Cassie & Rosey : Yukawa-Chan Piano Duo

A partnership in love with music, film, dance, art, sushi, architecture, photography & small creatures – Cassie Yukawa & Rosey Chan have surrendered themselves to the infinite mystery and ridiculously beautiful simplicity of 176 (which is no longer the bus route home) but the number of black and white keys their 20 fingers demand to use as their dance floor.
The Duo spend most of their waking moments finding new ways of weaving their finger dances together, and have a particular excitement for living composers. Always on the look out for new forms of shaking their knuckle-booty, they were breathtakingly stunned when Michael Nyman invited them to record a whole album with him. They have performed in KL, to the King of Malaysia, the Mozart Concerto for 2 Pianos at the launch of a brand new orchestra in London & Wales, performed in a sparkly light display at the George V in Paris and learnt that it’s really important to moisturize hands after really hyper finger dances.
Cassie & Rosey were invited by the British Council to play at the gorgeous L’Auditori in Barcelona where they premiered Phillip Neil Martin’s “Clocked”. They laughed so much they cried whilst touring Ireland to celebrate Mozart’s 250th birthday and made their USA debut at the “Music Festival of the Hamptons” in July ’06 where they received the ‘Tiffany & Co. Rising Star Award’ where their finger dances included Gershwin, Rachmaninov, Lutoslawski. They made it to the other side of the road after years of gazing out of their conservatoire window for many years at the Royal Albert Hall in London when they performed there in March ‘05.
Some of their favourite dances have been at the Wigmore Hall where Louis Andriessen’s “Hague Hacking” was premiered and the following year they returned with Liszt, Piazzolla and Takemitsu. It was weird and amazing to watch their own finger dances when Mike Figgis created a film featuring Cassie & Rosey and a dancer from the Frankfurt ballet all projected on the biggest screen they’d ever seen bang in the middle of Trafalgar Sq, London as part of the London Film Festival. Wow, how they had that recurring dream of Ligeti cross rhythms morphing into Jamie Lidell leading up to their debut at the Purcell Room, South Bank centre in January ’05 where they had so much fun, they realized they simply could not have more fun finger dancing elsewhere and that 176 was their new favourite number.