Whenever Wherever Festival 2025
Illust: Aokid + mina + Naoki sayuri Matsumoto
Whenever Wherever Festival 2025
Coexistence, Society and “Aroundness”
Creating a time machine together that moves one second forward, one second at a time
Period
February 1 (Sat), 9 (Sun), 2025
Venue
SHIBAURA HOUSE
Libra Hall
Shiba no Ie (House of Shiba), etc.
Organizer
Body Arts Laboratory
Co-Organizer
Minato City Sports Fureai Culture and Health Foundation (Kiss Port Foundation)
Staff
Curator: Aokid, Kanako Iwanaka, Mei Satsuki, Mina Nishimura, Kota Yamazaki
Guest Curator: Reina Kimura, TAKUMICHAN, Team Chiipro, Kanji Miyashita, Taku Yoshida
Production Management: Keiichi Hayashi, Kanako Iwanaka
Stage manager: Takashi Kawachi
Shooting record: Naoki Sakai
Graphic design: Naoki Matsumoto
Website: Yasuyuki Nakamura
Foreword
Whenever Wherever Festival 2025
Coexistence, Society and “Aroundness”
A performance festival where dance and the landscape of Minato Ward coexist
Whenever Wherever Festival (WWFes) 2025 is a dance/performance festival held in public spaces and facilities in Minato Ward, Tokyo. Organized by an artist collective centered around dancers and choreographers, WWFes has been held since 2009 in collaboration with various artists. This year, WWFes2025 will present an experimental program together with six guest curators, one of which is a two-person unit.
WWFes2025 will begin in November 2024 with workshops held at several locations in Minato Ward, including the Minato Ward Civic Center. An event consisting of presentations and showcases of some of the outcomes from the workshops will be held in February 2025, followed by a talk series to reflect on and explore the future potential of the festival.
Two editions of WWFes have been realized in the Minato Ward area, adopting the theme of rahen (“aroundness”) to refer to a realm where place, memory, and the body permeate and overlap beyond time and space. The previous WWFes events were also an attempt to find new forms of performance in parks and other outdoor venues, while at the same time serving as a means to explore an alternative platform.
WWFes2025 is an extension of this exploration. It seeks to reconsider coexistence and society through the exchange of works and ideas that involve unique forms of bodily expression, by artists on the periphery who do not conform to a “common denominator.” And their experiments will surely contain alternative forms of spacetime, each unique in character. The concept proposed for this edition, as a means to imagine and grasp the moment when such asynchronous lives synchronize in a non-inclusive way, is “Creating a time machine together that moves one second forward, one second at a time.”
Concept
Creating a time machine together that moves one second forward, one second at a time
Neither a time machine that jumps one hundred years into the future, nor returns to a past moment—a time machine that only moves one second forward, one second at a time.
Without needing to build one, we are already living our daily lives aboard a time machine that moves one second forward with each passing second. According to the theory of relativity, traveling from Tokyo to Hakata on a bullet train at 300 km/h will take us one billionth of a second into the future. And even if faster-than-light travel allows us to leap through spacetime in the future, the laws of physics will only enable us to move forward along the axis of time. We can never go back. Rather than a conventional “time machine” that moves along the same timeline, we will try to imagine a completely new kind of “time machine.”
A device that opens new forms of spacetime every second, as multiple time axes repeatedly disconnect, connect, and fluidly intertwine. A device that transforms traces of future memories, reimaginations of the future dotted in the past, and disturbances between the realms of “self” and “other” into collective bodily actions in the here and now. It may be a machine requiring extensive practice before one can synchronize effectively with the body, or it may resemble an elastic sneaker easily activated by walking or running in the city. Or perhaps, like a virus, countless micro-molecules mediated by the body may slowly spread through public space and trigger actions. There might also exist a groove-type version, where different rhythms and sonic vibrations transform the energy of spacetime.
The driving force of this machine is the network of energy emitted by people and places that runs in multiple directions. Within a living story where time is tightly condensed, “here” and “there” start to flicker in and out, and the irregularity of myriad differences causes the momentum to accelerate in a circular motion. While collaborating in the process of creating such a time machine, we hope to share the same spacetime that lies one second in the future—one you have never seen before.
Features
01│Dance Projects
Dance Time Capsule is a work in which Reina Kimura will interview visitors to the Shiba no Ie community space in Minato Ward to gather words, memories, and stories they would like to leave behind, using them to choreograph dance forms that will be returned to each interviewee.
In the project Bon Dance Anarchy! (curated by Mina Nishimura), which follows on from Bon Dance Aroundness presented in WWFes2023, participants will explore anarchic elements within the traditional Bon Odori (Bon dance). Through learning and dancing together, attendees will experience the possibilities of Bon Odori as diverse approaches and gestures are incorporated. Continuing the 2023 edition, in which participants danced the Bon Odori of Minato City and other regions before attempting to create an original version, tourism ambassador of Minato City Yukiko Kitajima, who is committed to preserving and transmitting Bon Odori, will be invited to join as planning advisor.
