Concept/Choreography/Installation/Performance: Michiyasu Furutani
System design: Hironori Kawaida
Photo: Radovan Stoklasa

9/Oct/2025 under a Festival “Sám na javisku” at Družba Drama Studio, Trenčín

The dance-performative work is rooted in a dancer’s personal experience at a friend’s funeral: at the crematorium, he was offered the chance to ingest a fragment of the deceased friend’s bones and ashes. At the centre of the performance is a stone that evokes the bone, with which the dancer enters a deep, non-verbal dialogue through movement, gesture, and symbolic acts such as offering a glass of water. This exchange explores the possibility of cognitive and emotional communication between animate and inanimate entities and asks whether intangible feelings or thoughts can be perceived and given form.
Rather than projecting human meanings onto the inanimate, the performance proposes attentive observation and active listening. By relinquishing control, the dancer seeks to encounter the other as it is, inviting the audience to reflect on connection, time, and the silence of death, while reconsidering whether empathetic listening can illuminate the continuities of life, death, and memory.