MUR 016 | KOTOHOGI || YO,YO,YO!
At the heart of Ma Umi Residencies unfolds Kotohogi—a practice and proposition that moves between incantation and rupture. In Japanese 言祝ぎ / 呪言 carries a double valence: to celebrate and to curse, to bless and to bind. Rather than resolving this tension, Kotohogi inhabits it, treating language itself as a threshold where meaning can be reversed, recharged, or undone.
Within this shifting field, Kotohogi proposes a deliberate dissolution of binaries—life and death, destruction and creation, negativity and affirmation—understood not as oppositions but as permeable states shaped by site, memory, and collective presence. Through dance, voice, calligraphy, and performative invocation, the work opens a shared space where audience and performers gather not to interpret fixed meaning, but to undergo a process of release, confrontation, and transformation.
KOTOHOGI YO, YO, YO! extends this practice as an immersive performance assemblage, where movement, spoken rhythm, and written gesture converge into a living score. Written, performed, and directed by Yuko Kaseki, Kanako Sehara, Miho Tsujii, with song by Setsuko Yamazato, and supported by Kikako Cho and Mayumi Mitsumoto, the work is co-produced by Kotohogi alongside Ma Umi Residencies, under the curatorial guidance of Valerie Portefaix. Its site-responsive structure allows the environment—sea, mangrove mud, vegetation, air—to enter as co-performers, shaping the tempo and affect of the piece.
Set against the elemental backdrop of Ma Umi, the performance engages the concept of utsusemi—the ephemeral being—foregrounding impermanence as both condition and method. In later iterations at Shinei Park, the work expanded into a collective field of care, shaped in collaboration with the Ishigaki Grannies’ Society to Protect Life and Livelihood and joined by local children. Here, the repeated invocation “Yo, Yo, Yo!” resonated as both call and protection: a sonic gesture of continuity, remembrance, and resistance amid the pressures of ongoing militarization.
Across its iterations, Kotohogi does not seek resolution but resonance—an open-ended choreography of speech, body, and site where celebration and curse fold into one another, and where community becomes the medium through which meaning is continually re-sounded.
Yuko Kaseki is a Japanese-born director, choreographer, teacher, and Butoh artist based in Berlin. Her practice engages Butoh, improvisation, and experimental performance, treating the body as a site of transformation, perception, and embodied inquiry. She studied Butoh at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig under Anzu Furukawa and performed with Dance Butter Tokyo and Verwandlungsamt from 1989 to 2000. Her work has been presented internationally in over 30 countries and is shaped by collective processes and distributed authorship. Kaseki’s performances explore corporeal memory, transformation, and the shifting boundaries between presence and disappearance, often unfolding as improvisational “physical landscapes” in which bodies and environments co-create meaning.
Kanako Sehara is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist working primarily with calligraphy (shodō), seal engraving (tenkoku), and live performance-based visual practice. She studied traditional calligraphy and developed a practice that expands classical techniques into contemporary art contexts, including installation, live performance, and collaborative cross-disciplinary projects. Her work explores the relationship between language, body, time, and material inscription, often treating written characters as spatial and performative.
Miho Tsujii is a Japanese performance artist working with choreography, voice, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her practice explores the body as a site of perception and transformation, often through improvisation and site-responsive performance. Miho works in collective and experimental contexts where authorship is shared and performance emerges through process rather than fixed form. Tsujii has participated in interdisciplinary projects including KOTOHOGI, contributing to works that integrate movement, voice, and ritualized performative structures.