Yuka Hayashi’s home body: Drawing delight and hope from not seeing forward, Sarah White
April 2025
Yuka Hayashi, a duet with the invisible to be hopeful, performance, 2024. Photographed by Emily Almodovar and MOVES Studio. Watch the excerpts of this work via YouTube.
Yuka Hayashi is an interdisciplinary, movement-based artist from Tokyo, whose practice embraces performance, film, and poetry. Yuka’s recent works have delved into the concepts of home, hosting, and hope, drawing on improvising and remembering. Sarah White has witnessed how Yuka’s embodied research on the idea of home has evolved over time, beginning with their master’s research and subsequently developing and exhibiting it further.
This conversation between Yuka and Sarah begins with the concept of “home body.” This term differs from the common idiom “homebody,” which generally refers to staying at home. Instead, “home body” here serves as a conceptual term with which to explore what it means to inhabit the body as one’s home, and acknowledge the present felt sense of the body.
Sarah White: So, the interview title centres around this phrase “home body,” which is a term home you… invented, or discovered?
Yuka Hayashi: The idea of home body started from the idea that if my body is my home, I can go anywhere. The term came to me as a way of saying it. I see home as something or somewhere I can come back to. Inhabiting my body as a home was my wish, which emerged from my experience of migration to the UK from Japan. I reference the book Queer Phenomenology (2006) by Sara Ahmed, who mentioned that inhabiting is extending one’s body into space. This sense resonates with me in the act of improvisation. Improvisation has become the way of inhabiting the space with the audience.
When you talk about home body, and when I witness you moving within it, it seems like a way of coming into yourself, and finding a grounding peace, or a stability internally. But there is then also an outward flow of the self which is ready and able to exist with other people. This is a powerful idea, and often a remarkably difficult place to arrive at within our lives. Are there other words you would use to describe what you experience when you find this place of home body?
I would propose the word fluid. Home body is experienced with fluidity. Through my practice and research process, I came to this idea of home as a fluid matter, mediating between the body and space.
Do you experience this fluidity as a kind of softening, or melting: being malleable to the environment and to yourself?
Yes. Home body has been a kind of device for me to connect this internal desire or impulse, with the presence in the outer world. And if I go back to the migration experience and Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, she suggests the word ‘migrant orientation’ as being trapped between two directions: the home that used to be home and another place that is becoming home but not home yet. I see its potential relationship with improvisation.
For me, improvisation has been constantly staying in the intensity emerging between the two: what I have done and what I’m doing, the past and the present, or the present and the future. I really like that improvisation literally means ‘not seeing forward.’ ‘Im’ means no, ‘pro’ means forward, and ‘vise’ means seeing, vision. This sense of not seeing forward or not knowing what happens next or what comes next is exactly what happens during the improvised performance but also in life as a migrant. It resonates with me to work on improvisation as research of home body.
This conversation between Yuka and Sarah begins with the concept of “home body.” This term differs from the common idiom “homebody,” which generally refers to staying at home. Instead, “home body” here serves as a conceptual term with which to explore what it means to inhabit the body as one’s home, and acknowledge the present felt sense of the body.
Sarah White: So, the interview title centres around this phrase “home body,” which is a term home you… invented, or discovered?
Yuka Hayashi: The idea of home body started from the idea that if my body is my home, I can go anywhere. The term came to me as a way of saying it. I see home as something or somewhere I can come back to. Inhabiting my body as a home was my wish, which emerged from my experience of migration to the UK from Japan. I reference the book Queer Phenomenology (2006) by Sara Ahmed, who mentioned that inhabiting is extending one’s body into space. This sense resonates with me in the act of improvisation. Improvisation has become the way of inhabiting the space with the audience.
When you talk about home body, and when I witness you moving within it, it seems like a way of coming into yourself, and finding a grounding peace, or a stability internally. But there is then also an outward flow of the self which is ready and able to exist with other people. This is a powerful idea, and often a remarkably difficult place to arrive at within our lives. Are there other words you would use to describe what you experience when you find this place of home body?
I would propose the word fluid. Home body is experienced with fluidity. Through my practice and research process, I came to this idea of home as a fluid matter, mediating between the body and space.
