INTRODUCTION

Introduction by Elizabeth Zimmer
A Word from Yoshiko Chuma

Introduction by Elizabeth Zimmer

For more than three decades now, Yoshiko Chuma has been building unique structures in the liminal area between her native Japanese culture and her adopted American one. Using trained and pedestrian movers, virtuoso instrumentalists (whose playing she often conducts), film, video, and sculptural forms by collaborating artists, she develops unusual time-based art works that blend the live and the recorded, the flat and the three-dimensional, people and things.

Chuma’s multidisciplinary work tries to capture the contemporary world in all its complexity: speedy, multi-faceted, diverse, both conceptual and concrete. She has traveled and worked in countries around the globe, with international casts.

I have often thought that the natural instinct of young artists and audiences is to seek complex, even chaotic structures, to fill out their nascent personalities and careers with noise, clutter, and confusion. As they grow older, artists and audience seek tighter forms, calmer atmospheres, clarity, transparency, peace.

The work of Yoshiko Chuma began in wildness, in the School of Hard Knocks. As she matures, the structures grow more confident, but the impulse to embrace the universe, to include everything at once, is still present. She seems eternally young, preternaturally wise, always startling.

A Word from Yoshiko Chuma

March 20, 2008

I recently spent five days in Jordan researching how to bring our project there in 2009 to a tri-country festival including Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. Today, in New York, I am preparing a new chapter of my performance series, A PAGE OUT OF ORDER. It is an exploration of cultures in conflict and out of the way places, a work that involves collaborators from Japan, Macedonia, and Manipur. The work will premiere in May 15-17, 2008 at Japan Society. This is my life. This is my continuous journey. This is The School of Hard Knocks.

Twenty-five years ago, I gathered 100 performers to appear in my landmark School of Hard Knocks project FIVE CAR PILE-UP at St. Mark’s Church, with live music by Christian Marclay. At that time, I was only beginning to dream of where we might go. Since then we have been to more than 40 countries and collaborated with over 1,500 people, artists from different backgrounds, ages, cultures and nationalities. I am in awe of the extraordinary people that I have had the privilege and honor of working with and I think about myself in relation to each port of entry that I pass through and each artist I encounter.

I challenge myself to create borderless works that do not diminish the perspective and point of view of each collaborator, no matter where they come from. I like to stir time, space and preconceived notions of culture together to experience a third dimension. I have never been able to think of myself only as a dancer or choreographer, but as someone striving to remain awake to the horrors and borders of the world in which we live our daily lives.

I hope you will come to Japan Society to see my latest international adventure. The last time I performed there was 10 years ago, and 10 years before that. I like the notion of performing there again in another 10 years. Please share my journey. Be a witness.

I look forward to seeing you in May.

Best Regards,
Yoshiko Chuma