KNOW NATION Presents: 
Still Life @ Maya Hotel

Created by acclaimed Norwegian director Alan Lucien Øyen for Japanese actor and dancer Mirai Moriyama and international performer Daniel Proietto, Still Life @ Maya Hotel is a visually arresting duet where choreography, cinema, and existential poetry converge.

Bringing together influences from Butoh, Kabuki, contemporary theatre and film, the piece explores the dissonance of being alive in a world suspended between hyperconnection and ecological collapse. A haunting reflection on stasis, movement, and the decay beneath stillness.

Filmed entirely in the abandoned Maya Hotel—a real-world ruin suspended above the city of Kobe—the space becomes both stage and character: a ghost of the future, echoing the collapse it once witnessed.

Long before it fell into disrepair, this mountaintop site housed a Buddhist monastery. It later became the Maya Hotel, and during the horrors of World War II, it was transformed into a military bunker and storage site for munitions. The building now stands as a layered relic—spiritual sanctuary, place of refuge, site of violence. Still Life unfolds within these haunted walls, each movement stirring the memory of what the world once was—and what it chose to forget.

A Cinematic Meditation on Nature, Time and Identity

“We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”
— Andy Goldsworthy

Movement in Still Life emerges like a quiet rupture—an echo of everything breaking beneath the surface.

Moriyama and Proietto become mirror images of our time: dislocated, hyperconnected, paralyzed by the noise of desire and the silence of collapse.

Time stretches. Identity dissolves.

The body remembers what the world tries to forget.

A visual elegy. A choreographic spell.

A reminder that even in stillness, something is burning.

 Creative Team

• Choreography: Alan Lucien Øyen

• Created with and Performed by Mirai Moriyama
  & Daniel Proietto

• Videography: Ryo Noda
  

• Location Management: naddist

• Filmed at: Maya Hotel, Kobe

• Produced by Winter Guests and AiRK