Umi Ishihara’s solo exhibition Nocturnal Melody, her first in Europe, follows with a curious ambivalence the lives and ambitions of two dancers in a Shibuya gentleman’s club, inviting viewers into Tokyo’s seedy alternative nightlife scene. Across two galleries, Ishihara builds a colourful, kaleidoscopic account of this nocturnal world. She intersperses documentary footage with direct camera addresses by the film’s participants, voyeuristic night-vision clips, and theatrical scenes in which semi-bestial women roam the city in packs as if stalking prey.
The near-complete darkness of the gallery space, lit only by the dim purple glow of a UV strip tucked into a far corner of the second room, suitably emulates the disorienting sensory environment of a nightclub. Playing in the first room is the titular film Nocturnal Melody, in which Ishihara immerses herself in the hedonistic worlds of Eri and Catalina, two dancers at Madam Woo’s gentleman’s club. The film challenges and problematises conceptions of agency, performativity, and shame by interrogating the position and complacency of its viewership. Ishihara questions what enables this industry to proliferate in a society that outwardly shuns women for their sexuality, thus highlighting the contradiction that underlies much of her nuanced enquiry.
The opening narration resoundingly asserts, “This is our story,” indicating the subjects’ perceived agency in the narrative of the film. But by weaving together the girls’ vibrant activities with static, unpeopled scenes of Tokyo at night – eerily empty bars, deserted streets – Ishihara reveals herself to be the decisive force in this story, acting as an interlocutor with and narrator of the fringe existence of the dancers whilst remaining decisively outside of their world. Her narration tells us that, upon taking an interest in the lives of dancers, she first entered the club as a client, soliciting the services of Eri. Here is revealed one of the film’s central conflicts: Ishihara, in her role as filmmaker, does not simply act as a neutral mouthpiece for the girls’ stories, but becomes in some ways a voyeur, perpetuating the imbalance of this dynamic.
Throughout the film, set to upbeat techno music, there are scenes of Catalina, Eri, and their friends dancing on stages in tiny bikinis, in front of audiences large and small, and performing directly for the camera, all with apparent energy and enthusiasm. In her interview-to-camera, Eri tells the audience that she sees herself as an artist, that she wants to be memorialised in textbooks. But positioned against this context of excessive partying, drinking to inebriation, even run-ins with the law, the audience is invited to question both the sincerity and viability of this ambition within the constraints of her current lifestyle. Most ironically, perhaps, Eri declares her desire to “survive on her own without depending on men”.
Though their largely male clientele is rarely pictured on screen, their presence is tacitly suggested. A quick shot of a male hand discreetly pointing a camera flash upwards, and the cuts to parties rendered in monochromatic night-vision seem to suggest an element of voyeurism, of only partial control. In positioning both herself and the audience alongside these insidious spectators, Ishihara blurs the boundaries between ‘safe’, artistic viewership and the more sinister, self-gratifying type that Madam Woo’s is designed for. Furthermore, alongside the scantily dressed female dancers gyrating on the stage at Madam Woo’s are fully clothed male performers, rapping to forceful hip hop beats about their insatiable sexual appetites. This stark image of gendered roles within the gentleman’s club undermines its purported existence outside of quotidian morality; instead, it enforces and, in many ways, magnifies the societal codes and conventions that have become so naturalised in day-to-day life. Without being didactic, Ishihara calls into question the level of agency afforded to these female performers, who can only make their living in minimal clothing, whilst their male counterparts are not required to use their bodies to the same effect.
In the second room, crisp prop money litters the floor as Nocturnal Breath plays, a shorter film in which a pack of the same bestial women with yellow eyes and long claws dance provocatively in an empty bar, their movements erratic and unrestrained. Similar scenes of these hybrid creatures are scattered throughout Nocturnal Melody, and at one point a monologue in the register of a newsreel PSA cautions Tokyo’s residents against venturing outside when night falls. The city after dark belongs to the dancers, thus taking on a simultaneously threatening and alluring character. The money underfoot acts as a tangible reminder of the system that implicitly invites and encourages the women’s uninhibited, deviant behaviour, complicating the notion of total, untethered agency. Despite the visual texture these scenes bring to the exhibition, I found them to notably weaken the compellingly honest portraits of Eri and Catalina that Ishihara draws out in Nocturnal Melody, reducing the women, even if satirically, to their supposedly animalistic and unbridled sexual urges. In fact, we come to understand that, however their work may be received, they see dancing as a form of self-expression and display of bodily autonomy.
Whilst the words ‘feminism’ and ‘liberation’ are notably absent from the film’s dialogue, they are certainly not unaccounted for. Ishihara’s exhibition does not perform a moralising function, in that it does not attempt to either condemn or celebrate the alternative lifestyles it showcases. However, through her sensitive approach, she invokes empathy and tentative curiosity in a viewer that serve to break down perceived divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Left open for reflection is the role, both positive and negative, that such underground subculture spaces play in our divided societies. Whilst dancing is not a means to women’s emancipation in itself, it offers an environment in which the dancers can exploit gender disparity for their personal gain. In Nocturnal Melody, Ishihara allows viewers a glimpse into a colourful, hidden world that, despite its shortfalls, girls like Eri and Catalina can find solace and stability in.
Nocturnal Melody is on show at Gasworks until 22nd March 2026. To find out more, visit the show webpage here.
Images: Nocturnal Melody (2026) © Umi Ishihara.
