Takuya Ishikawa | Between Watching and Dancing—A Memorandum on Hokuto Kodama's 'Wound and Ground'
This article examines the boundary between 'watching' and 'dancing' in the club space through the experience of viewing Hokuto Kodama's project 'Wound and Ground' at Kyoto METRO.Summary
The author, a researcher of club culture, focuses on the commons-like nature of club spaces. Hokuto Kodama's ongoing project, 'Wound and Ground,' involves physical practice rooted in pushing the ground to confront contemporary instability, and was performed twice—daytime and nighttime—at Kyoto METRO. The performance structure alternated or overlapped 'watching time' and 'dancing time,' constantly forcing the audience to cross this boundary, reflecting the club's inherent bidirectional dynamic as a 'theatron' where one is both watching and being watched. In the daytime performance, the dancers' trained movements paradoxically reinforced the audience's role as observers, highlighting a structural difficulty in staging dance in a club. Conversely, the nighttime performance saw this boundary dissolve, with the audience beginning to dance. This difference suggests the plasticity of the club space. The final scene, where dancers collapse toward the ground, seemed to visualize the duality of pleasure and exhaustion inherent in club culture, suggesting the work's core lies in 'continuing to connect to the ground while bearing wounds (Wound and Ground).' The author concludes that while the experiment at METRO was significant, further deconstruction and perhaps an all-night format could allow the work to reach deeper strata.
(Source：artscape)