The Only Male Geisha

Hello everybody :) 
We are Hans Diernberger and Will Saunders, two artists from Cologne and London.  We have both studied art extensively and are now working as self employed artists. For our next big project, we'd be thrilled if you'd take a short moment to learn more about it, and maybe, if you like, support us. 

Since 2016, we are working on our project about Japan's only male geisha, Eitaro.

This is Eitaro. He works as a professional geisha in Tokyo.

In many ways, he fascinates us.  Not only is he doing a perfect job as a geisha, he also shows us that a traditionally female occupation can be done by someone of another gender without jeopardising the beautiful tradition of geisha culture in Japan. (Funnily enough, the geisha culture started with male geishas, though wearing male dresses. Eitaro looks and dresses like a female geisha). The result: It doesn't matter if there's a woman or a man working as a geisha. What matters is the perfection of a profession.



In April this year, we have the great opportunity to travel to Japan, to be able to work with him and develop artworks around his persona and his great influence as a person free of a gender boundary. 
Later, in September, we will show the results of that time and our artworks in an exhibition in Cologne. 

For both, our time in Japan and our exhibition in Cologne, we are depending on funding from outside. Luckily, we already have some funding from Germany and England that cover our basic costs for:
flights, rent, wages, translators, hospitality gifts, subway travel and rent. 

What we would still need money for is:
- being able to rent special equipment
- being able to rent more interesting locations
- being able to work more days with Eitaro
- producing a small documentary film about him
- covering additional fees
- being able to afford extra travel to see special locations
- production costs of our artworks for the show
- developing a catalogue for our exhibition and
- hopefully (if we are able to make enough money) being able to invite Eitaro and one of his musicians to Europe. It would be an absolute dream for us to organise an event for and about him in his presence. 

We strongly believe that the people who are really benefitting from this campaign are the visitors of our show, everyone who likes to see more about the only male geisha in Japan and people being interested in art in general. We are so humbled and happy to being able to travel to Japan, even if it means we will work for free on pretty much all the content being produced for this project. 

We decided to become artists that constantly work for free in order to give something exciting and special back to this world, because we believe in the importance of art and a creative production of humans. However, having no regular income is quite a huge task and we constantly have to fight. 

With your help, we can realise our project on a larger scale, allow us to do things that we couldn't do alone. 
You won't be sponsoring us more expensive sushi or a fancy hotel room, but you will be enabling us to do a better project with a much more interesting outcome.

(We are very happy to live in that old sumo house for sumo-scholars and their masters, that now hosts artist studios)

Thank you so much! 

Hans and Will