For years, the Seattle performance group Degenerate Art Ensemble has been refining a performance piece called Anima Mundi, which is about the disconnect between humanity and nature. The group presented the first part of their work in development, Anima Mundi: Chapter 1: Amnesia, at the Seattle International Dance Festival in 2023. (It had previously been staged in New York in 2021).
Since then, Degenerate Art Ensemble has continued fleshing out Anima Mundi, and now, the World Premiere of the full piece is coming to the Moore Theatre in Seattle on February 14, 2026.
Inspired by the Japanese cultural emphasis on creating reciprocal relationships with nature, the piece examines the ways “our society’s devaluation of sensorial experience contributes to a compromised relationship with the environment, causing us alienation, depression and conflict, depriving us of the full mystery that it is to be a human animal,” according to Haruko “Crow” Nishimura, a member of Degenerate Art Ensemble.
As both director and choreographer, Nishimura draws upon the Japanese Butoh dance form and the Noguchi Taiso movement practice, which centers gravity, fluidity, and physical memory. “This defies our cultural tendency to de-animate the world around us, alienating us from our surroundings,” Nishimura said. “Feminine energy is a great source of creative inspiration in its embrace of mending, healing, reciprocity, and maintenance, and the energies of Japanese female ghosts, supernatural beings, and shape shifters strive to reveal hidden truths.”
Incorporating objects and technology into the performance, Nishimura aims to reanimate the world.
Of the many elements accumulated into Anima Mundi over the years, one stands out. Degenerate Art Ensemble created a sculpture resembling an animal crate, and during the performance, video imagery is mapped onto it, interacting with a dancing body. “The content of the video was taken at two farm animal sanctuaries in Washington, Ballydidean Sanctuary on Whidbey Island and the Sammamish Animal Sanctuary,” Nishimura said. “We were able to take footage of joyous animals that have been healed, nurtured, and resuscitated from abusive factory farming practices.”
In this sense, Degenerate Art Ensemble is using technology to highlight tech culture’s own pitfalls. “AI is promising to do everything for us, to drive for us, to think for us, to speak for us, and express for us, and we seem to become more detached from our physical bodies and senses,” Nishimura observed. “In our cocoon of technology, we are able to ignore the truth and find non-truths that we want to hear as our truth.”
These non-truths are what Nishimura and Kohl describe as our current society’s sensorially-compromised, distracted, and human-centric perspective that, they say, creates an amnesia about the fact that humans are still animals. “We feel joy and exuberance when we honor our animal senses,” Nishimura enthused,“ and even feel the joy of interconnectedness at times, and the deep knowing of interdependency that ultimately reminds us that we are not alone in this planet, or biosphere, of Mother Earth.” To create this joy, the Degenerate Art Ensemble team delves into visual cues, physical energy, and cultural ritual to create a live theatre experience.
Through Anima Mundi, Degenerate Art Ensemble became a finalist for the 2025 National Dance Project Grant Award. “It was a serious challenge, how to communicate the ideas behind the dance work,” Nishimura said; the grant application required both a performance video and an extensive written proposal.
But Nishimura and Kohl couldn’t do the work alone. Collaborators include, among many others, Japanese American musician and percussionist Mako Kikuchi, video artist Leo Mayberry, interdisciplinary artist and ballet dancer Ezra Dickinson, and poet, writer, and KUOW podcaster Shin Yu Pai. Pai contributed to the piece’s conceptualization, as well as contributing lyrics, vocals, and a cameo presence in the film.
And this World Premiere isn’t the final destination for this piece. Later this year, in August, Degenerate Art Ensemble will share Anima Mundi in two far-flung places: Port Townsend, Washington, at the Salish Sea Butoh Festival, and at the MikuLove Festival in Mikulov, Czech Republic.
Anima Mundi will be presented on February 14 at the Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Avenue, Seattle.
