FILMS

Yumi is creating a new solo work Buried TeaBowl, an interdisciplinary work with dance, text, song and poetry, inspired by Japanese female dancer/shaman, Okuni in 1600’s. The work in progress was completed in Aug 2021, and will be premiered in a live and digital performance in 2022.

"Sunrise at Midnight" (2002) is both a documentary portrait of Yumi Umiumare, a contemporary Japanese / Australian Butoh dancer, and a Japanese Ghost story set in the Australian Desert. Filmmaker Sean O'Brien and Butoh Dancer Yumi Umiumare make an expedition into the desert to experience and exorcise Noriko's lost soul.

Sakasama: the reverse world. The two worlds of Life and Death are described as two shores; one is ‘the near shore’ (the world of the living), and the other is ‘the far shore’ (the world of after-death). A river flows between them. ‘The far shore’ is a reversed world: it is the reverse of the world of the living and everything is upside down.

Using everyday objects as metaphors of ‘loss’, while also collecting residential memories defined by a psycho-emotional space, Yumi takes on the notion of ‘oriental’ in the context of moving and living in “foreign” spaces. The work explores the cracks and spaces between disorientation / destruction & attraction / familiarities.