Performance group inkBoat was founded in 1998 by Shinichi Iova-Koga, who is still the artistic director. Since then, the ensemble has won six Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, toured the world, and continues to create relevant work. He recently sat down with me for a conversation about the company’s upcoming piece, Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: our wild shining days, appearing at the 2026 San Francisco International Arts Festival (April 30 through May 3, Z Space, SF).

It would be too simplistic to call what inkBoat’s performers do as “Butoh” dance—envision white full-body make-up and ultra-slow motion—because that is only one of many elements in the development of this work. “If somebody asks me what I do, I oftentimes make the most generic answer possible,” Iova-Koga confesses. “I say I’m a dancer, or a physical theater person, or doing performing arts. It gives them a very general framework. Even if I say dancer, they immediately think ballet dancer or contemporary modern dancer. And if I say Butoh dancer, then some people don’t know at all.”

inkBoat’s refreshing ambiguity is an antidote to society’s current hyper-categorization of everything, from pedigree pets to psychiatric diagnoses, so it can fit into an easily marketable genre or niche. This hybrid impulse, which rejects easy pigeonholing, extends to the SF International Arts Festival as a whole.

inkBoat photo by Leighann Kowalski

Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: our wild shining days has been evolving since 2022, in sporadic bursts, much of it created both remotely and online, methods the pandemic greatly expanded. The six main collaborative artists—Iova-Koga, his wife Dana Iova-Koga, Elke Tuyten, Cass Tunick, Jubilith Moore, and Mari Osanai—mostly live in different places from each other and have their own touring and teaching schedules. Collectively, they also are trained in an enormous number of different movement practices: Butoh Dance, Action Theater, Body Weather, Noguchi Taiso, Noh Theater, Corporeal Mime, Tadashi Suzuki Method, Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints, Tai Chi, Tui Na, and Qi Gong.

The largest burst came when Iova-Koga was teaching at UC Davis as a Granada Artist-in-Residence. “I was choreographing, creating a piece there with full production support. I didn’t have to write grants, organize the venue or people’s schedules or all the stuff that uses up a huge amount of time when creating independent work. I was working with students who didn’t know any of my [movement] vocabulary, and so there’s definitely a process of educating them on movement principles, then working with them on developing this piece for two and a half months, working with them five days a week.” 

One facet of the production has a group of dead people waiting to move on into the unknown. “There’s this afterlife, and previous lives,” explains Iova-Koga, “and how lessons move forward on this purely genetic level. Like the influence of your mother and father, and the influence of my parents. A kind of genetic background of elements. My mother was and [still] is a painter, and my father, who passed away a couple years ago, was a martial artist, a six-time national judo champion, before I was born.

inkBoat photo by Robbie Sweeney

“Another layer is our process which also creates content,” Iova-Koga continues. “How we make the piece affects how the content arises. This has been my primary vision since I started at UC Davis, and most all of the iterations since then have been through my imagination, work, visioning in collaboration with Dan Cantrell, who’s doing the music. Sometimes my wife comes in leaving her perspective. Since November, not just Dana, but Elke, Jubilith, Cass, and Mari are there. These are people I trust artistically.” The six collaborators rotate directing different sections of the piece. Iova-Koga puts out a structure and asks someone to change the scene according to their own priorities and vision without having to justify why something should change. 

Another partner he has brought on board is KT Nelson, with whom he co-directed a work at ODC. “We have had a friendship for some years,” offers Iova-Koga, “and I know how my strengths and her strengths are different, which is a good thing. At some point KT is going to come and take up the reins of finishing the piece, looking at staging, timing, and just doing a lot of cleanup because our process is messy.

“One thing is so foundational and so basic you could apply it to many things. In the end it is the relationship between things, and exploring that relationship is a very deep process. Maybe not even how things change, just the nature of change itself. Even if I’m working a little bit more traditionally, I’m still the director doing everything. It’s still always a collaboration because I’m always influenced by the people in front of me. There’s a folding in of voices, all these different voices, and we create something that not one of us could possibly even dream of doing on our own.”

CLOUDS FROM A CRUMBLING GIANT: OUR WILD SHINING DAYS April 30 through May 3, Z Space, SF. More info here.

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