LEIMAY Ensemble’s Alius Bodies

A New Performance Work: “ Alius Bodies”

A new work by multidisciplinary artist duo: Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya featuring the LEIMAY Ensemble.

Combining LEIMAY Ensemble’s signature physicality layered over vivid visual landscapes, “Alius Bodies” delves into questions of otherness and the unfamiliar.

Through its five movements solo structure, “Alius Bodies” uses the lens of otherness to reconcile with the unfamiliar in an ever growing world of diverse cultures, genders, customs, religious, and technologies.

“Alius” is a latin word that translates into “another” or “other”.

“Ximena and Shige’s work is unique and powerful. It feels very ancient and very contemporary – a rare balance. It allows for a freedom of the mind”. – Robert Wilson

“Their work is visually stunning and kinetically powerful”. – Meredith Monk

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya with the LEIMAY Ensemble

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya are a Colombian and Japanese multidisciplinary artist duo. Their collaborative works manifest in live installations, performances, sculptures as well as publications, research, and community projects. Shige and Ximena are the co-founders and artistic directors of the arts organization LEIMAY and the performance group the LEIMAY Ensemble. The word LEIMAY [ley-mey] is a Japanese term symbolizing the changing moment between darkness and the light of dawn, or the transition from one era to the other. Ximena and Shige work out of their home studio CAVE located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Their work has been presented at a number of art spaces including BAM, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Watermill Center, HERE, Japan Society, and The Asian Museum of San Francisco. They have been nominated for the USA Artists Fellowship and the Herb Alpert Award. They have been part of the Bessie Schonberg Individual Choreographers Residency at the Yard, the Watermill Center Residency Programs, and the HERE Artist in Residency Program. Ximena was a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship for extraordinary stage directors, and she is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her article ‘LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival’ has recently been published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. In 2012 Ximena and Shige founded the LEIMAY Ensemble.

The LEIMAY Ensemble is a group of five international dancers and performers who hold a regular practice at their studio in Brooklyn where they engage in the creation of new work as well as on teaching, training, research, and distillation of years of direct transmission of embodied knowledge by Japanese Butoh pioneers, Noguchi Taiso practitioners, and Experimental Theater innovators. Through the work with the LEIMAY Ensemble, Ximena and Shige have developed LUDUS, a practice that explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and cultivates sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Current ensemble members included: Masanori Asahara, Krystel Copper, Andrea Jones, Derek Dimartini and Mario Galeano.