Free Admission+ Performance: Body Deploys

Free admission begins at 5:00 PM. A free museum tour starts at 6:00 PM, followed by Body Deploys, a live sound performance, at 7:00 PM.

Body Deploys

Body Deploys is a live sound performance by Spiral Body that explores how voice, memory, and environment move through space. Combining live poetry, multiple cassette tape players, field and sourced recordings, and sculptural sound objects, the work unfolds as an evolving landscape of sound. Each iteration adapts to its site, allowing the architecture and atmosphere of the space to shape the performance.

Poems written, recited, and recorded by Mami Takahashi circulate through several cassette players simultaneously, forming overlapping layers of voice that drift, echo, and occasionally fall out of sync. For this presentation, fragments of Japanese literary texts—including Ryōkan’s well-known poem “散る桜 残る桜も 散る桜” and writings by Motojirō Kajii and Ango Sakaguchi—are incorporated into the recordings, allowing language to move between memory, seasonality, and disappearance.

These recordings interact with environmental sounds and fragments of audio drawn from cultural and everyday sources, composed and arranged by Adrian McBride—including sounds from daily life in Japan such as store announcements, train station audio, and Noh theater chanting.

As sound travels through the room, the performers shift between visibility and partial concealment, allowing the audience to experience listening as a spatial encounter. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Body Deploys assembles fragments—spoken phrases, repetition, and ambient sound—into a shared field of attention, inviting audiences to consider how bodies, language, and sound occupy space together in time.

About Spiral Body

Spiral Body is a collaborative performance project by Mami Takahashi and Adrian McBride that explores sound, space, and presence through site-responsive performance. Rather than treating the performers as the center of the work, Spiral Body approaches each location as the primary character, allowing the architecture and atmosphere of a space to shape the performance.

Using spoken word, cassette playback, field and sourced recordings, and hand-built sound instruments, their performances unfold as evolving sound environments. Takahashi’s voice moves through and against McBride’s shifting soundscapes, transforming language into texture, rhythm, and memory.

Spiral Body has no fixed stage or permanent home. Each performance responds to the space it inhabits, allowing sound to travel through the air, fragment, and disperse into fleeting impressions.