Respira

You have never seen or heard a performance quite like Respira, which the celebrated sound artist Yuka Honda and the Butoh dancer azumi O E unveiled at New York’s ISSUE Project Room in April 2025. The show starts in near-complete darkness, Honda lit only by the glow of the electronics scattered before her and a corona of bulbs tracing her skull. The sounds slowly build, a collage of circular drums and sighing circuits moving outward like deep exhalations. azumi is steadily revealed as the sound rises, the blue bulbs atop her head offering a glimpse of her patient motion as the theater’s lights rise to show her shaking off a full-body veil of lace. As drums and bells dance around groans that suggest two tectonic plates meeting, azumi moves in methodical stutters, as if being born from the universe’s very ether. Chaotic and precise, patient and sudden, Respira suggests its own creation myth, light rising from the absolute dark.Born in Tokyo, Honda has been a hub of creative activity in New York for nearly 40 years, from her wild and effervescent band Cibo Matto to her works as CUP alongside husband Nels Cline. She has made records with Martha Wainwright and Sean Lennon and, under the name Eucademix, recently became a conduit of psychedelic electronic abstraction. azumi, meanwhile, was born in Kyoto. After relocating to New York, she worked for nearly a decade with the Vangeline Theatre. In Respira, their second collaboration, Waldo Walle offers ingenious lighting design.