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Yuko Kaseki & Antonis Anissegos: KAYA. 04.05. Now! Festival /Movement, Studio Verlin, Berlin

Dancer/performer Yuko Kaseki and composer Antonis Anissegos—sharing a fertile practice of collaboration of more than seventeen years—craft a distinct, yet ever-emerging world in Kaya, deftly guiding us into their experiences, which dynamically combine and separate into nameless terrain.

The frame: a golden jacket and a grand piano. The jacket moves at times delicately, gradually and at times suddenly, affectedly, over, under and around Yuko as she and it are transformed, producing a score of images that pass between what is recognizable and what may not be, and Antonis treats the piano as both an instrument of sound and as something else entirely, touching, operating and playing it from all angles and directions.

Kaya creates precise imagery and a sense of temporal expansion as each event subtly transforms into another, like the golden bundle of jacket on the floor stretching into a cape over Yuko, and, seemingly without notice, pulled taut over her body to become something else, and the piano, previously played at its keyboard, is plucked like a harp in its cavernous body—a dramaturgy of relation, ebbing and flowing without anticipated narrative, generates an emotionality that takes us beyond the celebration of improvisational procedures as merely the means to an end.

While the means might also be the end, the process, the product and the score, the practice, the improvisation performed in Kaya moves well past self-reference into its specific and mystic potentiality, framing and giving value to its material within shifting relations between bodies, objects and music, offering an expansive and transformative experience to the audience and as such, stood apart in the program of four improvised movement works.