In addition to the characteristic elements of light and sound in his previous works, Hiroaki Umeda's new piece Holistic Strata introduces a new system built around a key component of “physical data” generated by the dancer's body and its movements. During his two-month residency at YCAM, Umeda's creative work with an eye to touring the result on a global scale was based on the development of technologies and plans according to the piece's concept, assisted by the YCAM InterLab team of media art specialists.

A further leap forward from Umeda's tried and tested concept of treating light, sound and the human body as equivalent means of expression on stage, Holistic Strata revolves around the body as a complex cluster of information that configures actual spaces. The conversion into data for manipulating light and sound of dancer Umeda's body data (movements of muscles and locomotion coordinates) with the help of sensing technology results in the creation of a scenery that integrates dance, sound, and intensely blinking light. It will be challenging to see how the data of the body, broken up into the data (bit) as light and sound, will be represented in the viewer's perception when Umeda implants his improvised dance in the surrounding space, and lets it arise right in front of the audience. Based on this system of freely generated imagination, Holistic Strata proposes “dance” as a spatial expression, while highlighting the criticality of our perception.