Sun arose for the 28th cycle

This month, I entered the 28th cycle of the sun. The year of 27th, I had a drastic change in my life. I encountered a new environment, people, responsibilities, and opportunities. It’s almost like the universe shifted underneath where I was standing. In the unknown current of the ocean, I was trying to find the calm wave to put myself together.

Entering 2024, There were many fresh experiences. I was fortunate to find the support and exciting opportunities. Started to feel the tide and let it flow inside of me.

In January, I performed my solo, “The Discipline Body” at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis. I was a part of the work-in-progress sharing called “Tiger Balm.” This was my first time sharing my work in the Minnesota dance community, which was super exciting! “The Discipline Body” examines how one’s culture shapes the body to regulate one’s behavior in public space. It is inspired by the Japanese educational system that teaches students to behave “appropriately.” This performance was an autobiographic reflection of unfolding the embodiment of the education system through my body. The great thing about the showing was the feedback session. I was able to hear from the audience their sensations and questions that arose from viewing.

This is the video recording from Tiger Balms (work-in-progress sharing) at Red Eye Theater, Minneapolis MN.

Another experience I valued was participating in the ACDA (American College Dance Alliance) in the North Central region. This year was held in St.Olf College. I taught Introduction to Dance Film, which introduces students to dance-making from different angles and viewpoints by using the camera. Instant composition was a fruitful experience to see students’ creativity and playfulness. Also, I brought my dance piece from the Fall Faculty Concert, “Can I See You on the Other Side.” Calling the lighting cue and watching my choreography from the lighting booth was a new experience for me. Overall, it was a great opportunity to introduce myself to the regional institutions, and seeing students learning, performing, and connecting with the dance community was a treat to me as a dance educator.

Concluding the academic year of 2023-2024, we had “Carmina Burana” to celebrate the new departure as the Performing Arts Department of Minnesota State University Mankato. “Carmina Burana” is composed by Carl Orff, inspired by Latin songs of the circle of life. We fused live dance, chorus, and orchestra. I participated in this huge production as a choreographer. Embodying the strong introduction of this opera was very exciting and scary at the same time. I normally don’t work with classical music, so generating the materials was based on the theme and story of the opera, which was a fun experience to collaborate with my talented students. Also, composing the movement ideas into the big casts was a good challenge for me. I had 19 casts in one section, and moving the stage with that amount of movers was spectacular. It was quite an experience to work with live musicians and singers as well as theater technicians to put on this production. I am looking forward to having more collaboration beyond the disciplines in the future.

Photo: Dan Norman

Without the huge wave hitting at me, I am centering myself during the summer. More fresh experiences to come in the future. To prepare for the new wave, I am practicing letting go of judgment, expectations, and assumptions, and starting the conversation with open-ended questions. How to allow myself to be always open and available to the world? This is a difficult task, but I would like to practice every day. I am welcoming the new circle of life.

Hoping everyone has a toasty and juicy July:)

That’s a wrap! The year of change, 2023

Dance film, Life logging, Performance

It’s already at the end the end of the year 2023. What a year of CHANGE! Since graduation, my life has hugely shifted. I felt like I almost lived two lives in a year, the first half as a graduate student and the other half as a dance faculty.

After I graduated from Ohio State University in May, I moved to Mankato, Minnesota, where I started as an assistant professor in Dance at the Department of Performing Arts. Learning new theater and dance department ecosystem, adjusting the new school schedule as a faculty, adopting the cold Minnesota weather… All happened in less than five months. It was a huge learning curve to be an instructor of college-level movement courses with various students, not only dance major students but also Theater students and dance minor students with different movement backgrounds. I aim to offer a class where students can feel safe to be curious, explore, and deeply listen to their bodies and internal desire to dance. Ultimately, I want my students to look forward to taking classes. I wanted to write it down here to remind myself of the future -Where I started and what dance educator I want to strive to become.

Photos from the Fall Dance Concert 2023

I also would like to mention some of the choreographic projects I participated in this year. I was honored to be chosen as a dance artist to perform outside of the school system. Yujie Chen and I performed “Motion of Seeing” at the Detroit Dance City Festival in September. This piece we created was the second iteration of “Body Negative” and it expanded the idea of mobility in seeing the performance. I also deepened my choreography to think about how BIPOC artists deal with cultural representation. We received the National Exchange Award. Even though I am still in search of my artistic voice, such rewarding to share and recognize dance works that My collaborator and I put the effort into.

Photos from the performance, “Motion of Seeing” at the Detroit Dance City Festival

Another chance that I could explore my artistry was through dance filmmaking. I was fortunate to be part of the project, Dance for Diversity. Dance for Diversity was founded by Elizabeth Roskph and envisioned to amplify visibility and create a platform for BIPOC Artists to center their unique voices and their stories through their art while fostering a place of belonging and reclamation of their true identities. I had the privilege to collaborate with the videographer, Rachel Malhorn. I had an idea of visualizing in-betweenness that I experienced as a first-generation immigrant. I wanted to showcase the acknowledging upbringing and how we adopted, changed, and merged our living experiences in different cultures to live in the U.S. For 4 months, we had great communication back and forth to discuss creative direction. We filmed all the materials in Milwaukee WI in 2 days and assembled the film. The level of understanding and trust made us create a dance film, 藍 (Ai).

