The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Fall Performance Grant to Sachiyo Takahashi for the 2023 production of “The Emotions : Equinox” as part of the 2023 Puppetopia Festival, on March 22-23, 2023.

Sachiyo Takahashi is a Japanese composer, musician, and artist whose work centers around storytelling. Compositing sensory elements in a minimalist manner, she explores the border between narrative and abstraction to generate fables for the subconscious. Her interests throughout her career have been in the merging of audio and visual as well as the use of non-human figures (puppet, object, sound, light). She composes sound and visual elements simultaneously to design a synergistic score.  

Sachiyo founded Nekaa Lab in 2006 with other “lab members” (stuffed toys and tiny figurines). Under Nekaa Lab, she has been producing performances, installations, and writings while observing human nature from alternative perspectives. Her Microscopic Live Cinema-Theatre – unique projection performance using a miniature stage – has been appraised as a quirky yet imaginative merging between theatrical and cinematic experiences. 

Sachiyo is also an accredited master of Okamoto school Shinnai-bushi, a traditional song-storytelling from Japan, and performs as Okamoto Miya. She conceived an ongoing project Shinnai Meets Puppetry which combines this storytelling form with puppetry collaborating with US puppeteers. 

Her new project, The Emotions: Equinox, is presented as part of a two-act experimental music performance, The Emotions, co-conceived by Korean master instrumentalist gamin. Aristotle framed the western idea of emotions in ancient Greek poetry; in East Asian traditions, emotions are often expressed in music and song. Using traditional and folk East Asian music as entry points, The Emotions explores the intricacies and power of emotional expressions found in traditional Eastern Asian cultures while also reflecting on the role of emotions in our contemporary, hi-tech world in which they are often stereotyped, fragmented, or left behind. 

The Emotions: Equinox, is an abstract storytelling through puppets/objects, live projection, and original music, developed in collaboration with Korean video and object designer Yudam. The story told in The Emotions: Equinox is a birth of emotion and its transformation that finally reach a sort of festivity to find a new beginning, like the cycle of the earth suddenly shifting at the equinox to mark a rebirth. 

The Emotions: Equinox will premiere at Puppetopia at HERE in NYC on March 22-23, 2023, as the culmination of 3 years of development through HERE artist residency. Through this work, Sachiyo explores and shares what makes the material alive and emotional through the lens of East Asia, celebrating the very time of the equinox with the audience after a long pause with the pandemic. 

Sachiyo has presented her work at international venues, including Prague Quadrennial (CZ), ISEA (JP), Pact Zollverein (DE), STUK (BE), Dansefestival Barents (NO), St. Ann’s Warehouse (US), The Tank (US), La MaMa (US), and The Japan Society (US). She is a recipient of a scholarship from the Flemish government (BE), a project grant from APAP (EU), and an artist grant from the Pola Art Foundation (JP). Her puppetry-object work Everything Starts from a Dot was supported by The Jim Henson Foundation Grants (Workshop 2017, Production 2018). One Night in Winter, the first chapter of the Shinnai Meets Puppetry series is also supported by The Jim Henson Foundation Grant (Workshop 2021). She is an awardee of the 2022 NYSCA Music Grant for The Emotions. Sachiyo currently lives in Brooklyn yet sometimes can be seen strolling the back alleys of Japan, where she originated.

Please visit Sachiyo’s Facebook, Instagram and website for more information.