Iova-Koga solo show a masterful exploration of birth
Rachel Howard, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, January 26, 2007

It's always heartening, as an observer of the local dance ecology, to find a young maverick artist so gifted that audiences seem to discover him through natural buzz about his talent. Such has been the case with Shinichi Iova-Koga, who divides his time between Berlin and the Bay Area, and who founded his performance collective inkBoat in 1994.

Iova-Koga is part of the Bay Area's butoh boom; he studied with Berkeley's famed Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, themselves disciples of Japan's Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the two progenitors of this darkly absurd, apocalyptic dance form. Like many of his generation, Iova-Koga has cast off butoh's calcified cliches -- the shaved head, the white body paint, the glacial pacing and practically patented look of horrified despair -- and yet retained its expressionistic, grotesque essence.

REVIEW
Boy's avian affair never quite gets off the ground
Mary Ellen Hunt, Special to The Chronicle

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Even before the lights went down, a palpable sense of anticipation and excitement pervaded the audience at "Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird's Spine," the cabaret-style collaboration between experimental theater troupes Nanos Operetta and inkBoat, which opened a three-weekend run at the ODC Theater on Friday night. And why not? The last time that these two companies shared a stage was during Nanos' highly acclaimed "3 Drops of Blood," a series of 10 crazy sexy cool showcases.

Nevertheless, if you're an unsentimental and relentlessly literal type, "Our Breath" -- an episodic, absurdist journey through one man's impossible love affair with a bird -- may not be the show for you.

Dance review: 'C(H)ord' vague, hard to forget
Mary Ellen Hunt, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, April 26, 2008

It's a curiously compelling thing when performers push aside their humanness, when movement is so bizarre as to make you forget that you're watching humans. But then the inkBoat ensemble, and especially director Shinichi Iova-Koga, whose "c(H)ord" premiered Thursday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, are remarkably adept at generating simple images that you just can't get out of your head.

Like most of the 10-year-old inkBoat's butoh-inspired theater, "c(H)ord" - a commission for YBCA's Making Peace series - is hardly literal or linear. Boasting an international cast - which includes Finnish performer Heini Nukari as well as the Japanese Takuya Ishide, Yuko Kaseki and Sten Rudstrøm (both based in Berlin) and Sherwood Chen, Dana Iova-Koga and Dohee Lee - it's the sort of show where you can't seriously ask yourself what just happened. The pleasure lies in allowing its vagaries to cascade past you episodically, and the overall effect is not so much discomfiting as strangely charming.