LEIMAY Ensemble is a group of national and international dancers, performers, musicians and artists who create body-centered works around the principle of LUDUS, a practice that explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Founded in 2012 by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, the group took form through the creation of the Becoming Series pentalogy, of which three parts have been created: Becoming Corpus, borders, and Frantic Beauty (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2013-2017). Core members of the group hold a regular practice at their studio in Brooklyn, where they engage in the creation of new work in addition to teaching, training, research, and distillation of years of direct transmission of embodied knowledge by Japanese Butoh pioneers, Noguchi Taiso practitioners, and Experimental Theater innovators. Other members join as guest artists for specific projects. Additionally, some Ensemble members support LEIMAY via scenic and costume creation and through administrative and technical roles. The LEIMAY Ensemble and LEIMAY artistic collaborators have formed a constellation of creatives who develop deep connections with each other and with Ximena and Shige’s work.
Ensemble Members
Krystel Copper (Marketing Associate and LEIMAY Ensemble member) is a NYC based artist who has been a member of the LEIMAY Ensemble since 2016. She has been LEIMAY’s Marketing Associate since 2018, where she oversees content creation for the bi-weeky newsletter and interacts with all daily social media platforms. She holds a B.A. in Dance from the University of Maryland, where she graduated Cum Laude in 2010. Krystel has dramatically increased LEIMAY’s visibility over the past 5 years.
Masanori Asahara is a Japanese born dancer, choreographer, certified yoga teacher, and improvisation artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Masanori has been a core member of the LEIMAY Ensemble since 2010. Masanori teaches, performs, and contributes to the development of the LEIMAY Ludus practice. He is an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College and leads classes at LEIMAY’s studio, CAVE. As a company member, he has taught master classes and contributed to lecture demonstrations at MIT, the University of California Riverside, and the CUNY Graduate Center. Masanori has performed for sold-out houses in works such as Becoming- Corpus, borders, and Frantic … Continued
Shige Moriya is an installation and video artist, and the founder and Artistic Director of the CAVE, a multimedia performance space, gallery and artist in residence space in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY. Shige mixes live feed video with pre-edited materials and projects the images into sculpture constructed of layers of thin translucent screens. Shige invites audience and performer to enter the sculpture and discover further abstractions of a stretched two dimensional space. Video-installation artist and curator, Shige Moriya (born in Kyoto, Japan) has been in New York since 1993. He first worked as an exhibition curator in Soho, but in 1996 … Continued
Ensemble Guests & Former Ensemble Members
Other Collaborators