Photos from Dance for Diversity, at the Film Series Premiere

I want to conclude this post with appreciation and hope. The job and many choreographic projects that I participated in were extensions of what have learned and inserted in working with during my graduate time. This year gave me confidence and autonomy in what I want to do. I hope to expand and grow more in 2024.

My Dance Film Journey

Dance film

< 22 shots >

It was a great practice for understanding the camera operation. The all angles are capturing exact the same movements yet, since I shot Ishy outside at the South Oval, I also noticed that how much lighting affected to the shots. Especially I enjoyed the editing aspect to create the whole choreography with only 2 movements. The limitation gave me a power of making something really pleasing. I had a clear understanding of the goal of this assignment and I felt succesful making 22 shots.

< Art Project>

This practice I really enjoyed it and I could say the film was successful to display my intention. The idea of 2D image into 3D creation is really captivating to me. The image I chose was black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams, but it also connected to my childhood memories. So, the image itself was still, no movement inspiration whatsoever, yet I had the words, nostalgia and tracing to my home is in my mind to create the film. I chose Katie O’Loughlin as a performer since she is amazing mover as well as bold to try new thing with me. In editing, I noticed that I tend to overuse the layers, though in this film, it really worked well to tell the doubles or past self in the frame.

<Final: Fish out of the water>

My initial plan was to portrait my personal experience as an outsider from own culture. I wanted to keep the term “Fish out of the water” as a metaphor. Yet, I had a challenging time finding the performer who can display the struggle within their own heritage and now. So, I changed my direction to go along with the term, “fish out of the water” and created the narrative with Jackie that she had a daydream at the aquarium AKA fish shop. In this film, I used all elements that I learned in this class such as angles, musicality, key frames to make smooth transitions. The thing I regret is the dancing part. I had Jackie against the wall with the projection, and I shot her with many angles in different level. However, it turned out the lines of the wall creates the frame inside the frame. The film itself was successful to the audience to have a clear storyline as well as I could use all the skills I learned in this class.

Dance Film I is one of the class I was excited to take in this semester. I was ready to dive in this class. At first, it was challenging due to all instruction and class time was online. I have only used iMovie so learning all the function that DaVinci Resolve have took time and many practices and fails. Although the speed of the class and video recordings helped me a lot to catch up. I watched couple times to fully understand the editing software. In terms of filming, I enjoyed a lot to find more perspectives by applying the angles, levels, the physical distance with the objects. I only used front view to record my dance work, but to allow myself to have cinematic approach, I saw more possibilities in film. Overall, I gain a confidence to say I have a fundamental knowledge of making film.

Where is your “home”?

Choreography Workshop, Dance film

In the beginning of the semester, I had many questions related to “home” such as what defined “home”? Is it the location like where I grew up? Or the people such as the dance community at Ohio State University? Or the memories in my brain? etc..

Wherever I go, I can make some place for myself to be comfortable. But this comfortableness is not necessarily defined as belongingness. In my definition of belongingness is inherent desire to be accepted by the community by behaving what they expect to. I always have hard time finding a place to land myself. In the Japanese community, I am an outsider. People my age graduated from college, have jobs, live nearby their parents, mostly staying inside their country for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, I live in the U.S. which far away from all of my family, and still a student. I clearly not on the same pathway as others. In the U.S., I am a minority due to my race and skin color. I have a neutral opinion about politic, or economy which seems like unusual in this country.

So I started looking for uncomfortableness from lacking belongingness in the physical body. I had the privilege to work with a talented dancer, Aya Venet. She is a sophomore at Ohio State University, also from Japan. She was born between the father who is African American and the mother who is Japanese.

We started to brainstorm what makes us hard to find the belongingness. We met once a week at the studio and built the narrative of the piece. She shared the story that in between of two location, Japan and the U.S., she is uncomfortable to be “her” due to the different expectations. Started with improvisation with the question, “if you are very uncomfortable, how do you move?”The movement was developed to embody her internal struggle.

I had her move inside the circle, which stands for a borderline from the place she is at. What I wanted to emphasize on the circle was that it was not her choice to be inside of it. The line was drawn by an unseen force, to categorize her as an outsider. The white line was inspired by field chalk at the elementary school playground. It is drawn clearly to stands out the separation, but the more you step on it, the more the line gets blurry. This applied to her circle, the more she steps on the line, the more she has access to the outside and merge to the inside. The line will dissolve and disappear. That is my goal in this piece. Showing her strength and able to erase the lines and step out the circle.

I planned to stage this piece as a film because I want to show the external factor, which affect her to struggle internally. I initially wanted to ask volunteers to walk around Aya, although due to the COVID-19, it was not a good time to ask this favor around. So I decided to overlay the video clips my friend took for me a year ago. They were taken at Shibuya crossing and Shibuya station which is well-known place for thousands of people passing every day. The clips was a symbol of the place where always required to catch up with the speed, and match with the expectation.

We searched the location and decided to shoot at The Oval. The red brick contrasted well with the white lines and I loved the background. To me, the two roads behind her were the two countries Aya grew up and came from to be who she is now. I did one take for drawing the circle as well as the ending part. Which made me worry that if I could take a good shot, but I trusted Aya and she performed beautifully. I hope everyone enjoys this short film. I would like to hear what you see and what you feel, and please share your thoughts on comment below!:)