LADP PRESENTS: WALL—BODY
L.A. Dance Project
2245 E. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Saturday, May 16, 2026 | 8:00PM
Sunday, May 17, 2026 | 7:00PM
Tickets:
$35 | General Admission
$26 | LADP Friend Membership Level (with code)
LADP Presents | WALL—BODY
WALL—BODY brings together choreographer Shu Kinouchi and designer Hiroshi Kaneko in a performance that examines how walls shape the body’s relationship to space. The work assembles inanimate objects into an ensemble in dialogue with Kinouchi’s solo choreography.
Twelve movable ten‑foot walls and a tower create shifting conditions that test the endurance of the body and its desire for change. The performance approaches the intimacies of shelter, division, obstruction, and transgression through gestures of vulnerability, resistance, and care. The work emerges from an extended exchange of drawings, dances, models, and conversations, bringing architecture and choreography into a shared creative process.
WALL—BODY invites audiences to consider how we navigate the structures that surround us.
WALL—BODY was developed and produced by L.A. Dance Project through its programming arm, LADP Presents, with funding from Charlene Achki‑Repko, Susan Baumgarten, Robert Braun & Joan Friedman, Susan Friedman, Jane Jelenko, Michael & Aliza Lesser, David Totheroh, and Sue Tsao.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Shu Kinouchi is a Japanese dancer and choreographer whose work moves between performance, theater, and installation. Through choreographic installations, he uses objects, repetition, and spatial systems to explore support, intimacy, and human disconnection.
Based in Los Angeles, Kinouchi has performed with L.A. Dance Project since 2020, and previously with Houston Ballet and Tulsa Ballet. He trained at Hamburg Ballet School and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre.
Alongside his performance career, he creates choreographic works that treat objects not as props but as partners, witnesses, or structures that shape behavior. His process often begins with extended physical research with materials such as chairs or walls, then develops through repetition, tableaux, and movement tasks into live performance environments.
His recent projects include Shu Loves Chairs, a solo work about support created in collaboration with Waka Waka, and WALL—BODY, a choreographic installation with architect Hiroshi Kaneko that examines how walls organize relationships through confrontation, enclosure, incarceration, and transgression. Across his work, Kinouchi studies longing, habit, and the quiet force of inanimate things, creating performances in which choreography becomes a way to observe the systems bodies live inside.
Hiroshi Kaneko is a designer, educator, and researcher whose work spans architecture, interiors, sets, and text. Hiroshi is a partner at KANEKOWINSTON, a design office based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that focuses on architecture, and is an instructor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, where he teaches design studios exploring material construction, perception, and tectonics.
His interdisciplinary practice is grounded in drawing and model making as tools to examine how built environments shape—and are shaped by—the body.
His current projects include two renovation projects, in San Francisco and New York City, and a text on color, in addition to his ongoing collaboration with Shu Kinouchi on WALL—BODY and Shu Loves Chairs.
Image Credit: Hope Spears, 2025.