DesignBlok 2009

Handa Gote: Dances with the Wolves

(jiří macek) Handa Gote definitely represents the most remarkable discovery of this season. The group defines old meanings and rituals with irony and love. Its installation at Designblok is a world of rain in which objects have no pre-determined meaning and situations start to search out new objects.

Handa Gote means “a solder” in Japanese. The Japanese expression contains technology, dance, the pride of warriors, and the romanticism of endless mountains. Handa Gote is a theatre group that composes a new world from perceptions, emotions, and flashes in the performances. They dance, lecture, shiver with cold, dance, show films, mix images, experiment with time and space, yet remain cordial and human. They create objects for their performances, some of which are displayed at Designblok in Superstudio A7 Holešovický pivovar.

Their free-style sticks represent a performer’s elongated arm, thanks to which he/she is able to cover a larger space and emphasize a gesture. None of the freestyle sticks have a pre-determined purpose. It is up to each performer to make use of their potential. They pick sticks in forests and turn them into clubs, wings, or simply into sticks we really like. Tomáš Procházka runs over hills and dales with helmets tied around his waist in a movie entitled Patina-Coating Hard Hats. While the creative team of Diesel was inspired by portable DJ boxes and designed a dresser with a typical shape of rock concert back stages for Moroso, Handa Gote planted a small moss garden with a fountain in an aluminum briefcase.

Portable nature accompanies you on your travels throughout the world, even to places where Czech railways end and one has to put on a kimono, as well as places where a bell represents concentration and solitude… This story continues in an installation in which design ventures on the thin ice of meanings and nature endows objects with their own meanings. Do not forget to enter the temple on the roof and make a sacrifice to joy.

http://www.designboom.com/art/handa-gote/