Do you experience this fluidity as a kind of softening, or melting: being malleable to the environment and to yourself?
Yes. Home body has been a kind of device for me to connect this internal desire or impulse, with the presence in the outer world. And if I go back to the migration experience and Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, she suggests the word ‘migrant orientation’ as being trapped between two directions: the home that used to be home and another place that is becoming home but not home yet. I see its potential relationship with improvisation.
For me, improvisation has been constantly staying in the intensity emerging between the two: what I have done and what I’m doing, the past and the present, or the present and the future. I really like that improvisation literally means ‘not seeing forward.’ ‘Im’ means no, ‘pro’ means forward, and ‘vise’ means seeing, vision. This sense of not seeing forward or not knowing what happens next or what comes next is exactly what happens during the improvised performance but also in life as a migrant. It resonates with me to work on improvisation as research of home body.
Yuka Hayashi performing in the piece of home body, 22 July 2024.
Audience is also sitting on the same floor as Yuka, witnessing their movement.
Which methods do you work with in the studio to help you in this searching?
I’m sure I’ve been influenced by classes, sessions, or conversations with specific somatic movement practitioners, artists, and researchers. I especially referred to Authentic Movement, which values a mover’s inner impulse in relationship with a witness, for the structure of some of my practice. I also think my movement and its imaginative quality have been cultivated through Skinner Releasing Technique. With those influences, I played a lot with movement scores, which are like prompts for improvisation. Alongside my solo practice with the scores, I hosted some one-on-one sessions with another mover, where we held the space for each other as a mover or as a witness. In these sessions, I found I sometimes had to surrender to the space or the other person. Then, I started sharing with a group of people as well. I think I strengthened the sense of letting go or surrendering through those practices, which later connected to the exploration of a host-guest relationship.
As I know some moments of your research process, I remember the significance of making the transition from your solo practice in the studio to finding a way to share that practice with other people. You were moving from a very personal exploration of finding home with(in) yourself, to discovering how to be simultaneously with both yourself and with others, within the context of performance. It necessitated an understanding of how and why you would offer this practice to other people. I remember this being a big hurdle to move through, but that it resulted in a very refined way of articulating and inhabiting the space with others. Is this when the language of host and guest entered in, as a way to understand how to share the space with others? How did the idea of home body lead you to this language of host and guest?
I realised that if I’m inviting people to my space as a performer, then the act of performing becomes hosting. It’s like I’m inviting the audience to my home. Mover-witness relationships developed into host-guest relationships, which also became a model of performer-audience relationship to me. I wanted to focus on the interdependency between the two. One can’t exist without the other.
The concepts of guest and host are defined by, and only exist in relationship to one another.
Yeah, exactly. I found it liberating, and maybe even radical. In a conventional setting, there is a division between performer and audience, and this interdependency is not visible. But I wanted to find my way to appreciate this relationship.
When you hosted the performance of home body, in the degree show, parts of the performance were articulated very carefully and clearly. It seemed you were making a conscious effort to script the words you wanted us to receive. The way you delivered these words to us was an act of hosting. There was also a sharp contrast between these moments of scripted, considered speech, and other times when you became flustered, over-excited and apparently nervous. These were beautiful interruptions into the space. There was a vulnerability that appeared on these occasions, as we witnessed you shift between stability, control and gentle chaos. This oscillation between control and looseness, led the audience through an experience of solidity into a state of unravelling.
In your performance, I really enjoyed how happy you seemed to see us, and to have us witnessing you. You seemed delighted to see us, and radiated joy, gratefulness, and delight towards the audience. I appreciated the beauty of your honesty towards us. You possessed a vulnerable confidence in your desire to really see the audience, and look at us straight in the eye, whilst at the same time performing and sharing moments of intense vulnerability, within very intimate movement exploration.
I initially presented this rigid attitude by following a script, which was the score for the performance printed on a long strip of paper. Articulating what I would engage in was my way of assuring me and letting me be home. If improvising is about not seeing forward, then the place for it has to be safe. Once I set a space with a structure, I can reveal delight or over-excitement or vulnerability, which you just mentioned. In my notebook, I wrote, “During the improvisation, something can be hurt, something can be frustrating, but also I often find warmth and funniness.” This is not in a planned way, but it just emerges. I’m interested in all of that.
