Michikazu Matsune

At a time when the strengthening of security measures has led to increasingly irrational situations, Michikazu Matsune takes a critical view of the current outlandishness of our control-driven societies. The structure of his performance was built up from the story of Abdur Rahim Jackson, the Afro-American dancer, and member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, who was forced in 2008 to demonstrate his profession at Tel Aviv airport, before being able to enter the territory of Israel. The frontier in an airport, a sensitive site for surveillance systems, thus becomes the scene for a distinctly “spectacular” discrimination, as the symbol of a paranoia which has now become institutionalised. Between a dance performance and a theatre of objects, bringing in video projections, photographs and narrative elements, Dance, if you want to enter my country! treats this headlong rush into absurdity with a critical gaze, opposing the play of a free inventiveness to the repressive rationales of a globalised planet.

Born in Kobe (Japan), Michikazu Matsune lives and works in Vienna (Austria). At the crossroads between choreography and performance, his work examines the relationships between identity and globalisation, subject and object, actions and language, or the public and the private. He has developed an associated body of work in visual art through which he manages shifts between the stage and exhibition forms. Since 2012, he has been teaching dance at the Inter-University Centre for Dance in Berlin and the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance.