2022 SEOUL PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVAL

A stage filled with digital molecules created by movements experiencing Umeda’s choreographic works

On stage, the corporeal, the photic and the sonar forces converge in exponential speed, and, at one point, it reaches the critical point of energy. The audience will be experiencing a digital reality saturated with 'unstable stability'. When an evanescent expression per se of the body is embedded within the architecture of lights, which moves incessantly to maintain a split-second stability, sooner or later, the audience realizes that everything on stage will vanish in the next moment. As if to embody the ephemeral aesthetics underpinning the piece, here, on stage, the invisible forces come to the fore and the visual universe sink out of sight.
A horizontal line projected on the screen tremors. Suddenly, for an instance, the line drastically multiplies as if to discharge its immanent energy. Similarly, when Umeda on stage trembles, covert energy withheld in his body is transmitted from the pelvis to the spine, to the arms, and lastly to the digital screen situated at the rear, in which the energy is visualized by curved lines reminiscent of a solar corona. When waterfalls and rivers are seen from afar, they seem to maintain static forms; yet, when one zooms into the same objects in a microscopic level, it is noticeable that they are consisted of ceaseless motions such as swells, waves, vortex and crosscurrents. Based on this creative concept, in Intensional Particle, Umeda reinterprets the particles in space as not static molecules but rather as 'active particles (or, mass points)'; and, visualizes, in space, the 'intensional force' that particles conceal.

indivisible substance (work in progress 2021) is the work-in-progress version of Hiroaki Umeda’s experimental work, aiming for it to be transformed into various formats such as theatre, online through a monitor, and VR. It is a work that is not defined by a format, but the one that questions the modality and nature of a dance work.
“Movement always exists as a universal thing in substances and objects of any scales. I believe that there is a space created and generated only by ‘movement’.”
Based on this thought of the artist, indivisible substance combines digital technology, 3D data of the dancer in realtime, and data of various scales from micro to macro. By making these elements coexist in the work, he aims to present the whole space as a choreography.