YUKO KASEKI UND MEGUMI EDA - DIVINE

In the organizer's words:

danceOFFensive 2025

In DIVINE, butoh artist Yuko Kaseki and ballet dancer Megumi Eda combine two contrasting dance languages to create a haunting performance about pain, transformation and liberation. Inspired by tragic female figures such as Giselle from classical ballet and Oiwa from the Japanese Kaidan ghost story, they create a world between reality and the spirit realm - a place of struggle, encounter and dissolution.
With radically contrasting approaches to movement, Kaseki and Eda embody figures who lose and find themselves in the strangeness of distorted bodies. In an interplay of sympathy, confusion and dissonance, they reflect the fate of countless women whose souls continue to exist despite objectification, violence and social constraints. But DIVINE transcends gender boundaries: it is a universal story about living through and overcoming pain, which quietly allows the realization to grow - "We are all the same."
A moving, physical ritual that combines classical narratives with experimental dance - intense, profound and deeply human.

Concept, direction, performance: Yuko Kaseki, Megumi Eda
Music, composition: Reiko Yamada
Lighting: Teo Vlad, Daniel Miranda

Commissioned by CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing in NYC)