Reina Takeuchi

Reina Takeuchi is an Australian-Japanese artist-researcher, dance maker and curator interested in cross-cultural exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration. Reina explores how sensorial experience can be enhanced through ritualistic performance, interactive installations and time based media. Her work utilises choreographic processes and the transitory qualities of sound and action to meditate on human existence, transculturation, displacement, diaspora and the ethereal experiences of her peripatetic upbringing across East Asia and Southeast Asia. These processes allow for a clarity of somatic contemplation for the artist and she explores the potential for this sensitivity to be shared with the viewer. Her practice spans across visual arts, choreography, curatorial projects, written publications and creative facilitation.  

Her performance projects have included installations at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, and SomoS Arts, Berlin, and performances for Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Performance Space, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Late program, Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Pier 2/3 and Sydney Dance Company. Reina has worked with numerous Australian and international choreographers including Sue Healey, Idan Cohen, Leah Marojević, Meryl Tankard and Vicki Van Hout. Her facilitation practice includes teaching at the Sydney Opera House with Charemaine Seet, offering new choreographic methods to young dancers. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Creative Practice from Queensland University of Technology (2020) and an Advanced Diploma from Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year (2019). Her PhD research project Countermoves of the Transcultural has been focusing on Asian Australian performance and she currently works with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, a not-for-profit arts organisation that pioneers work from the Asian Australian diaspora, as Curatorial Program Producer. In June/July 2024, Reina was in residence at Murasaki Penguin Project Totsuka, a new performing and multimedia arts space in Totsuka, Yokohama, Japan before performing in the first Australian presentation of Club Origami, an immersive and interactive dance show for all ages at Sydney Dance Company by Makiko Aoyama, Robert Howat and Takeshi Matsumoto. Her most recent co-directed show Ghosts Between Streams (2024) was awarded highly in two categories at Sydney Fringe Festival – Best in Dance and Music.

Listen to Wombat Radio podcast between Matt Cornell and Reina Takeuchi here.