Chico Katsube Dancer/Organizer
is a dance improviser, choreographer and a teacher from Osaka, Japan. She received her B.Ed. and M.A. degrees at the Dance Education Division of Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, where she studied Modern Dance and Choreography. From 1990 to 94, she studied and danced in New York City as a company member with many talented choreographers such as Joy Kellman and Ruby Shang. She has also developed her own style of choreography and performance.She has begun Contact Improvisation activity in Japan with the strong influence and the recommendation of Nancy Stark Smith who visited Japan and taught her workshops in 1997 at the program of “Triangle Project”.In 2000, she founded C.I.co., a Contact Improvisation Company, with Makiko Ito. Since then she has been a leading figure in teaching, organizing and performing Contact Improvisation in Tokyo and throughout Japan.In 2005, 2007 and 2012, she participated and taught intensive workshops in Contact Festival in Israel. In the summer of 2006, she taught a workshop in the Magpie Collective Workshop and performed with the Magpie Music and Dance in Amsterdam. And in 2011, she participated Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur, i- dance Taipei, where she taught and performed with Shoko Kashima. And she has been a seed member of AIAE in South Korea from 2008.From 2008, she founded the CIFJ (Contact Improvisation Festival Japan) and continues to organize and create the international CI festival to exchange culture, people, essence of CI in Tokyo and some regions in Japan. Now she is studying and investigating together improvisation dance with Shoko Kashima, who is a dancer as well as a photographer, to search and mix the Asian Culture in their dance improvisation. In 2010, Chico and Shoko participated in ECITE in Finland and AIAE (Asian Improvisation Art Exchange) in Korea to research for the next improvisation project in Japan and Asia. She was a faculty of some universities in Tokyo for more than 10 years such as, Ochanomizu University, Keio University, Rikkyo University, Nihon Women’s college of physical Education where she teaches dance or CI regularly.In 2012, she moved her base of the dance activity (C.I.co.)from Tokyo to Kagoshima with Shoko Kashima. They started the activity with the focus on exploring and integrating Asian culture into improvisation, as well as to establish the art community in the countryside in Kagoshima prefecture. In 2013, she will organize the first “i-Dance Japan”, Contact Improvisation Festival in Isa-city. http://www.ci-jp.com
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