This performance draws on “Zetsudoku” (舌読), a practice Shikichi encountered in their recent choreographic research. Zetsudoku is a technique developed by people with Hansen’s disease in Japan after World War II. After being confined to isolation wards and losing their sight and the sensation in their fingertips as the illness progressed, these people nonetheless learnt to read Braille using the sensitivity that remained in their lips and tongue, in an effort to actively perceive the world through their own bodies.
Referencing this attempt to find light within darkness, the tongue is used as a third hand in the performance, guiding the bodies we take for granted toward new, poetic, and sensuous bodies—ones accompanied by pain.
Osamu SHIKICHI
Osamu Shikichi is a choreographer and dancer from Japan. Their practice questions the human body as something often taken for granted, challenging notions of bodily self-possession and identity. Shikichi explores the idea of the anonymous body through performance, video and mediated sculptures, blurring and remixing how bodies are recognised, gazed upon and politicised. Drawing on personal experiences of dissonance between body and mind, their work focuses on wet movements, ASMR-like sensations and the circulation of affects across human and non-human bodies.
Choreography and Performance
Osamu SHIKICHI