What is Responding?
Responding Performance Art Initiative is a collective that responds to current social and environmental issues through performative acts such as performance art based on field researches and dialogues among various communities within both local and global contexts.
We belong to plural units indicating society called “community”. Beginning with family and friends, workplace, gender, hobby-oriented, and in large, language sphere, country, etc. Naturally ten different people have ten different positions and opinions. Our existence lies within multiple communities intermingled in complexity, and it often make us suffocate and feel difficult to get by. In that case, let us “Respond” to real of society freely with the sensibility of ten different strokes for ten different folks. Praxis of performance art as a means to do it. It is a new community itself, a new language that artists and audiences experience in the same sense of air on the site.
The initiative has been developed through the trials and errors within the process of operating Responding: International Performance Art Festival and Meeting as the organizing committee in 2018 and a year long practice of R2 Osaka and R2 Philippines in 2019, and our third project “R3”(originally a collaboration with Singaporean art collective The Artist Village in Singapore/Japan in 2020-2021, however due to the Pandemic) held on line and in Suwa region, Nagano prefecture with Japanese participants. It will continue developing through flexible changes of members and range of activities.
