Online de Odorō (Let’s dance online)

Online de Odorō (Let’s dance online) is a performance film by dancers Lauren Eiko and David Huggins, chronicling their attempts to create a performance in separation, but still together across distance and bad internet connections.

David grew up in Hyōgo, and remains closely tied to Japan. He recently spent time in a small town called Komoro in Nagano, learning Nihon Buyō with Akashi Suma-sensei of the Akashi Sect. Lauren Eiko’s paternal grandmother is from Nagasaki Prefecture and her father was born in Yokohama, they both emigrated to Australia in the 1970s via the US.

In collaboration, Lauren and David explore their relationship and personal histories with Japan through contemporary dance, combining personal performance practices with their shared foundational level experience of Nihon Buyō. This was explored in their previous live-streamed work titled insituation: Lauren, choreographed with the assistance of Youtube tutorials, investigating the fictions and non-fictions inherent in the ongoing discovery and construction of our own cultural identities.

The outbreak of COVID-19 halted their plans to take insituation: Lauren to Japan in May 2020. With travel plans postponed, and physically separated in Australia and New Zealand by closed borders, Lauren and David take their project online.

Welcome to the online extension of insituation: Lauren, Online de Odorō (Let’s dance online).

Presented by The Japan Foundation, Sydney as part of the Issho Editions online program and the Fluid Forms: Blending Traditional and Contemporary Japanese Dance.

Full program: https://jpf.org.au/events/issho-editions