Saturday 3 September 2016, 12pm
Day events: 12noon until 7pm – OTO PROJECT SPACE
Evening events: 7.30pm until 12am – CAFE OTO
Ura Matsuri aims to be a new fun and friendly one day festival of live performance arts from Japanese Londoners and their London friends. A day of the joyful, the serious and mostly the absurd!
Taking place on the 3rd of September at Cafe OTO in Dalston, East London, the festival is named "Ura Matsuri – A Celebration of The Third Culture" In the Japanese language Ura means ‘back or other side’ and matsuri means ‘festival’. Ura Matsuri will feature live performances, film shows and children’s workshops.
Organised by London based Japanese artists including members of the long standing, much loved and joyful performance group Frank Chickens, it brings together grassroots Japanese immigrant culture in London and local alternative art and music scenes.
Celebrating the music, arts and ideas cultivated and created by UK-based Japanese artists through living in the UK, who we have now christened ‘The Third Culture”.
This celebration of UK Japanese arts aims to encourage general appreciation of the ‘third’ cultures being explored by immigrants in the UK, including local Japanese people. We feel strongly about the importance of inclusive cultural exchanges to celebrate the positive influences that the introduction of new cultures gives to society as a whole. And we like to have fun and share as well!
Our intention is to continue this event as an annual summer festival in London and so this first year is the sowing of the seeds so that much rice will grow in the future!
DAYTIME CHILDREN'S WORKSHOPS IN THE PROJECT SPACE
12 noon till 2pm – FLANGE ZOO! come and draw fantastical creatures with them!
They say: "For Cosmos-myths visitors large and small can view animation and print-outs of mythological creatures as reference to drawing an ever growing galactic scroll ov their own cosmic characters accompanied by live sounds from Flange Zoo & there will be a final ritual near the end." More details below.
2pm till 4pm – Members of Frank Chickens present a kids ninja workshop - Learn to make paper origami ninja throwing star, learn dance routine of "We Are Ninja" along with ninja games.
Both age 6 years upwards - Parents should accompany if they are 6 or 7 years
FILM SCREENINGS – OTO PROJECT SPACE
Make sure to see these exclusive screenings on the afternoon of 3rd Sept between 4.15pm and 7.15pm in the Project Space, Free entry as well.
New Japanese animated shorts including:
- Domestic RoboCop (Keiichi Matsuda, 2010)
- Friendship 2016 (Takashi Iitsuka, 2016)
- Hyper-Reality (Keiichi Matsuda, 2016)
- Mizutamamoyo (Ryu Furusawa, 2006)
- Night of Poison (Takashi Iitsuka, 2016)
- OBAKE (Takashi Iitsuka, 2016)
Also: Dream Girls by Kim Longinotto
A Japanese pop band formed and based in Hackney, London. The band consists of four Japanese girls (allegedly 17 years old but not!) Performing original songs since 2007 with a special focus on the aspects of being Japanese in the UK. They are punky, they are funky and they are funny peculiar! ‘NO CAR (nouka)’ means ‘farmers’ in Japanese.
Jasper Sharp is a writer, curator and filmmaker. He is the co-founder of the Japanese film website Midnight Eye.com. Books include Behind the Pink Curtain, The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Film and The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds. A regular contributor to Sight and Sound and curator with the BFI he is director of Zipangu Fest, a festival dedicated to Japanese independent cinema and is Artistic Director of the Asia House Film Festival. Film programme will be announced nearer the event
Richard DeDomenici makes work that’s social, joyful, topical and political - although rarely simultaneously. He specializes in urban-absurdist interventions which strive to create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility. Richard is the inventor of the Carry-Ok wearable karaoke system, office chair sport The Swivelympics and the crocheted crypto-currency Knitcoin.
At Ura Matsuri 2016 Godzilla has been watching the continued gentrification of East London unfold with increasing horror. On September the 3rd he invites the good citizens of Dalston to build cardboard models of prominent local buildings, which he will then destroy, in what will hopefully be an act of collective catharsis.
All Yokos! All Ukes! All Alright!
