Ryuta Iwashita
Class Description: CI & SOTAI: Ancestral Body
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This CI workshop is infused with Ryuta’s life research called 祖体 (SOTAI: Ancestral Body).
Flavored with Japanese cultural concepts and nuances, SOTAI not only emphasizes our embodied connection with our direct ancestors in our human lineages but also the broader concept of all ancestors spanning from fish and bacteria to the earth and nature itself.
This offering is not limited to CI dancers. Anyone can benefit from deep rest of our ancestral bodies, which prepares you to show up for your community and yourself with more 余裕 (YOYUU: a Japanese word for “ease and spaciousness of the self”).
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Ryuta Iwashita currently lives and improvises in Bulbancha (New Orleans) in the USA as a movement/performance/visual artist and educator after living in Japan for 25 years. Their artistic lexicons are rooted in social justice, somatics, martial arts, child education, and ancestral work including 祖体 (SOTAI) of which Ryuta is its conceiver.
Their teaching moves and responds to juxtapositions between their Japanese heritage and their westernized life in the Southern US, between a day of organic farming and a night of MSG-heavy instant noodles, and between their internal organs and their ancestors moving and pausing as stars.