. In this way, new relationships and identities are born, a new time, and why not new social constructions.
The futuristic dance language of the performers is amplified by the lighting, which plays a major role in the performance. The centre of the stage space is framed with a luminous floor and ceiling, forming a square space in which traditional archetypes dissolve and spotlights illuminate anyone leaving or returning to it. In a kind of dialogue between dance and hypnotic light, the ancient ghosts of Noh and bodies speak, having the ability to be something else, something different, something beautiful. Atsumori is the intersection between the visions and attitudes of the past, the metamorphoses and energy of the present and the enthusiasm of the future.
Catarina Miranda creates stage works that are characterized by the construction of topographies and bodies at once archetypal and transhuman. In 2018, she participated in a traditional theatre training course at the Kyoto Art Center, Japan, dedicated to the gestural and musical tradition of Noh. After presenting the roller-skating performance Cabraqimera at One Dance Week in 2022, Catarina Miranda returns to Plovdiv with her new work, just weeks after the world premiere in Portugal.