SAWADA worked in a clothes store I often visited, which is how we got talking. Back then, his dancing was hardcore, and he always wore turtle-necked long T-shirts. They made his shoulders seem even broader than they do now.
The first time I saw TATSUO, he was wearing this weird, flashy suit—I still wonder to this day where the hell he bought it. He had real swagger when he danced. His style wasn’t house back then. In fact, it was nothing like the acrobatics of his dance today. One thing hasn’t changed though, and that’s the look of confidence you can see on his face when he dances.
As for U.U., my first impression of him was that he had the biggest earrings had ever seen on any 16 year-old.
Since then, I’ve seen him dress himself up in all sorts of costumes—if you can call scraps of fabric and paper “costumes”— in order to perform dances—if you can call what he was doing dancing—which have soon got audiences laughing, sometimes despite themselves.
I started to think how I’d like to dress these three dancers in a way none of them have been dressed before. They’ve all spent over twenty years wearing costumes, dressed up in their various experiences, philosophies, feelings, and even the groups they were dancing with. By dressing them up in a world they’ve never before experienced, I wanted to see if we could achieve the exact opposite—to undress them completely, and in doing so reveal everything about them on the stage.
YOKOI, Director
