FESTIVAL PICKS

Akiko Kitamura (Japan)
Choreographer

Akiko Kitamura is a choreographer, dancer, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Shinshu University, Nagano. She studied ballet and street dance, and graduated from the Graduate School and Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University.

In 1994, Kitamura founded her own company, Leni-Basso, and in 1995-1996, went to Berlin on an overseas training scholarship awarded by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.

In 2001 she was invited to the Bates Dance Festival in 2001 and created Finks, one of her best known works, performed more than 60 times worldwide. Ghostly Round (2005), choreographed for In Transit organised by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) is another of her signature works which has toured internationally.

In 2007 Blind Trip was created for the SKIN project which toured to 20 cities in the UK in 2007 and 2008. In 2009, Kitamura choreographed and performed in a video opera based on the film Kairo by Art Zoyd, a well-known French avant-garde rock group. Since 2010, she has been working on To Belong, in Indonesia and Japan as an independent artist.