Play Modulor

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2025 / Theatre Tram (Tokyo)

Play Modulor is a lecture performance work that critically re-examines how the human body has been standardized under the logic of technology and rational design.

Taking as its point of departure the “Modulor” — an architectural scale system proposed by Le Corbusier based on the golden ratio and the male body — the work interrogates how architecture and visual media have historically framed and optimized the body into a supposedly ideal form.

Focusing on what resists measurement — bodily depth, gravitational perception, asymmetry, and sensory deviation — the performance crosses between lecture, drawing, physical improvisation, spatial diagrams, and video projection. Through this layering, it foregrounds the tension between the designed body and the unruly, felt body that eludes standardization.

The work also addresses the contemporary condition in which the body becomes a site of cognitive warfare — where perception, recognition, and identity are shaped and manipulated within information environments. Referencing the impact of deepfake technologies and other algorithmic visual systems, the piece asks: Who defines what is seen? What architectures — visual or spatial — shape our bodily image?

Play Modulor unfolds as a lecture, a ritual, and a resistance — exposing how our bodies are not only measured by space, but also constantly constructed and contested within systems of visibility.

Direction, Choreography: Saori Hala

Performance: Saori Hala