I used to feel so nervous about receiving the gaze from the audience. I’m still nervous about it, but I also know that shutting them down won’t work for me. When the audience comes all the way to a performance, a performer shuts them down; I think I simply don’t like it. Through the score of hosting and the attempt to host, I’m building the attitude to offer something to the audience and receive something through them. One of the ways of receiving and offering is seeing them and being seen.
In terms of the idea of delight, I think it’s not just about delight that other people have come to see you. It’s also you just delighting in yourself. You are in a state of amazement: discovering and delighting in what you have discovered, and showing us that you are delighted about that.
Maybe I’m changing the sense of not knowing into discovering. While performing, I like to find a space where I don’t know what’s coming next, but I know what I’m doing. I think that is where this delight happens.
So you made this piece of home body, which was 40 minutes long, but also you developed a much shorter work. The six-minute work was called a duet with the invisible to be hopeful and performed at the event Queer Club in 2024.1 I’m wondering how the context of Queer Club changed the idea of home for you, or your experience of hosting people from a particular community. How is the idea of home body carrying through into the other work?
The theme for the event was ‘Returning Home’. There was already the shared sense of home and community to hold the space, which made me feel easy in a way. I had an instinct that the state of ‘not knowing’ relates to queerness as a questioning person, which may also underlie in the film You don’t want to lose me (2022). My movement scores often require me to articulate what my body is doing and where I am in the present moment. It resonates with this need for claiming the sense of existence, while not clearly seeing the future. If I can draw delight from simply being now and here, perhaps it becomes my way of resistance or resilience. That is my way of coming home. My question was how I can be hopeful, how we can stay hopeful. To address that question, I attempted to imagine beyond hope. This was an idea I first encountered through a workshop with the choreographer Sonya Lindfors last year. For example, given that gay marriage is not yet legislated in my home country, I may hope for a world where the legislation is achieved. But what if we are imagining beyond the world where gay marriage is already legislated – then what? I’m referring to this idea of not imagining toward hope, but beyond hope. With this idea, I found that somehow the tension in my body was released and I was breathing easily.
Was the idea of hope and of imagining a different future part of that performance for you?
Yes. I’m always sure something will happen within me during the improvisation as a performance. And people will witness it. Here, we are witnessing and imagining the future or present together. I wanted to frame it as a way to be hopeful.
Do these ideas of home body and of improvisation come through in the film You don’t want to lose me, which you mentioned earlier and was screened at Boreal Screendance Festival in Akureyri? The film focuses on your hand gestures and voice, removing the identity of your face.
I made this film a year before I started my exploration of home body through improvisation. It’s interesting to see how the attempt to embrace not knowing or not defining was there in part of me already. I had never talked about being questioning before I made this film. I conducted a self-interview, and I edited it by myself, which was a process of literally reconstructing my narrative. People say I move my hands a lot when I speak. For this film, I intended to let my spontaneous hand gestures speak to express something I had not expressed through voice. Movement is so visible, showing what is always and already there. Showing my presence and living the present moment gives something powerful to me, like ‘you can’t erase me because I’m here.’ But at the same time, I see my tension, hesitation, maybe fear, in this film. Those things emerge in my improvisation as well. I am aware that the state of not seeing forward or the future is sometimes terrifying, especially in today’s world. I want to let these vulnerabilities or the soft parts of our hearts be a glue between people, which I think is much more powerful than any hierarchical force.
I’m sure I’ve been influenced by classes, sessions, or conversations with specific somatic movement practitioners, artists, and researchers. I especially referred to Authentic Movement, which values a mover’s inner impulse in relationship with a witness, for the structure of some of my practice. I also think my movement and its imaginative quality have been cultivated through Skinner Releasing Technique. With those influences, I played a lot with movement scores, which are like prompts for improvisation. Alongside my solo practice with the scores, I hosted some one-on-one sessions with another mover, where we held the space for each other as a mover or as a witness. In these sessions, I found I sometimes had to surrender to the space or the other person. Then, I started sharing with a group of people as well. I think I strengthened the sense of letting go or surrendering through those practices, which later connected to the exploration of a host-guest relationship.
