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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 an assistant artistic director of dance-theater company PROJECT/TAG .
She has had opportunities to present her self-choreographed solos 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 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 simply for being born. I began creating choreographic works as a teenager, searching for a space to reconcile with my own chaotic self.
From those early years, my work has focused on violence: domestic, psychological, and systemic. And the way it circulates within families, communities, and nations. I examine how war enters the home, how trauma mutates across generations, and how power reproduces harm even in the name of care or justice.
My process resists conventional dance vocabulary. I seek raw expression, unexpected physicality, and striking surrealistic 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, and create a tapestry of lived experience and artistic transformation.
Entomology and Creation
My curiosity and love extends beyond the human body into the lives of non-human creatures.
Insects, our planet’s most diverse animal group, represent more than half of all known organisms. Over a million species have been described, and an estimated six to ten million may exist, undiscovered. Their ecosystems and behaviors are intricate, efficient, and astonishingly organized.
Studying entomology at university allowed me to spend years researching insect biology: bizarre anatomies built for specific purposes, individual bodies functioning within tightly woven social structures, and ecosystems sustained through an economy of instinct, mutation, and necessity.
Their existence challenges the ethical frameworks, values, and regulations that humans consider absolute. This tension pushes me to reimagine movement, relationships and stories through a lens unbound by human norms.
By observing and researching those fascinating creatures, I explore ambiguity in human certainty.
One of my favorite biologists once wrote:
“Complete metamorphosis in insects is a form of parasitism. When a larva becomes a pupa, its body dissolves into a soupy liquid, then re-forms into an adult with a completely different shape. Rather than a single creature growing up, it may be more accurate to think of the adult as a separate being parasitizing the larva, using it as nourishment to be born anew.”
This idea opened a fault line in my imagination. We humans are fixated on interpreting the world through our own rules, our standards, our justice, our truth. But when that fixation is stripped away, we recognize that one person’s justice may be a destruction to others.
This realization forms one of the core statements of my creative work.