LEIMAY Friends and LEIMAY Members Showcase: Gio Kusanagi, Emily Smith, Derek DiMartini

Gio Kusanagi
Shadow and Beyond
Kusanagi’s socially-engaged solo meshes with original atonal music piano score, finding itself within primarily bound flow along with alternating dichotomies of quick-sustained & heavy-light spectrum. Here lies a question on the contemporary human condition while presenting responses via metaphor.

Emily Smith/NOTforreTALE
Identifying as Seeking Plush
“... used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”

Begun as a dialogue between ‘sex negative’ and ‘sex positive’ feminism, Smith draws upon Audre Lorde’s the Erotic as Power” and dives into an abstract exploration of the value of the erotic that lies beyond the sexual.

Derek DiMartini
an incomplete list of things I don't understand
DiMartini embarks on a study on the search for intimacy: On embracing identity, and on letting it go; On obscuring destination, nursing fragments, and removing cobblestones from the path.

About the Artists
Gio Kusanagi is native of Japan and studied Butoh with Moe Yamamoto, Toru Iwashita, Kunisuke Kamiryo, Yoshito Ohno, Yukio Waguri, Seisaku & Yuri, Ko Muroboshi, & Kayo Mikami, and was an Artist in Residence at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance in 2012, along with various other commissioned works.

Derek DiMartini was an ensemble member in LEIMAY’’s 2016 premiere of borders, and is training to teach and continue to develop the LEIMAY LUDUS program. He likes to view dance as an extension of his passion as a creator and a performer.

Emily Smith, dancer, choreographer, and costume designer. Emily is currently producing a performance series called Fête with Elena Light. With Laura Smith, she formed “NOT for reTALE”, creating kinetic sculptures and performance. She has worked with LEIMAY since 2015.

About the festival
SOAK is a festival presenting a stream of AcTS and training in theater, butoh, dance, music, and performance art every summer-spring season. SOAK is molded by LEIMAY, the interdisciplinary ensemble and producing organization behind the acclaimed New York Butoh Festival. SOAK takes place at LEIMAY’s home, CAVE, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

SOAK broadens the perceptions of our artists and audiences with work that is experimental, rigorous, and thought-provoking. The festival showcases finished and in-progress work by international, local, and fellow artists, and blends them together in a concoction that inspires audiences, fuels the artists, and stimulates the community surrounding LEIMAY’s activities.

Submerge your senses!