[I-MY] Dual Noh Dancing of Vision and Reality

Two identical characters, a woman possessed by a spirit and the spirit herself. Two dancers, actually one dancer, “I” and “MY” synchronously dance with the music accompanied by performer’s movement. The performer does not only perform the dance but creates the music by her motions. Kenji Kojima's program converts a music from digital data on the changing light and shade that are captured from performer’s movement by the computer algorithm. The back screening plays an algorithmic music and dubbed a vocal that is already created from the video. The final performance is added a live music from the whole stage through a video-cam by Kojima’s software.

The dance technique is based on the Japanese Noh theater. “I-MY” means dual dancing in Japanese. Noh is a classical Japanese masked drama with dance and music that has been performed since the 14th century. The Noh expression is very slow and quiet. Emotions are conveyed by stylized gestures and sounds of instruments. The gestures and music have a strong sense of unity. This performance explores a strong sense of unity of gestures and music by the performer.

Two dancers who are vision and reality dance synchronously with the recorded vocal. The music of the performance is created by the performer's motion. The back screening video and a live music (using live video-cam) are composed of digital data by the computer algorithm. The computer program captures the data from 84 divided grids of video images. The program compares the differences of the brightness of grids, and chooses appropriated data by the algorithm, then converts them to musical notes, and plays the notes by MIDI musical instruments. The screening video shows binaries in white squares that indicate the positions of the data of musical source. Kenji Kojima developed two algorithmic composition applications for a back screening and a live performance.

The dance technique and the plot are based on the classical Japanese Noh theater. Most of all Noh dramas are ghost stories. A man, a woman or other creatures died whom the spirit is still hanging around in this world, appears and tells his/her sad and regrettable story to a traveling Buddhist monk or a passenger of the land. The [I-MY] was adapted from Noh drama "Futari Shizuka" that was a village woman was possessed by the spirit of "Shizuka" who was a dancer and a lady of the tragic warrior "Yoshitsune".