Mobius/808 Infuse
Yuka Takahashi + Angela Sawyer @ the Fund-Raiser Event - June 14
Sinking Adam
Yuka Takahashi + Angela Sawyer
Walking through life, our actions and beliefs are often judged by other people with their own unique perspectives. How much does the fear of being judged influence our own actions and, on the other hand, how does the way we deal with this fear influence the judgment? There is an almost physical quality to the vibe given by judging eyes.
Do invisible vibrations in the air change a person's body? Can a body change the signals those invisible vibrations give off?
Yuka Takahashi and Angela Sawyer work in somatic movement & sound respectively, but they both cross back & forth between conceptual composition and improvisation. Their collaboration blends their separate arts in unique ways.
Yuka Takahashi
Yuka Takahashi is a dancer, performer, improviser and choreographer currently based in Boston. She is originally from Japan. Her works are highly influenced by conceptual /experimental practice and movement invention. Her experimental approach towards her creations are by actively making an attempt to employ various media and taking advantage of the specific performance site to expand the possibility of presenting the concept from many perspectives without forgetting the existence of the body. At the same time she is interested in taking the audience out of its passive role and actively engage it in the performance.
After she received professional training at Joffrey Ballet School, she extended her interest and training in dance and performance art in NYC and Europe. In 2006 she moved to Vienna, Austria. There, she received a residency at D.ID curated by Liz King and she was an artist in residence at the experimental performance LAB called LABfactory for 2 years. At LABfactory she regularly created inter-disciplinary productions with full professional support under the direction of Thomas J. Jelinek and Kazuko Kurosaki. Since she was in Vienna, she has been strongly engaged with artists of other disciplines. Her works and collaboration projects were performed around Europe, Japan and the United States. Since moving to Boston in May 2011 she has presented her own works at Mobius, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston University, Movement Research (NYC), Y Theater at YMCA and OBERON. She produced the experimental performance events 'Living Space' at OBERON (2012) and 'Test Kitchen' at Cambridge Y (2014).
Web: www.highbridgeproject.com
Angela Sawyer
After finishing a philosophy degree specialising in Husserlian phenomenology in the mid-1990s, writer and musician Angela Sawyer felt fully prepared to start astonishing audiences around the Boston area using her mouth, some broken electronics, toys & noisemakers. Impromptu squealing & gargling has become her specialty, and she’s released a steady trickle of small-run lps, cds, cdrs & cassettes over the years. She changes the names of her projects to suit her every whim, but longer running ones include Preggy Peggy & the Lazy Babymakers and Duck That. Her 2014 lp release “A Short Visit To The City That Bleeds” is full of weird up-close intimate wordage and environmental activity recorded in and around a rental car parked in Baltimore, MD. Dennis Tyfus from the Ultra Eczema label says Sawyer is “the best living vocal artist”. You can also catch Angela doing stand up comedy around town, & she runs the one & only Weirdo Records from a tiny storefront in Central Square Cambridge.
Web: www.weirdorecords.com
