Experimentation series #1
Video•Dance•conversation• Drinks

BUTOH and BEYOND

"What is the Ultimate?” 究極とは？

It was fun and stimulated night where we just gathered, experimented and shared!

I am still in awe, to think about this performance, I've done in Japan, as a part of annual performance season with Tenri University Dance club, at the Nara Centennial Hall, December 2024 .

The title: 'あめつちの聲〜 in the middle of the awe'
あめつち（AME TSUCHI): Heaven and Earth
聲(KOE) : Voice

Photo: by Takahiro Kitagawa
Great soundscape by Dan West and Ai Yamamoto

This trip was supposed by Creative Australia, international engagement program.

Special Thanks to Prof. Junko Tsukamoto and Gagaku Master Koji Sato as well as many supporters!　

22 (Sun) Dec 2024
At Nara Centennial Hall 18:00 start (17:00 door opens)

Yumi has great opportunity of choreographing and performing at the annual event of the Tenri University Dance Club, Nara Japan, renowned for winning numerous awards due to the high quality and creativity of their dance.Yumi has been staying in Nara for 2 weeks in December, to create and perform a piece, collaborating with 22 dancers and 18 Gagaku musicians to present it on the grand stage of Centennial Hall in front of an audience of 1,500!!

I've become puffy 'mother earth', surreally dancing (digitally) in this project in Adelaide. Fill The Earth 11 - 14 JUL 2024. Go and check it, if you are near by!

Yumi was invited to choreograph for the 19th Annual performance event by Tenri University, Nara, Japan @ Nara Century Hall, 17 Dec 2023

View photo gallery

Yumi is creating a new solo work Buried TeaBowl, an interdisciplinary work with dance, text, song and poetry, inspired by Japanese female dancer/shaman, Okuni in 1600’s. The work in progress was completed in Aug 2021, and will be premiered in a live and digital performance in 2022.

Yumi was one of the 5 choreographers of the 5 days performance season of PIECES FOR SMALL SPACES at Lucy Guerin Inc, 13-17 Dec 2017.

EnTrance is a critically acclaimed full-length solo work with multimedia and installations within the metaphor of ‘the near shore’ of life and ‘the far shore’ of death. Award-winning dancer Yumi Umiumare performs the mystical conundrum of ‘the space between’ amid the hubbub of our city-life. ‘EnTrance opens heart, body and soul to the transformations that direct the human spirit.’ Canberra Times 2011

A solo dance work influenced from the personal experience from Hanshin Earthquake in 1996.The work was devised as prayer for the event. Directed and Performed by Yumi Umiumare. Stage & Set design  Anthony Pelchen. 

Sakasama: the reverse world. The two worlds of Life and Death are described as two shores; one is ‘the near shore’ (the world of the living), and the other is ‘the far shore’ (the world of after-death). A river flows between them. ‘The far shore’ is a reversed world: it is the reverse of the world of the living and everything is upside down.

ZeroZero was the second in a triptych and has premiered in Melbourne, in Feb 2013. Collaborated between Tony Yap, Yumi Umiumare and Matthew Gingold, ZeroZero explores the spaces between fullness and emptiness, visibility and invisibility. It was presented in Bogota, Columbia (2014) and Melbourne International festival (2014).

A series of experimentations of visual poetries, film work and physical theatre, inspired by Yumi’s own experience of her brother who had a cerebral hemorrhage. Is it really happening right in front of us or are we daydreaming? What if our piled up memories were suddenly erased? Our memories are like a heritage but our brain could hemorrhage.