RESPONDING PERFORMANCE ART INITIATIVE

Responding Performance Art Initiative is an artist-run collective that responds to current social and environmental issues through performative acts such as performance art based on field research and dialogues among various communities within both local and global contexts. We belong to plural societal units or “communities,” beginning with family and friends, workplace, gender, hobby-orientations, and expanding to configurations of language groups, country of origin, etc. Naturally ten different people have ten different positions and opinions. We exist within multiple communities intermingled in complexity, and it can often be suffocating and make it feel difficult to get by. Within this context, let us respond to the realities of society freely with the sensibility of ten different strokes for ten different folks. We propose a praxis of performance art to do this. Performance art is a new community itself, a new language where artists and audiences experience the same site and share the same air.

Responding Performance Art Initiative began in 2018 with Responding: International Performance Art Festival and Meeting as the organizing committee, and it has changed its format from an art festival to research-based art collective since its second year (R2), evolving through the trial and error. In the past few years, the core members have spread out to work on multiple art activities in Japan, with Responding now housed at DAIS_Ishinomaki. Past projects include: R1: Tokyo-Fukushima (2018), R2:monumentED Osaka-Manila (2019), R3:Scape-City Singapore – Suwa (2022, collaboration with the Artist Village), R4:street view (cancelled due to the pandemic), R5: since then | from now (2023), R6: Releasing and Healing (2024), and R7: non capital letters (2025).

Current members include Minkei Murata, Yuzuru Maeda, Miri Hamada, Midori Miyamori, Daisuke Takeya, TAKUMICHAN, Maron Shibukawa, and Yoshia Makita.

DAIS Ishinomaki: Responding page
R2 Official website
R3 Official website
Facebook page
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