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6/07/2022

MANCC Welcomes Returning Choreographic Fellows Kota Yamazaki and Mina Nishimura

Two dancers perform beneath a live oak tree covered in Spanish moss.
Kota Yamazaki and Mina Nishimura are returning to MANCC for a June 2022 residency. Photo by Chris Cameron.
Kota Yamazaki and Mina Nishimura
Kota and Mina will be building movement scores and deepening new and existing practices while collaborating with composer Kenta Nagai.

New York-based artists Kota Yamazaki and Mina Nishimura return to the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, or MANCC, after a December 2020 residency, to continue developing a new work as a collaborative pair entitled, “I, Ghost, the, Other (self), You.” Having been in residence together before to focus on Yamazaki’s “Darkness Odyssey” trilogy, their December 2020 residency and June 2022 residency mark a shift in how they’re thinking about their relationship and work as a collaborative duo.

I, Ghost, the, Other (self), or You” is an intimate and quiet duet that re-imagines an abandoned, forgotten, aging or marginalized body while deepening and rigorously pursuing weather-like, inner energy-based movement practice, reflecting the Japanese Zen philosophy about the self as “no-self” or as “fluid being.“ Through channeling to those beings that wander through spaces between life and death, light and darkness, physical and metaphysical, and “this” and “that” world, the work attempts to reveal the depth and richness of undefinable in-between spaces, and the fluid and uncategorizable nature of being.

While at MANCC, Kota and Mina will be building movement scores and deepening new and existing practices while collaborating with composer Kenta Nagai. Towards the end of the residency, Yamazaki and Nishimura will host a sharing of their work ahead of a showing at Jacob’s Pillow on July 14th, 2022.

Yamazaki and Nishimura’s residency is funded, in part, by the Mellon Foundation.

A pen and ink illustration.
Illustration by Mina Nishimura
Two dancers perform outdoors beneath a live oak tree covered in Spanish moss.
Kota Yamazaki and Mina Nishimura dancing on Landis Green. Photo by Chris Cameron.

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), at the FSU School of Dance, is a choreographic research and development center whose mission is to raise the value of the creative process in dance.