ANIME DANCE THEATER

METAMORPHOSIS

NEW SUNSUN YORY SERIES

Genre: Romance

2010-05-19T16:36:00.006-04:00

ROMEO THE THIEF

AND

JULIET THE GEARD

Genre: Robot

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Genre: Heroes

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XKILLS Y, AND VICE VERSA

Genre: Drama

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Genre: Comedy

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FAMILY PORTRAITS

Genre: Classics

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ROMEO THE THIEF

AND

JULIET THE GEARD

Genre: Children/Family

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FAMILY PORTRAITS

Genre: Action/Adventure

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Genres

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Anime Dance Fellows

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(alphabetical order)

Dance fellow

Lighting fellow

Design fellow

Choreography, dance fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Music fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Video fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Dance fellow

Video Clips

2010-05-11T11:59:00.005-04:00

See ANIME DANCE REPERTOIRES page

"What's Anime Dance"?

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Anime Dance Repertoires

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THE LABORATORY OF DR.X

METAMORPHOSIS

FAMILY PORTRAITS

"What's Anime Dance"?

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Anime Dance Postcards

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MICHIKO KOBAYASHI

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COMING SOON!!

MONICA REYES

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Monica was born and raised in Mexico City. She started her dance training at 11 years old. Her dance life included training in such techniques as Ballet, Martha Graham, Lester Horton, Katherine Dunham , Jazz, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown. Also performing at City Center and Apollo Theater with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (third company).

She graduated from The Swedish Institute of Massage Therapy in 1997 and was granted her professional license in 1998. In 2006 she completed her Professional Feldenkrais Method Training and has a current practice in both Massage Therapy and the Feldenkrais Method were she lives in Goshen, NY.

She is currently enrolled to complete a Bachelor’s degree in Science at the Empire State College.

She is also in an ongoing process of gardening, learning pottery, guitar playing and singing.

Monica has an enormous love, respect and admiration for all animals (yes all!). She cares for and enjoys her five kitty cats at home.

Photo by Beatriz Schiller

LUCRECIA BRICEÑO

2010-05-04T10:36:00.006-04:00

LUCRECIA is a Peruvian artist and former beekeeper. Her body of work includes theatre, dance and opera, as well as non-performance based projects. Her work has taken her to Turkey, Colombia, Peru, Edinburgh, Korea and Greece. MFA graduate from Tisch School of the Arts.

ALBERTO EDWIN BOHL

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Alberto is a lighting designer and an avid dancer himself. He enjoys the backstage side of the theater world and enjoys lighting dance as well as dancing himself.

Before he left for Europe, he was the technical director of the Merce Cunningham Studio.

NY Times reviews X kills Y and Vice Versa

2010-05-03T21:52:00.006-04:00

"Characters Who Cavort in and Out of the Anime and Human Worlds"

By JOHN ROCKWELL

September 3, 2005

Animating anime might seem a redundant proposition: anime is already the animated-film version of Japanese manga comics. But the choreographer and dancer Kiyoko Kashiwagi, Japan-born and New York-based, has taken the animation process one step further in her Anime Dance Theater, currently ensconced for a two-weekend run at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens.

There is actually one more level of animation in her 45-minute piece "X Kills Y, and Vice Versa," since it deals with a robot who is fitfully brought to life, along with a superhero and a gender-confused heroine who (until the end) keep popping back up when they seem to be down and out for good.

"X Kills Y" is nothing if not good-natured, and the hyper-friendly audience at Thursday's opening chortled at every joke and wisp of a joke, and applauded wildly at every blackout. The plot involves a male scientist (Ms. Kashiwagi, got up at the outset to look like Prince in a white robe) who creates a dominatrix robot who can kill people with her breasts (the full-figured Suzi Takahashi, who acts more than she dances). A Hero (Vincent McCloskey) flits about with his little cape. Because of either his manly charms or an inadvertently consumed potion, the scientist becomes a sexy, simpering superfemme. Their domestic bliss is disturbed by various assaults from the robot, and the woman partly changes back to scientist to combat her. Eventually the robot kills both of them and stalks toward the audience in triumph.

The dancers are all willing and accomplished. The video projections on the floor are well done, and there is an appropriately eclectic, popsy recorded score.

But not being a devotee, I found their cavortings a little sophomoric. Anime and manga owe their charm and their power to the depiction of an idealized world with which the viewer or reader can identify. The presumed humor of reducing these characters to merely human form may be momentarily amusing, but much of what is seductive about anime gets lost in translation.

Photo: Nan Melville for The New York Times

Village Voice reviews X kills Y and Vice Versa

2010-05-03T21:49:00.007-04:00

At Last, Weapons of Mass Destruction Are Found . . . In Queens!

