Site Specific - Works
Kokoro Dance Site Specific Performances – Booking Information
Curators and Presenters, Kokoro Dance wants to create Site Specific performances in your festival, gallery, park, beach, neighbourhood, warehouse, nightclub, farm, factory – anywhere where there is space for audiences and performers.
Kokoro Dance Artistic Directors, Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, were introduced to Site Specific performances in 1980 as members of the Evelyn Roth Moving Sculpture Company. That year, they performed Evelyn’s Salmon Dance in the streets and parks of Edinburgh, Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival. They also performed at Robert Davidson’s first Potlach for the Living Haida in Masset, Haida Gwaii. After starting Kokoro Dance in 1986, Barbara and Jay continued to perform yearly in parks, streets, restaurants, and jazz night clubs. In 1990, they created City on the Edge, a performance installation on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery with 70 musicians, dancers, actors, visual artists and poets. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, they made impromptu appearances at all six stages where folk singers and musicians performed before thousands of music fans. Memorable improvisations included guarding the portable potties and the production of Verdant Stones as the closing night main stage performance in 1999 that featured 12 dancers, 6 stilt walkers, 10 jazz musicians, 10 pipers, and 32 drummers. In 1999, Jay and Barbara also participated in Yumiko Yoshioka’s EXIT ’99 in Schloss Broellin, Germany along with 12 other butoh choreographers and over 40 students in a month-long residency in a 600-year-old farm castle that culminated in a 2-hour performance in the stone farm buildings and barns. For the past 31 years, Kokoro dance has annually performed in the nude on Vancouver’s Wreck Beach. Each year we create a new 60-to-70-minute butoh score that we teach during a 2-week-long workshop open to all – from beginner to professional.
Kokoro’s butoh-inspired performances adapt to any environment and can be performed in silence or to live or recorded music. We are happy to collaborate with local dancers, musicians, and visual artists, or to come as a duet or small ensemble.
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Barbara Bourget
Jay Hirabayashi
Performers
Barbara Bourget
Jay Hirabayashi
and Guests
Barbara Bourget
Jay Hirabayashi
and Guests
2024 Kokoro Dance Residency at Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island:
2015 Powell Street Festival performance of Book of Love:
Excerpts of Kokoro Dance works including Site Specific productions: