Choreographer and Director: Yukiko Masui
Dominated by a series of moods, Yukiko Masui’s innovative immersive dance anime performance RONiN arrives at The Place following a performance in Huddersfield. Based on a class of samurai warriors but refigured as a female story and taking place across the seasons in Japan, there is a filmic quality to the choreographed stage fights between the protagonist and her adversaries that continually redraws the boundaries between enemies and allies while conjuring a variety of locations and tones against a beautiful and sometimes grave Japanese landscape.
The 30-minute first half has four set pieces, scenarios that draw their influence from video games – in the surrounding graphic design by Barret Hodgson projected onto three walls and the floor, and in character movement – as well as hip hop, street and ritualistic, militaristic shapes. Like the immersive art shows involving works by van Gogh, Hockney and the Frameless gallery at Hyde Park, Masui creates a series of captivating settings, from a cold rainy opener as the samurai warrior sits forlornly among the bamboo trees to an urban graphic building, a crosshatching of levels that fly vertically, horizontally, left and right, to play with perspective as game-like design allows characters to move freely around their digital world.
Best in Act One are the two landscape sections, first a cherry blossom-inspired woodland scene filled with pink and blue petals that swirl and move with the twirling and wafting of the dancers, itself transforming into a lava-filled volcanic display, energetic, powerful and full of electricity that sparks and shoots from the thudding of the dancers’ feet into firework explosions. Throughout, the stalking of the samurai by baddies underpins a narrative in which they regularly come face to face – or sword to sword – for fights that culminate in a dramatic Tarantino-style cliffhanger at the interval.
And it is this combination of symbolic Japanese military and cultural heritage channelled through the elite, skilled existence of the female Samurai that adds meaning and texture to the beautiful visuals. Masui’s choreography is the same for the male and female dancers, strong, sure and poised with the grace of the sword play and stunts designed into the piece by Kashmir Leese. Often, these evoke action sequences from films taken in slow motion, but the quietest moment in RONiN, when dancer Cher Nicolette Ho calmly presents her power and control in complete silence, is one of the strongest, as everything focuses on this timeless representation of strength.
Dancers Ho, Jacob Lang and Nathan Bartman are entirely at ease with the shifting form, intently focused on delivering the interplay of these characters regardless of the designs evolving around them. The storytelling is strong and the energy consistent, and even though the dancers start to tire in the less effective Act Two, this fits the psychological insight into the exhaustion of the warrior fighting enemies she can’t see, a nice touch to end on as peace and tranquillity eventually beckon.
Runs Until 18 April 2026
