Ayaka Nakama is a choreographer and performer based in Kobe, Japan, who has worked with Mika Kurosawa, Reina Kimura, Toshiki Okada, contact Gonzo and many others. With the aim of expanding the dancer’s work itself, Ayaka started making dance pieces in 2013 and has been an associated artist of dB Kobe since 2018.

For her four-hour solo “Freeway Dance”, she asked her father and friends who were not specialists in performing arts to give her their first memories of dance, and read them as choreography: “I have worked on the stage with countless choreographers, believing that it is the dancer’s job to launch choreography as a dance and let the choreographed body dance. My body is not able to dance without choreography, and furthermore, it has the property that it wants to dance a lot, so it needs much more choreography (like food). Choreography exists in various forms anytime and anywhere. I have long wanted to dance to all the choreography that exists in this world. In this project, I asked people who are not specialists in dance or performing arts about “a memory of when they danced for the first time in their lives”, and I treated those memories as choreography. I stack multiple choreographies in my body without replacing them. Let’s dance with a plump and luxurious body that has stored a lot of foods.”
 
The distribution of Ayaka’s work is conducted jointly with the excellent human beings of Something Great.