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CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS This page is under construction CONTENTS To skip to a particular work, click on the asterisk (*) A Page Out of Order: 3 Women (2007) *
A Page Out of Order: 3 Women (2007)Wave Rising Series, Brooklyn A variation of "A Page Out of Order," performed by Ursula Eagly, Yoshiko Chuma, and Jean Butler; Sound design by Jacob Burckhardt; lighting design and production management by by Rie Ono.
"Red Carpet 1967" (2007)
Lincoln Center Out of Doors A piece in which four dancers walked, vamped and flailed up and down a strip of red that ran along a walkway between the Damrosch Park Bandshell and the little park to its east. NY Times Review by Jennifer Dunning
A Page Out of Order: M (2007)Dance Theater Workshop Ritualistically intense, "A Page Our of Order: M" drew on the shared histories and unfamiliar stories of artists living in Japan, Macedonian and the US. Fifteen musicians and dancers share the stage in an installation environment that acts as a metaphor for psychic space. Projected films, including a distillation of Milcho Manchevski’s 1994 Academy-Award nominated film Before the Rain, were layered over the performers’ choreographed chaos. Japanese voice-over sensation Sizzle Ohtaka narrated this non-linear diary in the ‘benshi’ style, evoking 1920s Japanese silent cinema.
Sundown (2006)
Issue Project, Brooklyn The afternoon vista at Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, long a favorite of sunset painters and photographers, was the setting for "Sundown," which built on performance works that Chuma and company had been developing over the last few years, using 7-foot boxes framing a variety of locations around the world. By far, "Sundown" was Chuma's most elaborate piece of this kind. It took place in the indoor performance area, as well as outdoor sites around Issue Project, set off by the sun, the sky and the Gowanus Canal The piece was performed to music commissioned by School of Hard Knocks and composed by Christopher McIntyre in collaboration with the 7x7 Trombone Band, which included Joe Fiedler, Jacob Garchik, Curtis Hasselbring, Richard Marriott, Christopher McIntyre, Steve Swell, and Peter Zummo. An additional soundscape was created by Chuma and sound designer Jacob Burckhardt, in collaboration with Stephan Moore, for an innovative multi-speaker 16 channel installation by Moore. Village Voice Review | NY Times article | Press Release
A Page Out of Order Overland (2006)Albania, Macedonia, Japan "A Page Out of Order Overland" was based on the history of several lands and landscapes, from the Balkan region to Asia, where war has torn apart families and divided lives. The work emerged from a variety of shared and unfamiliar stories and artist-to-artist dialogues among dancers, musicians, stage designers and producers from the USA, Macedonia, Albania and Japan. The style of the performance was conceived in the form of a 1920 silent film and features a variety of new and archival films created and edited for the production. The 7-foot cubes were metaphors for enclosed spaces and frame urban and rural landscapes.
PI = 3.14 (2002)
La MaMa E.T.C. "War is like having a sick child," said Yoshiko Chuma, adding, "you either keep doing your job or not." She did her job when she and The School of Hard Knocks traveled to Sarajevo in 1999 to perform at the MESS Sarajevo International Theatre Festival in Bosnia with a piece called "Footprints of War." The show went on, but getting the set back from Sarajevo, in time for an engagement at the Joyce, was a drama in itself: a 2½ month administrator's nightmare of mis-communications, frayed emotions, botched promises, excuses and cultural challenges. The mountains of emails and correspondence relating to this set became the starting point of the script for "PI = 3.14: Hiroshima-New York-Belgrade-New York-Sarajevo-New York-Kabul." The math part of the title stood for "endless, continuous circles of life and war," according to Chuma. The resulting production turned into a spoken and choreographed work that dealt with large issues of war, displacement, and the parallels between Chuma's youth in postwar Japan and the lives of the performers, who have all had wartime experiences of their own. They included Tea Alagic, an expatriate artist from the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ivan Talijancic, a Croatian-born actor, Jim DiBiasio, an American actor who has lived through three wars, and Wazma Osman, a 27 year-old Afghan woman who walked over the Pakistani border to freedom in 1980, yet returned in 1999 and met Taliban repression face-to-face. Chuma attempted to bring out the parallels between hers and each person's story--between 1945 Japan, 1995 Sarajevo and 2002 Kabul.
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