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Mizuho Kappa
Choreographer / Performer / Entomologist
“This is not a dance.
This is a hidden fight for humanity. This is an unheard voice of death.
This is endless mourning for slain warriors.”
- Mizuho Kappa
This is a hidden fight for humanity. This is an unheard voice of death.
This is endless mourning for slain warriors.”
- Mizuho Kappa
Bio
MIZUHO KAPPA is a choreographer and performing artist with a degree in Entomology, originally from Osaka, Japan. She has recently performed with Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More NY, Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, and Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks, among others.
She is a founder of her own collaborative dance theater company Kappa InKahootz, as well as an assistant artistic director of dance-theater company PROJECT/TAG .
Her multidimensional choreographic works have been presented at The Shed, La MaMa, Dixon Place, Gene Frankel Theater, TheaterLab, Kennedy Center, The Brick, Ars Nova and more. She also collaborates with cross-disciplinary artists, including a neuroscience researcher, a transmedia playwright, a hybrid writer, and a choreographic researcher. These works have been showcased at New Museum, New York Hall of Science, Open Source Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, City University of Hong Kong, House of Yes, Chocolate Factory and beyond.
She is a commissioned choreographer for Peridance Contemporary Dance Company's 2025 Spring Season, also a recipient of the GALLIM Moving Artist Residency.
Kappa was a resident artist at Experimental Film Virginia 2022, where she performed lead roles in two award-winning films, Devouring Stones Up Close and Sole, both of which premiered at Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival.
The way she conveys narratives through these intricate and simultaneous scientific experiments has been described as 'Evoking and Unhinged' (Brooklyn Magazine) and ‘Potent’ (The New York Times).
Artist Statement
“This is not a dance. This is a hidden fight for humanity. This is an unheard voice of death. This is endless mourning for slain warriors.”
At 14 years old, I kept a diary documenting the rigid routines imposed by my vengeful mother. My childhood was a wildfire that ended in ashes—perpetually punished for being born. I began creating choreographic works as a teenager, searching for a space to reconcile with my own chaotic self.
I explore the brutality of war and domestic violence—the way war unleashes pain and trauma within the intimacy of the home. My work resists conventional dance training, striving for raw, authentic expression, unexpected movement, and striking tableaux that leave lasting imprints on the imagination. My movement emerges from a rage to survive, an inner fire, and an endless search for light, connection, and love.
I fuse the spiritual essence of Japanese traditional dance with contemporary, non-literal movement. Through trance, repetition, dynamic pulse, and sacred ritual, my choreography seeks to exorcize violence. I integrate abstraction and narrative, past and future, reality and unreality—a tapestry of lived experience and artistic transformation.