Neon Dance delivers major UK–Japan site-responsive collaboration

One Dance UK member Neon Dance has returned from a landmark international commission in Japan, further cementing its reputation as one of the UK’s most forward-looking contemporary dance companies. Invited to create a new site-responsive work for the 30th anniversary of the iconic Site of Reversible Destiny – Yoro Park (Gifu Prefecture), the Swindon-hailing company worked alongside leading Japanese artists evala (sound) and Shinji Ohmaki (visual design) to realise an ambitious promenade performance across the park’s radically disorienting terrain.

Designed by visionary artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Yoro Park is internationally renowned for its architectural provocations — a vivid topography of slopes, voids and shifting surfaces that actively invite risk, play and re-negotiation of the body. For Neon Dance, whose practice consistently foregrounds the meeting point of choreography, design and embodied perception, the commission offered a rare opportunity to test dance inside a living, responsive landscape. Across three days (1–3 November 2025), the company delivered both open daytime encounters for public visitors and sold-out night-time performances, the latter granting audiences unusual access to the site after dark. The cast — Fukiko Takase, Dickson Mbi, Manon Parent, Aoi Nakamura and Moo Kim — performed choreography by Artistic Director Adrienne Hart, with costume design by Mikio Sakabe and a sculptural mirrored mask by Ana Rajcevic.

Hart reflects: “Working at Yoro Park demanded a level of presence and adaptability unlike any other project. Every element — the architecture, the light, the sound, the weather — became a choreographic partner. What Arakawa and Gins proposed about rediscovering childlike exploration resonated deeply with our performers and audiences. It has expanded our thinking and will shape our work with communities back home.”

The performances drew widespread attention in Japan, including intergenerational audiences who responded physically to the work. One audience member shared that their grandmother, initially reluctant, “started climbing towards the performers … and before I knew it, she was dancing along.” 

This project follows Neon Dance’s acclaimed appearance earlier this year at Melbourne’s RISING Festival, where the company performed Last and First Men, a work set to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s film and score narrated by Tilda Swinton. As a One Dance UK member, Neon Dance continues to champion UK innovation on the international stage while strengthening its regional roots in Swindon. 

The company’s next focus is a London run of Last and First Men at The Coronet Theatre, 26–28 February 2026, offering UK audiences another chance to engage with the company’s boundary-pushing interdisciplinary practice.

Neon Dance’s participation in Japan was supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Arts Council England National Lottery Grants. neondance.org