As regular visitors to our JAPAN-UK Events calendar will know, there are a great many Japan related events held across the country to satisfy most peoples’ interests. This month we focus on the diverse range of Japanese arts that can be enjoyed in the capital city this month. For the latest information please check our online calendar here.

To submit an event to our calendar please check the information here.

Four young members of the multi-award-winning Japanese folk music group Abeya provide a stunning mix of song, dance, drumming, bamboo flutes, and the powerful, addictive 3-string tsugaru-jamisen. Abeya’s diverse repertoire ranges across highly ornamented ballads, dance songs, lullabies and work songs. The group has been praised for their ability to enchant audiences not only with their talent but also their highly engaging approach using humour, interaction, and poignant explanations to help make the music relevant to international audiences.

Reiko Fujisawa is delighted to announce her series of special concerts in London for 2013 ‘Reiko Fujisawa and Friends’. The concerts will showcase Reiko performing in collaboration with many of her wonderful friends and colleagues from the UK and Japan, and this first concert in the series features an exciting new partnership with members of the Allegri Quartet.

Another highlight of the series will be performances of various works by British and Japanese composers, and the series is being generously supported by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

Performers:
Reiko Fujisawa (piano)
Ofer Falk (violin)
Vanessa Lucas-Smith (cello)

Japanese artist Hiroko Imada is a graduate of the Slade, and has been living and working in London for over 20 years. She is a member of Palace Wharf Studios, and has drawn much artistic stimulation from its prime riverside location.

In this show she presents works inspired by her two primary passions - Nature and Dance/Movement - and which explore them using various two dimensional techniques. She likes to use a variety of media, such as painting, printmaking, and installation, and to find the primary characteristic of each. Her vivid and powerful use of colour, and her strong brush strokes, express the movement, energy and life of her chosen subjects.

As frontman and vocalist of the hugely successful award-winning Japanese rock band Radwimps; Illion is Yojiro Noda’s first major solo project. Based in Tokyo the 27 years old gifted musician has been standing on the frontline of the Japanese music scene from his teens and is ready to fly out to the world.

Like Radwimps; Illion crafts the lyrics seriously, often cynically, and weaves out music of vast style and sound. His debut album ‘UBU’ is released in February and will follow with his first major UK solo headline show.

Employing a spectacular combination of synchronized video screens, real-time content feeds, digital sound sculptures and – for the first time in Ikeda’s work – human performers, superposition explores the thrilling conceptual world opened up by quantum theory.

Ikeda’s immersive and viscerally exciting music plunges you into the grey space between 0 and 1, true and false, where uncertainty and probability coexist, through a powerful display of technology and art designed to take the spectator inside the indescribable structures at the very foundation of all life. 

JICC