As I know some moments of your research process, I remember the significance of making the transition from your solo practice in the studio to finding a way to share that practice with other people. You were moving from a very personal exploration of finding home with(in) yourself, to discovering how to be simultaneously with both yourself and with others, within the context of performance. It necessitated an understanding of how and why you would offer this practice to other people. I remember this being a big hurdle to move through, but that it resulted in a very refined way of articulating and inhabiting the space with others. Is this when the language of host and guest entered in, as a way to understand how to share the space with others? How did the idea of home body lead you to this language of host and guest?
I realised that if I’m inviting people to my space as a performer, then the act of performing becomes hosting. It’s like I’m inviting the audience to my home. Mover-witness relationships developed into host-guest relationships, which also became a model of performer-audience relationship to me. I wanted to focus on the interdependency between the two. One can’t exist without the other.
The concepts of guest and host are defined by, and only exist in relationship to one another.
Yeah, exactly. I found it liberating, and maybe even radical. In a conventional setting, there is a division between performer and audience, and this interdependency is not visible. But I wanted to find my way to appreciate this relationship.
When you hosted the performance of home body, in the degree show, parts of the performance were articulated very carefully and clearly. It seemed you were making a conscious effort to script the words you wanted us to receive. The way you delivered these words to us was an act of hosting. There was also a sharp contrast between these moments of scripted, considered speech, and other times when you became flustered, over-excited and apparently nervous. These were beautiful interruptions into the space. There was a vulnerability that appeared on these occasions, as we witnessed you shift between stability, control and gentle chaos. This oscillation between control and looseness, led the audience through an experience of solidity into a state of unravelling.
In your performance, I really enjoyed how happy you seemed to see us, and to have us witnessing you. You seemed delighted to see us, and radiated joy, gratefulness, and delight towards the audience. I appreciated the beauty of your honesty towards us. You possessed a vulnerable confidence in your desire to really see the audience, and look at us straight in the eye, whilst at the same time performing and sharing moments of intense vulnerability, within very intimate movement exploration.
I initially presented this rigid attitude by following a script, which was the score for the performance printed on a long strip of paper. Articulating what I would engage in was my way of assuring me and letting me be home. If improvising is about not seeing forward, then the place for it has to be safe. Once I set a space with a structure, I can reveal delight or over-excitement or vulnerability, which you just mentioned. In my notebook, I wrote, “During the improvisation, something can be hurt, something can be frustrating, but also I often find warmth and funniness.” This is not in a planned way, but it just emerges. I’m interested in all of that.
I used to feel so nervous about receiving the gaze from the audience. I’m still nervous about it, but I also know that shutting them down won’t work for me. When the audience comes all the way to a performance, a performer shuts them down; I think I simply don’t like it. Through the score of hosting and the attempt to host, I’m building the attitude to offer something to the audience and receive something through them. One of the ways of receiving and offering is seeing them and being seen.
In terms of the idea of delight, I think it’s not just about delight that other people have come to see you. It’s also you just delighting in yourself. You are in a state of amazement: discovering and delighting in what you have discovered, and showing us that you are delighted about that.
Maybe I’m changing the sense of not knowing into discovering. While performing, I like to find a space where I don’t know what’s coming next, but I know what I’m doing. I think that is where this delight happens.
So you made this piece of home body, which was 40 minutes long, but also you developed a much shorter work. The six-minute work was called a duet with the invisible to be hopeful and performed at the event Queer Club in 2024.1 I’m wondering how the context of Queer Club changed the idea of home for you, or your experience of hosting people from a particular community. How is the idea of home body carrying through into the other work?
