Oct 11, 2008

INTERNATIONAL Herald Tribune/The Asahi Shimbun

The performance "IZU HOUSE" is appeared on the article of Weekend|
arts & MORE, INTERNATIONAL Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun on October 10, 2008.
This article is also on the following web page of The Asahi Shimbun;
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200810100054.html

"Izu House" creative process #01, 2007


October, 2007
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Views of Chihan-an, Kano-gawa, Joh-yama


October, 2007
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Leah Stein

Leah Stein comments about site specific.

October 19, 2007
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Roko Kawai

Roko Kawai comments about Chihan-an and herself.

October 17, 2007
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Roko Kawai (dancer/choreographer and project leader)


Roko Kawai investigates the relationship between the specificity of traditional dance and the craft of improvisation. Her work includes international collaborations in Bali, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Japan, and she has performed nationally in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Hawaii, New York, Chicago, at the Florida Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out. Roko has been supported by the Artists Exploration Fund of Arts International, Dance Advance, Independence Foundation, the PA Council on the Arts, DanceLINK, and others. In 2003, she was awarded The Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography and, in 2005, a 7-month Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship in Tokyo during which she trained in Classical Japanese Dance with Hanayagi Kazu, and pursued artistic research on the contemporary dance scene in Japan as well as on kagura in Shimane prefecture. This Fall, she performed as part of the Philadelphia cast in Jerome Bel's The show must go on at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. She is also currently working on a writing project, an 'Artist's Workbook' to be published on the web, that reflects upon issues of “categorizations and collisions,” “belonging and longing,” in the 15 year arc of her career.
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Leah Stein (dancer/choreographer)


Leah Stein has been living and making dances in Philadelphia since 1987. She has created dances on site and on stage in Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Romania, Japan and Scotland. She founded the Leah Stein Dance Company in 2001 and in 2004 established a program for annual local on site performance projects called “On Site Philadelphia”. In 2007 she collaborated on a film documenting the making of GATE, a seminal site work at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia. She has been awarded grants from Dance Advance, the Leeway Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts including three Fellowships in Choreography.She has been in residence at Yellow Springs Art Institute, the American Dance Festival and Djerassi Resident Artist Program in California where she received an honorary award for her work “Barn Dance”. In 2001, Stein was awarded a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland for In Situ. Stein has collaborated with dancer/choreographers Sean Feldman, Roko Kawai and Gus Solomons jr, sculptors Jeanne Jaffe and Edward Dormer, poet Josie Foo, and composers/musicians Pauline Oliveros, Robert Maggio, Mark Weber, David Forlano, Dave Burrell and Dan Peterson. She has been collaborating with percussionist Toshi Makihara since 1989. She currently teaches at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges. http://www.leahsteindance.org
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Hideo Arai (movement artist)


Hideo Arai was trained by the well-known Japanese movement and body expert Michizo Noguchi in whose technique he is ceritfied. Noguchi taught Hideo how to artistically express his unique dance impulses through efficient body kinesthetics. Hideo also learned how to link his personal artistic yearnings with the greater surrounding forces of nature. Taking place in temples, shrines, fields and streets,
Hideo’s work may be accompanied by live musicians and variously concocted sets, or they may occur in complete silence, punctuated only by ambient noise and wild grasses. His dance is intensely shamanistic yet playfully light. In 1997, Hideo created the dance project-office KARADAKARA, joining two Japanese words, “body” (karada) and “therefore” (dakara). Hideo has performed throughout Japan and in Canada, Hungary, Malaysia, Germany and Austria. Hideo has done extensive field work in Japanese folklore, traveling throughout the countrysides of Japan to learn about folktales, beliefs, festivals and language. He is also a big fan of “Rakugo,” the traditional form of one-man comedy. http://www.h2.dion.ne.jp/~hideo-a/
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Mika Kimula (vocalist)


