| Saturday, 2nd July 2011 | 20.30 / CCNS, Main Hall |

I am an avant-gardist who crawls the earth. I am a body with language. Language is symbiotic with the functions of the body. Dance comes into being between body and body, arising as a result of mental effort.

Min Tanaka
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Shiho Ishihara
Shiho Ishihara was born in 1971, and raised in Kagoshima Prefecture, the south east island of Japan. She attended the Kuwasawa Design Laboratory in Tokyo.
While in school, she began acting under the direction of Shigeko Ichikawa who trained Shima Iwashita, a leading actress in Japanese films since the 1960s. Ishihara also attended NHK Acting School, held by Japan’s public broadcasting company, where she was taught by directors such as Shunya Ito and Yukio Fukamachi.
In 1994, Ishihara started to farther explore the field of physical expression and dance under Min Tanaka, dancer, when she made a debut as Ophelia in Hamlet – The Pale Cast of Thought, a music image drama produced by NHK. In the program Tanaka played King Hamlet, the ghost, and also choreographed the program.
She soon moved to Yamanashi Prefecture, where Tanaka and his colleagues extend the search for a body for origin of dance. Their daily training is mainly farming using as little machinery as possible, and the performance activity is numerous throughout Japan and abroad. Their works are not limited to dance, but widely expand to operas, movies and collaborations with traditional performing arts, and the venues also vary from theatrical settings, open-air garden spaces to sites with contemporary art pieces.
As she joined their farming and performance activities, their search for the origin of dance soon became her own, and it gradually grew to be yearning for indefinable dance, beyond the boundaries of genres like classical, contemporary, post modern, or avant-garde.
After she performed a major role in the Tokason Dance Troupe, held and directed by Tanaka and actively toured nationally and internationally from February 2002 to January 2006, she started a solo dance series in collaboration with improvisation musician Keiji Haino from August 2006 to November 2008.
Ishihara’s solo dance works have continued till now, as a collaborative experiment with her teacher/mentor Tanaka’s choreography.