The theme for the event was ‘Returning Home’. There was already the shared sense of home and community to hold the space, which made me feel easy in a way. I had an instinct that the state of ‘not knowing’ relates to queerness as a questioning person, which may also underlie in the film You don’t want to lose me (2022). My movement scores often require me to articulate what my body is doing and where I am in the present moment. It resonates with this need for claiming the sense of existence, while not clearly seeing the future. If I can draw delight from simply being now and here, perhaps it becomes my way of resistance or resilience. That is my way of coming home. My question was how I can be hopeful, how we can stay hopeful. To address that question, I attempted to imagine beyond hope. This was an idea I first encountered through a workshop with the choreographer Sonya Lindfors last year. For example, given that gay marriage is not yet legislated in my home country, I may hope for a world where the legislation is achieved. But what if we are imagining beyond the world where gay marriage is already legislated – then what? I’m referring to this idea of not imagining toward hope, but beyond hope. With this idea, I found that somehow the tension in my body was released and I was breathing easily.
Was the idea of hope and of imagining a different future part of that performance for you?
Yes. I’m always sure something will happen within me during the improvisation as a performance. And people will witness it. Here, we are witnessing and imagining the future or present together. I wanted to frame it as a way to be hopeful.
Do these ideas of home body and of improvisation come through in the film You don’t want to lose me, which you mentioned earlier and was screened at Boreal Screendance Festival in Akureyri? The film focuses on your hand gestures and voice, removing the identity of your face.
I made this film a year before I started my exploration of home body through improvisation. It’s interesting to see how the attempt to embrace not knowing or not defining was there in part of me already. I had never talked about being questioning before I made this film. I conducted a self-interview, and I edited it by myself, which was a process of literally reconstructing my narrative. People say I move my hands a lot when I speak. For this film, I intended to let my spontaneous hand gestures speak to express something I had not expressed through voice. Movement is so visible, showing what is always and already there. Showing my presence and living the present moment gives something powerful to me, like ‘you can’t erase me because I’m here.’ But at the same time, I see my tension, hesitation, maybe fear, in this film. Those things emerge in my improvisation as well. I am aware that the state of not seeing forward or the future is sometimes terrifying, especially in today’s world. I want to let these vulnerabilities or the soft parts of our hearts be a glue between people, which I think is much more powerful than any hierarchical force.
Yuka Hayashi, You don't want to lose me, film, 2022. Exhibited at the Boreal Screendance Festival, Akureyri, in 2024, in this installation setting.
Sarah White is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer, currently completing an MFA in Creative Practice: Dance Professional at Trinity Laban Conservative. With a background in visual art, her recent work focuses on movement and performance research, in dialogue with theological frameworks: exploring forms of attention, mimicry and transformation. Sarah is also a programme curator for the charity Morphe Arts, and editor and founder of the online Agnoscis Journal. Sarah has created performance work for the Goethe Institut (with the Royal College of Art), Art Night Dundee, Religion and Art Live (Art Research Goldsmiths), The Koppel Project, The Swiss Church (Arts Council DYCP funded), and Siobhan Davies Studios. www.sarahwhite.org.uk
Yuka Hayashi is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist, who completed their MFA in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban in 2024. In their ongoing creation and research, Yuka coins the term “home body”, which implies the concept of the body as a home, and its conceptual, felt, and physical fluidity. Yuka’s work expands to writing and filmmaking as embodied practices, exploring how the fleshy presence and experience of the maker/writer and audience/reader coexist through movement/dance, poetry, and film. Yuka’s works have been performed or curated internationally, on platforms such as Company Jinks’ Mindful Movement Festival (London, 2024) and Boreal Screendance Festival (Akureyri, 2024). https://linktr.ee/yukahayashi
1. Queer Club was hosted as a part of Mindful Movement Festival by Company Jinks, supported by East London Dance, in November 2024.
Yuka Hayashi is a movement-based interdisciplinary artist, who completed their MFA in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban in 2024. In their ongoing creation and research, Yuka coins the term “home body”, which implies the concept of the body as a home, and its conceptual, felt, and physical fluidity. Yuka’s work expands to writing and filmmaking as embodied practices, exploring how the fleshy presence and experience of the maker/writer and audience/reader coexist through movement/dance, poetry, and film. Yuka’s works have been performed or curated internationally, on platforms such as Company Jinks’ Mindful Movement Festival (London, 2024) and Boreal Screendance Festival (Akureyri, 2024). https://linktr.ee/yukahayashi
1. Queer Club was hosted as a part of Mindful Movement Festival by Company Jinks, supported by East London Dance, in November 2024.