Theatre of Enclosure and 8 Senses Rap is a participatory performance limited to one group per session, in which participants will attempt to expand their physical senses while driving around nighttime Tokyo.
- Dance Time Capsule – Reina Kimura
- Bon Dance Anarchy! – Mina Nishimura, Yukiko Kitajima, Mizuho Tanaka and others
- Theatre of Enclosure and 8 Senses Rap – Mina Nishimura, Tetsu Umehara, Rick Yamakawa
02│Showcase
In Whenwhere Dance(cutated by Kota Yamazaki), which reimagines the SL Square at Shimnbashi Station as Minato Ward’s Libra Hall, we will pioneer a new kind of performance in public space. Various sensations and an awareness of coexisting with the bodies of others will be transmitted among participants in a space that encourages natural communication, all while coexisting with passersby and the surrounding cityscape.
What is the connection between postmodern dance in New York in the 1960s, which democratized dance by rejecting all hierarchies, and the way we in Tokyo think about the “democratization of dance”? Based on this theme, Not about Judson in Tokyo will feature five artists who will present performances based on the actualities of their own lives and practices.
In addition, Taku Yoshida and WWFes2025 will curate new gen Showcase, an event introducing up and coming artists.
- Whenwhere Dance – Kota Yamazaki, Yumi Motegi, Kazuhito Tsuruga, Chiharu Kuronuma, Hiroto Mochizuki, Chiaki Horita, Liel Fibak
- View View Shimbashi-Bashi-Bashi-Shimbashi View – Kota Yamazaki, Kana Anayama, Hiroyo Miura, Asuka Yamanobe, Naganuma Wataru
- Not about Judson in Tokyo – Megumi Kamimura, Yuta Hagiwara & Wang Mengfan, Anna Kuroda, Taichi Yamagata, Aguyoshi
- new gen Showcase: side A – Takumi Tsuji, Julia Huang (Curator: Taku Yoshida)
- new gen Showcase: side B – Momoko Hibino, Natsuki Iwata (Curator: WWFes2025)
- Live Music Concert: Shi-O-C-O – Aokid, Reizaburo Adachi, Fu Sakai, Marie Yoda
- NEGAERI – ARICA [Yasuki Fujita Tomoko Ando Ami Yamasaki]
03│Worskhops
Team chiipro organized a dance workshop primarily for elementary school students to find new ways to skate using roller skates and inline skates on the rooftop of the Azabu Children’s Plaza. In Roller Skate Dance Roller, the organizers and guest instructors/artists will perform and present a dance based on new forms of skating found in the workshop.
Takumichan’s Club-going Club has been exploring the theme of “why people dance” through fieldwork at dance clubs in Minato Ward. In her presentation, she will examine the results and the nature of “squares” by dancing in spaces that are different from workplaces and clubs. In addition, two workshops that also approached the landscape of Minato-ku will be presented.
- Roller Skate Dance Roller – Kana Anayama, Minami Nakayashiki, Nanako Matsumoto, Kengo Nishimoto, team chiipro
- Club-going Club – TAKUMICHAN, Workshop participants
- Inter-Uni Study Session #2: Finding (Your Own) Form of Life in Minato Ward – Kanji Miyashita, Workshop participants
- A crew who, no matter how much the city develops, still wants to find people and greet them with their physical bodies. – Aokid, Mano Hatanaka, Satoshi Murakami, Workshop participants
04│Talk Series
Architect Keisuke Oka, who has been self-building “Arimasutonbiru” for eighteen years in Mita, Minato-ku, where urban development is rapidly advancing, will be joined by the “Arimasutonbiru(buil)-ders” for the talk event “Arimasutonbirutalk─On Building Together.” Focusing on the joyful, mysterious community of individuals who gathered to build “Arimasutonbiru,” the talk will be interspersed with improvised live performances.
Aokid’s ongoing TryDanceMeeting offers a time for those present to discuss dance from various perspectives.
In the “Online Talks” scheduled after the event, we will have a session where, together with guests, we explore the possibilities of WWFes through its concept (curated by Mei Satsuki), as well as a session to introduce and exchange dance practices from various regions outside Tokyo (Akita, Kobe, Kanazawa, and Kozushima), while also considering ways to sustain them (curated by Aokid, Mina Nishimura, Mari Fukutome).
- Arimasutonbirutalk─On Building Together – Keisuke Oka, Arimasutonbiru(buil)-ders
- TryDanceMeeting – Aokid and others
- Online Talk: Coexistence, Society, and “Aroundness”: Theory Edition – Pegio-Yukio Gunji, Tami Yanagisawa, Kota Yamazaki
- Online Talk: A Habitat Map to Trace the “Aroundness” of Dance: Relocation Roundtable 2025 – Aoi Kagaya, Nanako Komatsu, CHIBIGUTS, Haruno Kakumura, Aokid, Mina Nishimura, Mari Fukutome
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Translated by Jaime Humphrey