One of Tokyo's most emotive and inventive artists, first emerging in Japan during the early '80s women’s liberation movement, Kamura was a founder member of the first Japanese all-feminist punk band, Mizutama Shobodan, also known as Polkadot Fire Brigade, formed in 1979 in Tokyo. As agitprop feminist pioneers, Mizutama Shobodan joined the Japanese punk rock DIY movement, toured Japan extensively, set up their own record label (Kinniku Bijo Records) and released two albums. Their second album, Manten ni Akai Hanabira (Red Petals in the Sky), was produced by Fred Frith. Kamura also teamed up with Tenko as the female vocal improvisation duo Honeymoons, who developed a unique style of avant-noise improvisation and performed internationally with seminal New York improvisers including Tom Cora and John Zorn. In the late 1980s Kamura joined Kazuko Hohki’s UK based Japanese pop group Frank Chickens and toured Europe, USA, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, USSR and Japan. In 2002 she began working with UK musicians, expanding her vocal genre to ethnic-experimental song writing. At the same time she performed vocal improvisation with such masters of improvisation as Eddie Prevost and Clive Bell. Her 2021 project, Kamura Obscura Duo with Natalie Mason, supported The Nightingales' sold-out UK tour.
In 2022 Kamura recently released her first solo album, “4am Diary", on which - said Stewart Lee in The Idler - “she douses the anti-musical strategies of the late-seventies Rock In Opposition movement... with a soupçon of fizzy electrics, her operatic voice navigating an echoing mirror maze of pulses and tones.” That year too she performed “ A Page of Madness” with her original soundtrack at FILM FEST in Portugal, in the role of narrator for silent film.
https://kamuraobscura.bandcamp.com/album/4-am-diary
https://www.facebook.com/kamuraobscura/
Hibiki is the only professional Tsugaru shamisen player in Europe. Tsugaru is the northern region of Japan, which has its own regional percussive style. His set normally consists of traditional folk songs and improvisations.
http://www.hibikishamisen.com/Biography.html
Akari, dubbed the only professional enka singer in the UK, will be singing enka (Japanese torch song) with backing tracks, and also sing minyou (traditional Japanese folk) accompanied by Hibiki playing Tsugaru shamisen.
http://www.akarisinger.com/#about2
Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima, Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, percussionist and photographer Marie Roux and violin player Billy Steiger, O Yama O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. They move between pop and the philosophical, defined by the overall space afforded to texture and movement. In small, delicate sound an intimate musical climate is established that reflects on life, telling stories of improvised clockwork, whispered dreams, small movements of the hand and the rhythm to be found in the shuffle of a deck of cards.
The group have performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.
Frank Chickens initially found fame in the late 80’s as a kimono and cardboard clad duo scoring a chart hit with the classic single “We are Ninja – No Geisha!”, they toured with the likes of Billy Bragg and The Smiths and headlined their own shows around the world!
They were regulars & favourites of DJ John Peel, recording several radio sessions for him and appearing in his famous & fondly remembered Festive 50. A Channel 4 series followed with a Perrier nomination at Edinburgh festival not far behind. Later Ninja Tunes released a remix album of Chickens favourites, Universal featured them on a best selling compilation and thanks to a Stewart Lee's drunken late night internet rant Frank Chickens found themselves the unexpected but deserving winners of The Edinburgh Festival Comedy Gods Award!
The Chickens are still going strong, recently performing at Royal Opera House, Hackney Empire & Duckie at RVT.
Mini-Kev from Monkey Stomp Blues will soundtrack the end of the evening with a selection of vintage showa period records randomly selected from his collection hunted out while working with Fuji Rock Festival in Japan. Perfect listening for having an end of the day beer or sake to! Kanpai!
Kitsune Tsukai, an ancient Japanese fox-witch, a 3.5 billion year old dragon Lotan the Destroyer and Tiger Gnome an immortal Tiger sprite together form Flange Zoo. For Cosmos-myths visitors large & small can view animation & print-outs of mythological creatures as reference to drawing on an ever-growing galactic scroll ov their own cosmic characters, accompanied by live sounds from Flange Zoo a troop of musical mythical animals using multi-effects, Stylophone, Theremin, hand-designed ‘Tube-Fox’ Didgeridoo and other amplified interferences. Strange Star Rivers, by Flange Zoo.
