The Behaviour Project

This is an art project in which artist Daisuke Nakazawa collects the ‘behaviour’ of people living in the streets of Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul through fieldwork, and creates video and performance works with a total of six dancers, two from each of the three countries, Japan, China, and Korea. Utilising images shot in each city, modern and contemporary history materials collected from sociological perspectives, and various data, he pursues a new form of work that fuses physical expression and media expression under the theme of ‘behaviour’, which is a familiar social phenomenon.

Behaviour is an act that everyone who lives in society naturally does, and expresses the culture and history of the region where he was born and raised, and the intention of how he or she wants to be. Behavioir can be said to be a natural ‘performance’ in daily life.

The three countries, Japan, China, and South Korea, are closely related geographically and historically, and are sometimes said to be culturally similar, while others are said to have many differences. By pursuing our ‘differences’ together with such similar neighbours, we would like to understand our own existence more deeply and depict the possibility of coexistence.

In the process of creating the work, Daisuke Nakazawa conducts filming and fieldwork in Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul with the cooperation of dancers from various countries, collects the behavior of the people, analyzes them with the support of experts in sociology, historians, comparative cultural anthropology, etc., and considers the differences in the behavior of each city and the differences in the social structure and historical formation hidden in them from multiple perspectives. In addition, six dancers from Japan, China, and Korea were invited to Tokyo. Presentations of discomfort and awareness of issues regarding behavior felt in the process of fieldwork are presented on stage with physical expressions.

When researching behavioir, I often discover the difficulties of living in modern society, and feel that it would be good to have a more such way of life and behaviour. The aim of this work is to reconstruct such difficult everyday behaviours on a stage where freedom of expression is allowed unlike everyday life, and to transcend existing values and restrictions such as nations and societies to create another ‘performance’ that the creator and the audience want to be.

After the performance of this work, the audience will return to their daily lives and witness the real-world behaviour they see all the time. Through our experience of the work, we hope to create a work in which such everyday ‘behaviour’ looks even a little different from the past, and the audience themselves feel that they should try a “performance” that is a little different from usual in their daily lives.