Mika Kimula has a keen interest in the use of voice and Japanese language in contemporary theater and music. She majored in voice at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. She has also studied with Michizo Noguchi, the founder of Noguchi Taiso (body training), in exploring how language is affected by the voice and one’s inner image, and with Dr. Shigeo Miki, M.D. to investigate “life morphology” (how live beings respond to the voice). In1997-98, Mika was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to travel to the United States. Presently, Mika performs, records, teaches, writes and gives workshops throughout Japan and internationally. Most recently, she is featured in the book/DVD, “Japanese Voice —A Video Archive of Singing and Techniques in the Japanese Language” (compiled by I. Nakayama, Osaka Univ. of Arts, AD POPOLO Inc., 2008 http://www.geocities.co.jp/nihonngo2002inkym/DVD/), for which she has also translated an English supplement with explanatory notes on 79 singers from 32 genres.
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Toshi Makihara (percussionist)


Toshi Makihara studied drums, percussion and improvisation with Sabu Toyozumi, a prominent percussionist in Tokyo. Since arriving in the United States, he has worked with various new music ensembles as well as with numerous dance and theater companies internationally. Makihara has provided original music to Arden Theater Company, Diversions Dance Company (Wales), Pennsylvania Ballet, ZeroMoving Dance Company, Merian Soto / Performance Practice and Leah Stein Dance Company, and has worked with musicians including Steve Beresford, Peter Brotzmann, John Butcher, Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, Amy Denio, Thurston Moore, William Parker and John Zorn. He has also collaborated with poets, visual artists, filmmakers and performance artists widely.

Makihara's recordings include Grammy nominated "Another Shining Path" (1998 Drimala Records) in trio with Gary Hassay (alto saxophone) and William Parker (bass), and "Hurricane Floyd" (Spring 2000, Sublingual Records) in trio with Thurston Moore (guitar) and Wally Shoup (alto sax).
http://www.toshimakihara.com
photo: courtesy of Toshi Makihara

Nobuko Awaya (Izu House owner)


Nobuko Awaya is a professor of Intercultural Communications with a special interest in gender issues and media at Shoin University, Japan. She has also served as co-chair of the Research Organization for Asian American Experience since 2000, and she is a freelance journalist/author. Nobuko introduced "men's issues" (vs. “women's” issues) in Japan and translated Shy-Man Syndrome, by Dr. Brian Gilmartin in 1990. Using a cross-cultural framework, she has interviewed visual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, cellist Yoyo Ma, and actor John Lone, and has written articles on Bruce Lee and Gordon Hirabayashi. Since 2004, the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science has included her essays in public high school textbooks. Other publications include: “Onna Kodomo Ga Nihon o Kaeru (Women and Children Change Japan)” 1991 PHP, “Re-Imaging Japanese Women”1996 UC Berkley Press, “Nigeru Otoko” (The Man Who Runs Away) 2000 Kosai-do Press, “Hataraku Sorezore No Riyu” (Myriad Reasons to Work) 2005 Nikkei Home Shuppan. She is a descendant of 450 years of the Suganuma family in Izu, Japan. http://home.c04.itscom.net/a-no/
© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

IZU HOUSE


Last fall, Philadelphia-based dancer/choreographers Roko Kawai and Leah Stein began collaboration with Tokyo-based movement artist Hideo Arai and vocalist Mika Kimula on a site-specific dancework at Chihan-an, a 200-year-old traditional home located two hours south of Tokyo on the Izu Peninsula. “Site-specific” refers to a work that is created in and for a particular place, connecting with its sights, sounds and stories as a partner to the creative process. In site-specific dance, the audience and performers often travel through the site and become a “part of” rather than “apart from” the performance. This fall, with the addition of Philadelphia-based percussionist Toshi Makihara, these four artists rejoin to further develop and present the first public performance of “IZU HOUSE.” This American and Japanese collaboration explores Chihan-an’s architectural form, the Suganuma family’s oral histories, and the artists’ own personal connection to the space, creating a contemporary event about cultural space and memory.

"This project has been funded by The Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage, through Dance Advance."

© IWASA Eiichiro, Chihan Art Project

Chihan Art Project blog in Japanese

Chihan Art Project blog in Japanese is as follows;
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/chihan_project_jpn/

Chihan Art Project blog

We have started the Chihan Art Project blog.