Show Me What You Got: How We Ended Up Sponsoring Edamovement Lab

This one started as a joke at somebody else's event.

In December we sponsored Samurai Sword Soul's twentieth anniversary run. Fuka was there helping out. At some point she worked out that we were one of the sponsors, and she said, more or less, that we should sponsor her too.

I said: show me what you got.

Who She Is

Fuka Kojima is one of three founders of Edamovement Lab, along with Tamaki Horibe and Ryoka Matsumoto. They started it in 2024, all of them young Japanese artists working in New York.

What they do is take Japanese stories and put them into movement. Their own framing is about crossing language and culture, and it works because you do not need any Japanese to follow it. There is barely any dialogue.

Their debut was The Seven Gods, at RESOBOX in the East Village in April 2025. It is built on the Shichifukujin, the Seven Lucky Gods, and it is about morality and choice and fate, told almost entirely through bodies.

They have since performed all over the city, including at Japan Fes.

Then She Showed Me What She Had

After the samurai run we worked the same event together, and she invited me to Edamovement's anniversary show.

So I went.

It was a lot of fun. That is not a sophisticated review and I am not going to dress it up into one. I sat there and enjoyed myself, and somewhere in the middle of it I thought: this is a thing I could get behind.

That is the entire evaluation process. I do not have a grants committee. I have an evening free and an opinion afterwards.

What Came Of It

We started sponsoring, and then we started collaborating, and we got to do several genuinely good events together.

This is the part I keep noticing about the way this restaurant ends up involved in things. It almost never starts with a proposal. It starts with somebody who is already in the room, doing something, and a conversation that goes further than either of us expected when it began.

Fuka joked about it. She then backed it up, which is the part that matters.

She Went Home

Fuka has gone back to Japan.

That is how it goes with a lot of the artists who pass through here. New York holds people for a while and then it does not, and the ones who leave usually leave for good reasons.

We are looking forward to working together again when she is back.

Go And Watch Them

Edamovement Lab is still going, and they are worth your evening. Their links are here, and they post what is coming up on Instagram.

If you go to one of their shows and enjoy it, tell them. Small collectives run on that more than anyone admits.

More of the people we work with.