Yumiko Yoshioka is a butoh dance master who plays Hiro in Hiro’s Lied, a dance and theater performance. Her mother had dementia.
Hiro is a mother who has dementia.
Yumiko Yoshioka used to perform under the stage name of Mizelle Hanaoka as a cabaret dancer.
Hiro is a mother who had dementia, who used to be a cabaret dancer named Mizelle Hanaoka.
The memories that play on stage are of Hiro, Mizelle Hanaoka, and Yumiko Yoshioka.
In the mirror
someone looks back
standing in some human costume in Germany? In 2023?
Speaking Japanese sometimes. German sometimes.
She smiles
She squeals that she was a cabaret dancer named Mizelle Hanaoka
repeating
The daily life of confusion is broken with the familiar memories that repeat, that she was a cabaret dancer named Mizelle Hanaoka. A song only she can hear comes on as her body is moved.
Her daughter is played by Asuka who patiently enters and supports Hiro’s theater of life. When Hiro’s song comes on, Asuka is there with more costumes, a camera, and lights, to project the past into the present and the present into Hiro’s past. Asuka enters the choreography of care, crossing her mother’s limbs and electric lines, in a patient following and subtle leading. At the edges of the unknown future of time passing with Hiro’s dementia, Hiro is taken over by a reckless joy of the past ~ Mizelle Hanaoka flips her hair open / winks with a smile full of life / PA! Bubbles blow from her lips ~ Sometimes happiness attacks. The daughter is taken, spiraled, while her life and movements drag heavily in the shadows.
Sometimes darkness attacks
In Hiro’s body, precise movements
from the practice of the theater and life
[from the physical capacities of Yumiko’s life practice of dance
and perhaps the gripping memories of her mother with dementia]
She is taken by a different song
of memories collaging and collapsing
Her body at the rips of reality
between the memories that hold on
and future that disintegrates
In her body, truth
She enters the mirror
Exits life
To the cabaret song only she can hear
“They say it’s the last song. They don’t know us, you see. It’s only the last song if we let it be.” Dancer in the Dark (2000) Dir. Lars von Trier.
Hiro’s Lied [Hiro’s Song] is a dance theater piece that premiered in Berlin with Direction, Choreography — Yoriko Maeno / Choreography, Dance — Yumiko Yoshioka, Asuka Julia Riedl / Music — Chikara Aoshima / Stage set — Mikako Kura / Production assistant — Zuzanna Marczak
Yoriko Maeno brings together butoh & contemporary dance, acting, video projections, lights, music, and set design with specific attention to a mirror that becomes a portal, projection space, window, and mirror to layer the perspectives of Hiro / Asuka as mother / daughter as the one with dementia / caregiver and the ones joyfully and desperately making sense of the many dimensions of existence, shared and alone.
