Meiro Koizumi is an artist who seeks out the relationships between state and individual, spirit and body, and exposes them in video works which borrow techniques from theater. Starting with his recent work Rite for a Dream (Today My Empire Sings), he has been making waves in the worlds of theater and art with his direction style: filming as involuntary, physical reaction, expressing the violence latent in society and its structures.
In collaboration with Theater Commons Tokyo, Koizumi is holding a workshop to investigate the ritual that arises in the space between the individual and the group. Can an individual lay down his life for the sake of the community? Koizumi returns to themes he has long grappled with, heroism and self-sacrifice, joining with the participants to create a performance as a kind of “ritual.” As they integrate their individual bodies and voices into the group’s, then break away again, how will their experience and appraisal of contemporary society change?