One of the performers at Mapping Festival 2024 was the choreographer / dancer Hiroaki Umeda who performed their dance piece Median. Sadly our team didn’t arrive in Geneva until the following week, but fortunately we were able to connect with them over email for a quick interview!
1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am a choreographer, dancer, visual artist from Japan, based in Tokyo. Most of my dance pieces, I do choreography, composing the sound, visual design. As extension of my dance pieces, I also make visual installations.
2. What tools (hardware, software, and other) do you use in your work?
For sound creation, recently I have changed to Ableton Live. For visual creation, programmers in the production team use different tools such as Touchdesigner, openFrameworks, houdini etc. For the operation of dance performance, Logic X, Max, VDMX and Touchdesigner.
3. Tell us about your latest performance at Mapping Festival!
The title of the piece was ‘Median’ that is solo dance piece with video projections. I myself dance in the piece. The concept of the piece was choreographing micro scale visual materials and human body. As a choreographer, I have ambition to choreograph cells or some micro scale objects. From that, I made this dance performance. The programmers used a lot Voronoi program with Houdini and oF.
‘Median’ - Photos by S20
4. Can you tell us about your process for designing videos to use as part of dance? Does one come before the other?
First setting basic concept of show, key visual and key choreography. It is like parallel processing. For me designing visual materials including lighting, costume and etc is a part of choreography.
5. You have been working in this area for more than 10 years, what things have changed and what things are still the same about your workflow?
At the beginning of my career 20 years ago, I did all elements of the creation, sound, visual and choreography. with the time, the programming had gotten more and more complicated and specialized. So I needed to work with programers for visual elements and engineers for other technical parts like sensors. That was about 10 years ago. But recently, I see the softwares and programming have been developed a lot and designed more for wide range users. I can easily use sophisticated and complicated program by myself. For the latest my dance piece, I did all the creation like my beginning of my career by myself with Touchdesigner, Ableton Live and Azure kinect thanks to all the developers!
Want to see more work from Hiroaki Umeda? You can find them on YouTube and on http://hiroakiumeda.com