Action Briquette Z Manga beat & dance

A sonic and bodily journey into the pop heart of Japan, between comics, sounds, and movement. To speak to those growing up in both the real and virtual worlds, with lightness and depth.

Action Briquette Z, Manga beat & dance is a dance theatre solo that plays with the sounds, images, and bodies of Japanese manga. The onomatopoeia of comics—explosions, impacts, animal cries, action sounds—becomes the performance’s soundtrack, generated live with synthesizer, voice, and loop station.

Kenji Shinohe, a Japanese dancer trained at the University of Arts in Wuppertal, the school of Pina Bausch, creates an ironic and surprising choreography in which movement emerges directly from sound. On stage, a monitor interacts with him by displaying cartoon characters, while drawing and animation merge with physical action.

The work stems from the disorientation experienced by Shinohe himself upon arriving in Europe, when he discovered that Japanese pop culture had become an object of fascination for a cultured and passionate audience, far removed from his own everyday childhood experience. From this arises a subtle and accessible reflection on cultural stereotypes, on the relationship between the real and the virtual, and on how entertainment narratives shape collective imaginaries.

With this work, the artist seeks to reveal the more popular and everyday side of Japan, the one less known in Europe. The sounds of manga are the music of his childhood, and together with the audience he explores what happens when those sounds become body, movement, and play—and also when they reveal the distance between what is told and what is lived.