Waking up at 7 am stinks…but then we took a two and a half hour bullet train to Tokyo, so I slept. When we arrived we ate at Illy, and took another train to meet Mr. Mochizuki. Mr. Mochizuki is a teacher at a graduate university here as well as a choreographer and director of the Alti dance company. We have been talking with him since the birth of this project. Originally we were supposed to work with him and his dancers, however he had to go out of town this time and so we were lucky enough to meet him and watch a rehearsal for an upcoming festival. The dancers were rehearsing a piece he choreographed titled, “Prayer”, which was mostly contemporary ballet with bits of folk dance intertwined-beautiful. As a gift for letting us come and watch their rehearsal we performed for them. Brandon performed “Billie” a piece about Billie Holiday that is performed with CD and saxophone. I performed my solo “Find a cure” which is about my time in Florida working with students who are dealing with extremely tough situations. And we all performed “My Chinese Parents”, our collaborative piece with text written by Tsukasa. Afterwards we interviewed Mr. Mochizuki and found out a lot of interesting things (video at top). Who would have known he went to Juilliard? Then he offered to drive us to our next destination, which was to meet Atsushi, the dancer from Sugar&Salts Dance Company. After saying goodbye to Mr. Mochizuki we went to get some food and play in a river- Brandon had so much fun!!!
Then we went to the community space to rehearse from 5-8 with Atsushi and his dancers. We divided the room in half so that we could rehearse as well as Atsushi who is working on a piece with hair dressers and dancers. After we were done rehearsing we walked around a bit, arrived at Atsushi’s apartment and went to sleep!
