Backstage pass

TARA BRADYmeets Yasuko Yokoshi, dancer, choreographer and academic, and one of the headline guests at the Dublin Dance Festival

SHE ARRIVED IN Ireland less than 24 hours ago, but performance artist, dancer, choreographer, academic and author Yasuko Yokoshi is already hard at work in Dance House’s rehearsal space. The empty, echoing studio is eminently suitable for her methodology.

“Spiritually, dance is something where I don’t have to use my intellectual brain,” she says. “It’s a different way of being. Whether it’s something interpretive, or traditional and very set, my ego has no importance. The more I erase myself, the more the dance becomes the dance.”

This is the celebrated choreographer's first visit to these shores. As a headlining guest at Dublin Dance Festival's 2011 programme, she is here to present Bell, her interpretation of the Kabuki theatre classic Kyoganoko Musume-Dojoji, and Hangman Takuzo, a new experimental dance film. The works are typical of Yokoshi's ongoing physical discourse between Western and Asian cultures.

“People say my work is cross-cultural, but that’s a funny term,” she says. “I could never deny that because I live in New York the way I look at Japan is from a particular perspective. But culture is something like air or water. It’s difficult to separate out its effects.”

Maybe it’s an extension of the historical overlap between modernism and orientalism, but there is a strangely happy conflation of influences in Yokoshi’s pieces. It is tempting to pigeonhole her work as a quirk of ma, a traditional Japanese concept of emptiness, or indeed, as an extension of negative space that has come to be associated with other Hiroshima-born artists. But her work is historically closer to the US than Japan.

“It’s ironic, but my American training is what helped me to access traditional Japanese forms and movement,” she says. “When I first came to New York from Japan I was trained in Graham technique, which was a revelation because we danced barefoot, like in folk dance, and that got me interested. Then I changed schools and Trisha Brown became a big influence. Dance in New York at the time was very improvisational and free. I had to completely decode everything I had learned from Graham, from ballet, from walking around. With each work you reset the hardware and build new software. And that’s how I’ve lived as a dancer for years and years. My training is about getting back to zero and into neutral.”

It’s not about the learning, she says, it’s the un-learning that’s the trickier part of her craft. I wonder how the rules work after she rips up the rule book. “Somehow when it’s right, you know,” she says. “When I rehearse I don’t plan. I try to be as vacant as possible. When I work with other dancers I will give them ideas, but my ideas are not as interesting as accidents and unknowns that happen when I stand back. The dominant trend in contemporary dance is to think beyond the body. The shifting and changing is the beauty of it. Contemporary dance is malleable.”

One of the dance world's most decorated servants – recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two "Bessies" for her choreography and the Japanese Ogai Mori literary award for her autobiography, Once in a Life Time– Yasuko Yokoshi views her career as a succession of fortunate accidents.

Born in Hiroshima, she attended ballet classes as a child but only because of a wildly popular TV programme. (“All the girls my age did ballet,” she laughs. “It was a very dramatic show.”) She trained to black belt level in Kendo, but had long forgotten about her early pirouettes by the time she decamped to the US with the intention of training as a bilingual secretary.

“I was the only Japanese student on campus and because my English was so bad, my adviser suggested I take physical education. And that was dance.”

Her new film, Hangman Takuzo, is yet another accident, she says. Part-documentary and part-multidimensional-performance art, Yokoshi's movie triptych features the dance artist Mika Kurosawa, 72-year-old performer Namiko Kawamura and Hangman Takuzo, a performance artist who hangs himself from a tree at his suburban Tokyo home for a small audience everyday.

“Mika is a very good friend of mine and Takuzo is her boyfriend,” says Yokoshi. “I wasn’t sure he would even be in the film. All I knew was I wanted to film them at this house on an island that belongs to my grandmother. And I knew I wanted Namiko Kawamura, the lady who walks naked. She’s a great performance artist whose work is called Zenshin-Hoko, meaning naked walking forward. She basically walks forward outside naked. Her ethos is all about being naturally naked, like trees or grass. She’s been doing this for a long time. She’s 72 now. So this was a chance for me to bring this very underground world to a wider audience. I’m lucky. I get to tour. My work is seen. This way I can bring these great artists with me.”

It’s an unusually permanent work from someone who mostly thrives on the ephemeral: “It is ironic to capture something on film that is all about being in the moment. That is what Takuzo talks about, about being present. If you love dance you probably chose it because it evaporates the moment you execute it. You can’t own it. It’s a permanently vacant lot. It’s like a beautiful space you can’t possess.”

Yasuko Yokoshi – Hangman Takuzo is being screened at the Screen Cinema tomorrow at 3pm as part of the Dublin Dance Festival: see dublindancefestival.ie