Still Life @ Maya Hotel

Still Life @ Maya Hotel is a cinematic duet created by Alan Lucien Øyen for Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto. The work brings together choreography and film to explore states of suspension, memory, and embodied presence.

Drawing on influences from Butoh, Kabuki, contemporary theatre, and cinema, the piece attends to the condition of being alive within a fractured world — one shaped by acceleration, ecological strain, and emotional dislocation.

Site and History

The work was filmed entirely inside the abandoned Maya Hotel, overlooking the city of Kobe. The building functions not as a backdrop, but as a spatial condition within the choreography.

Before becoming a hotel, the site housed a Buddhist monastery. During the Second World War, it was later used as a military bunker and munitions storage facility. Now abandoned, the structure holds layered histories of care, refuge, and violence.

Still Life unfolds within this accumulation of past uses, allowing movement to register absence, residue, and time.

Movement and Stillness

Rather than progressing through narrative, the choreography operates through states of interruption and attention. Movement appears, withdraws, and returns, shaped by proximity to architecture and environment.

Moriyama and Proietto occupy the space as parallel presences rather than characters, allowing gesture, pause, and duration to carry meaning.

Context

Still Life @ Maya Hotel forms part of Know Nation’s engagement with cinematic dance as a means of holding memory and place through embodied practice.

The work is presented without commentary, allowing the encounter to unfold through movement, sound, and spatial awareness.

Credits

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 & AiRK