MARIKA NIKO

Choreographic Research

HENRO

2025 Participatory Walking Performance

In crowded trains, while waiting for concerts, or standing at traffic lights—despite being surrounded by people in the city center, we routinely experience time passing without knowing anything about the person next to us. This performance gradually unpatterns such everyday experiences, exploring the boundaries between our own bodies and others, as well as with nature, to discover new relationships. "HENRO" is a play on words with "遍路" which means to go on a pilgrimage and "編路" which means to weave one's journey. After being offered a gentle choreographic proposal by the facilitator, partcipants split into two and eventually find their journey as a group. Walking becomes a nonverbal yet highly complicated dialogue that emerges between oneself and the other.

Choreography: Taku Yoshida & Marika Niko
Concept Advisor: Yuma Ochi
Publicity Visuals & Video Production: Takumi Tsuji
Drawings (for Publicity Visuals & Video): Miina Yamaguchi
Music (for Publicity Video): Tomoyoshi Date
Publicity Video Cast: Nao Usami, Taku Yoshida
Organized by Phyms
Supported by Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)

Photo by Chiharu Saito

Trailer Video

nudation

2022 Olfactory Ritual Performance

Starting from a bare state, this ritual performance invited visitors to conjure their memories and map them on the site, Orchard Park. Using scent as a guide, the performance inspired a moment of solitude and intimacy with the park’s natural habitat, bridging the visitors’ past with the nature’s present. Contemplating on the different temporalities that lingered in the park – their embodied memories and the saplings’ future – the performance offered a humble celebration to the newly planted cherry blossom trees.

Performed by Zhixuan (Miki) Zhu
Music by Poah West
Choreographed by Marika Niko
Supported by Duke Forum for Scholars and Public

Photo by Alec Himwich

Caress

2021 Immersive Audio Choreography

Caress is a 28-minute immersive audio choreography that explores the gendered and racialized labor of providing and accepting care. As Caress moves between story fragments, meditative and erotic narration, and domestic choreography, we ponder together the ways in which care expresses itself in our most intimate moments with lovers, family, friends, and nature.

Written and Choreographed by Nia Wilson and Marika Niko
Sound by Keira Simmons
Voice by Marika Niko, Yukari Niko, Mars Dixon, Keimei Jin, Tomo, Lee Edwards, and Nia Wilson (in order of appearance)
Special Thanks to Dr. Angenette Spalink and Dr. James R. Ball III
Supported by Academy of Visual and Performing Arts’s Pandemic Innovative Arts Grant at Texas A&M University

memory is a partial victory over death

2019 Site-Specific Dance Performance

Placing Henri Bergson’s philosophical framework as the foundation, this research questioned how aging bodies, specifically of my grandmother with dementia, remember childhood memories from World War II. memory is a partial victory over death was a site-specific performance that pondered upon the relationship between materiality and memory, historical trauma and amnesia, and dementia and aging. The duet challenges the presence of time and the body reflected and refracted back to them in the Atrium space.

Performed by Ophelia Senfter and Simon Wilkes
Stage Managed by Sarah Booth
Choreographed and Designed by Marika Niko
Supported by Capstone Research Grant, New York University Abu Dhabi Theater Program

Courtesy of The NYUAD Theater Program, Photo by Harshini Karunaratne