Anime Dance Theater

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

September 6th, 2005

Don't mind sitting in an AC-less, former industrial building? On narrow bleacher seats? Crushed against your neighbor's hip? At the Chocolate Factory performance space you can spend a back-killing hour while Kiyoko Kashiwagi provides ditzy diversion. Her X Kills Y, and Vice Versa continues her "anime dance" series, an artful blend of Western styles with Japanese cartoon aesthetics. She portrays a mad scientist bent on world domination via her secret weapon - Suzi Takahashi, a dominatrix-styled robot with bodacious knockers and man-slaying farts. Kashiwagi also plays a sweet Juliet-like girl whose superhero Romeo (Vincent McCloskey) wears a cape too short and narrow to cover his back - not a good sign. The youngish opening-night crowd giggled at the slightest provocation, but the pleasures of this piece - Kashiwagi's ballet and mime skills, Takahashi's hilarious acting - are anything but slight.

Time Out New York reviews X kills Y and Vice Versa

2010-05-03T21:43:00.012-04:00

Back to REVIEWS
Back to "X Kills Y, and Vice Versa"

"Funny girl

- Kiyoko Kashiwagi embraces anime in her kooky X Kills Y, and Vice Versa"

by Gia Kourlas

September 1-7, 2005

Japanese choreographer Kiyoko Kashiwagi has long been obsessed with comic dances that tell stories, but her efforts haven't always been met with admiration - especially when she was training to be a serious classical ballet dancer. "I was so frustrated," Kashiwagi recalls after a recent rehearsal. "Stories about queens and princesses seemed so outdated, so I kind of started to create my own stupid stories through ballet technique. Ballet people are interested in line or technique, which is great- I am too - but I'm also interested in working with a different kind of vocabulary that isn't just about moving from position to position. I'm kind of an outside, I think."

Kashiwagi's current fascination lies with anime dance, a style she created by combining classical ballet, modern dance and Japanese animation. In X Kills Y, and Vice Versa, which will be presented by her Anime Dance Theater at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, she conjures an especially weird tale about a mad scientist, Dr. X, and his ominous invention: a female robot(dubbed "a weapon of mass destruction" by the choreographer) destined to conquer the world.

Brian Rogers, the director of the Chocolate Factory, was introduced to Kashiwagi's offbeat vision through her work with Ex.Pgirl, a physical-theater group that participated in HERE's Artist Residency Program. "I like the crazy humor of her work," he says. "It's very Japanese and surreal - it's very funny, but also really sick. There's something about anime that is gross and violent, and it's just really funny to see her juggle those sensibilities."

Kashiwagi envisions her new work as a cartoonlike meeting of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Romeo and Juliet: A strapping young hero (Vincent McCloskey) falls in live with Y, a pretty young girl (Kashiwagi performs double duty as Y and Dr.X). The dramatic, voluptuous Suzi Takahashi an actor and founding member of Ex.Pgirl, portrays the menacing robot, who, in the end, outlives everyone. "The weapon of mass destruction can conquer the world and destroy it - good-bye nature, good-bye art, good-bye planet," Kashiwagi says, adding with a sly giggle, "and it's not political at all. I like America so much, but politically I always wonder why I live here."

X Kills Y, set to a score by composer Shuichiro Nakamura, Features video by Kazuhiro Soda, a filmmaker who is also Kashiwagi's husband (they met on an airplane). The images, which include both a nuclear explosion and a gentle pastoral landscape, will be projected onto the theater's floor as the performers move upon it. But Kashiwagi isn't interested in having the two elements blend seamlessly; like Japanese animation that so deeply inspires her, she wants the situation onstage to appear fantastical. "Anime is so simple and clear but powerful," she says. "My movement, too, is like a painting or a drawing - it's very flat. I'm trying to use my choreography in a two-dimensional way. It's like an outline. A performer in my work doesn't have to show emotion, because shape is the most important thing I learned that from Merce Cunningham, and it always works."

It took Kashiwagi, who moved to New York from Japan in 1993, some time to discover Cunningham's work and technique; at first she was a scholarship student at the Ailey School. " I liked the company, but the classes were like a factory," she recalls. " I hated it. My image of New York was this" - she swirls imaginary water down a drain with her finger. " I had a five-year visa, but I thought I was going to have to move back to Japan."

She used the excuse of an old injury - a torn tendon from her ballet days - to escape the daily grind of classes and check out other dance schools, " I found the Merce Cunningham studio, and it was like heaven, she says. " I was surprised that Merce was still alive, but he was there, rolling the dice! It may not seem like I learned a lot from him, but I realized how to use my body and how to use space. That's always in my mind, and it's still a part of me."