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Backstage pass

TARA BRADY  meets Yasuko Yokoshi, dancer, choreographer and academic, and one of the headline guests at the Dublin Dance Festival

SHE ARRIVED IN Ireland less than 24 hours ago, but performance artist, dancer, choreographer, academic and author Yasuko Yokoshi is already hard at work in Dance House’s rehearsal space. The empty, echoing studio is eminently suitable for her methodology.

“Spiritually, dance is something where I don’t have to use my intellectual brain,” she says. “It’s a different way of being. Whether it’s something interpretive, or traditional and very set, my ego has no importance. The more I erase myself, the more the dance becomes the dance.”

This is the celebrated choreographer’s first visit to these shores. As a headlining guest at Dublin Dance Festival’s 2011 programme, she is here to present Bell  , a new experimental dance film. The works are typical of Yokoshi’s ongoing physical discourse between Western and Asian cultures.

“People say my work is cross-cultural, but that’s a funny term,” she says. “I could never deny that because I live in New York the way I look at Japan is from a particular perspective. But culture is something like air or water. It’s difficult to separate out its effects.”

Maybe it’s an extension of the historical overlap between modernism and orientalism, but there is a strangely happy conflation of influences in Yokoshi’s pieces. It is tempting to pigeonhole her work as a quirk of ma, a traditional Japanese concept of emptiness, or indeed, as an extension of negative space that has come to be associated with other Hiroshima-born artists. But her work is historically closer to the US than Japan.

“It’s ironic, but my American training is what helped me to access traditional Japanese forms and movement,” she says. “When I first came to New York from Japan I was trained in Graham technique, which was a revelation because we danced barefoot, like in folk dance, and that got me interested. Then I changed schools and Trisha Brown became a big influence. Dance in New York at the time was very improvisational and free. I had to completely decode everything I had learned from Graham, from ballet, from walking around. With each work you reset the hardware and build new software. And that’s how I’ve lived as a dancer for years and years. My training is about getting back to zero and into neutral.