The Life Work

Installation & Performance

In The Life Work visitors are invited into a contemplative garden made of natural materials, voices and fleeting stories. It is located at the center of Global Groove, an exhibition that presents groundbreaking positions in 20th and 21st-century dance history by focusing on encounters between the east and the west.

In a darkened museum space, the visitor encounters a carefully composed spectrum of sensory, optical and acoustic impulses: the changing colours of lights, the shadows of a rotating tree, the fragile movements of a human body, or the remarkable connections between the stories told.

Four women, born in the 1930s and 1940s, who left behind their native country Japan decades ago to come live in Europe, look back at their lives and the broader social and political events that influenced them. They reflect on crucial decisions they made, on their relation to nature and to history, and the sometimes difficult question of social belonging.

On four weekends the women activate the museum installation with the presence of their bodies. Through a intimate choreography, the collective narratives that emerge out of their individual stories come to life.

Premiere: August 13, 2021, Ruhrtriennale & Museum Folkwang, Essen