Stage and
Costume Design / Performance
ART OF TIME
I design and create stage and costume designs and also perform myself. I am particularly interested in the interaction between human bodies and objects, and in the mutual influences that emerge from these encounters—generating new inspirations and processes shaped by chance.
Costume Sketches / Set Design Concepts for the dance piece Romeos & Julias Unplagued
2021
Choreography: Yoshiko Waki
Dramaturgy: Rolf Baumgart
Stage and Costume Design: Nanako Oizumi
Polish Dance Theater (Poznań, Poland)
The dance piece Romeos & Julias Unplagued (2021), a co-production between the Polish dance company Polski Teatr Tańca and the Münster-based group bodytalk, explores the longing for freedom during a time marked by the restrictions of the pandemic.
Inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which two young people struggle with love and freedom against inevitable fate and violence, the piece reimagines the story through multiple Juliets and Romeos, as well as a range of imaginative figures.
Costume Sketch for Scene Nature
Costume Sketches for the Masked Ball Scene
Scaffolding "Freiheit-Booth"
Set Element Designs – The Seventh Brother or the Heart in the Jam Jar
2023
Direction: Lukas T. Goldbach
Stage and Costume Design: Nanako Oizumi
Landestheater Tübingen
The play The Seventh Brother or the Heart in the Jam Jar is based on the graphic novel of the same name by the Danish author Øyvind Torseter.
The stage design drew on the distinctive aesthetic of the graphic novel and was conceived to create a unique sense of dynamic through movable and rotatable elements, allowing the performers to continuously reshape the stage environment.
The piece begins in a living room, from which three performers generate new scenes, transforming themselves into characters such as an evil troll, a mad princess, or a courageous hero.
Stage and Costume Design Concepts for the music theatre piece When We Didn’t Know Who We Were
2025
Direction and Video: Jens Bluhm
Stage and Costume Design: Nanako Oizumi
Staatstheater Wiesbaden
When We Didn’t Know Who We Were is a music theatre piece for two performers and two musicians. It explores themes of human loneliness, hostility, and memory.
Two protagonists—a child and an elderly woman—reflect on how the human mind changes through dementia. They ask how one can resist forgetting, or how one can believe in friendship when it is clear that the other will forget you almost immediately.
A central element of the stage is a large tree reminiscent of human nerve cells. Numerous notes hang from its branches—like a tree of wishes, but also as fragments of memory that can be revisited and remembered again and again.
Model
Image of the Element "Tree"
Zeichnung "Baum"
Photo: Laura Nickel
Set Design Concept for the Bürgeroper Who Cares?
2025
Musical Direction: Ruth Katharina Peeck
Direction and Video: Mirjam Schmuck
Stage and Costume Design: Nanako Oizumi
Composition: Marc L. Vogler
Libretto: kainkollektiv
Oper Dortmund
Who Cares? is a participatory opera production that explores the theme of care work, drawing on the myth of the Greek goddess Cura—the goddess of care.
The Bochum-based artist duo kainkollektiv wrote the libretto, which is based on interviews with members of the community choir, many of whom are women over the age of 50. Their experiences of care work, raising children, and caring for relatives are accompanied by the multifaceted music of composer Marc L. Vogler.
The choir embodies the goddess Cura, while the humans she creates are represented by a multitude of mannequins. These figures are fragile and unwieldy; they are carried and tended to by the choir on their endless journey between the universe and the earth.
Photo: Björn Hickmann, Nanako Oizumi
Performance and Design
Host Club
Choreography: Yoshiko Waki
Performance: Bartosz Przybylski, German Hipolito Farias, Martijn Joling, Paweł Malicki, Tirza Naomi Ben Zvi, Yasin Wörheide, Timo von der Horst, Roman Podeszwa, Vincent Loth, Nanako Oizumi, Momoko Baumgart, Mareike Fiege
Set Design: Yasin Wörheide, Nanako Oizumi
Costume Design: Nanako Oizumi
Host Club is a successful business model from Japan: attractive men entertain and attend to female guests. Its strategy is to make the audience emotionally dependent.
Success is measured in revenue—both that of the guest and that of the host.
What can we, as artists, learn from this? We reinterpret participation as ‘party-cipation,’ and the happening as a ‘happening’ of joy.
Photo: Borna Julaie, Klaus Dilger, Nanako Oizumi
