Michikazu Matsune
was born in Kobe, Japan, and has lived and worked in Vienna since the 1990s. Between documentary and conceptual performance, where poetry, humor, absurdity, and criticism meet, his work explores the relationship between identity and globalization, action and language, public and private, as in the films Goodbye (2016), All Together (2018) and Mitsouko & Mitsuko (2021). Matsune teaches performance practice and is guest lecturer at the University of the Arts in Linz and the Icelandic University of the Arts. He is currently part of the mentoring program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Martine Pisani
is originally from Marseille, France, and has worked as a choreographer in Paris since the 1980s. She founded the Compagnie du Solitaire in 1992 and has created more than twenty performances, including Le grand combat (1993), sans (2000), Undated (2017), and Bouillir le vide, un récital (2020). Her group performance Slow Down was performed at Tanzquartier Wien in 2005 and in 2008 as part of the 4+4 Days in Motion festival in Prague. Her playful and poetic world, far removed from formalism, explores the meaning of movement and the artificiality of performance. She lives near Paris with Dutch painter and performer Theo Kooijman, who has been with the company since its inception as a dancer, assistant, and set designer.
4+4 Days in Motion:
Kono atari no dokoka (Somewhere Around Here)
Three artists – Japanese-Austrian performance artist Michikazu Matsune, French choreographer Martine Pisani and her life partner, Dutch painter and performance artist Theo Kooijman – meet on stage to revisit the beginnings of their careers. They explore how artistic creation and biography intersect, embarking on a journey through time and space to search for the past and its meaning in the present. In 2005, Martine Pisani and Michikazu Matsune met at the Tanzquartier Wien residency center. Over the years that followed, their paths crossed from time to time. Such long-term artistic relationships beg the question: what is left of the dance when the performance is over? Archives, personal recollections, shared anecdotes and ideas all chronicle their activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Kono atari no dokoka (Somewhere Around Here) is a place at once distant and yet so close, with blurred but familiar contours, a journey through time and space. From the beach in Kobe to the port of Marseille, from Paris to Vienna, or somewhere else entirely… a collective memory emerges between the lines of their personal stories. Using charmingly simple poetry, humor, and, above all, tenderness, they reconstruct what remains of the past and enter the present.
“Their journey through time and space blurs boundaries, shrinks distances, overlaps epochs, and combines languages in the eternal presence of the imagination.”
– Rosita Boisseau, Le Monde
The performance is part of the 29th International Festival of Contemporary Art 4+4 Days in Motion, which will take place in Prague from 4 to 13 October. The festival traditionally combines theatre and visual arts. Five foreign and seven Czech theatre premieres will be accompanied by two exhibitions. More at https://ctyridny.cz/en/