Identity – Ancestral Memory

Identity — Ancestral Memory, a work by Yayoi Theatre Movement, celebrates the life and poetry of Roy Kiyooka. A fusion of two dance forms, noh mask theatre and butoh dance choreographed by Yayoi Hirano and Jay Hirabayashi, the piece will be performed by Hirano and Hirabayashi along with Carolyn Chan, and Tomoko Hanawa accompanied by musicians Kozue Matsumoto on Koto and Minoru Yamamoto on Shakuhachi.

May 12 to May 14, 8 pm
The Revue Stage on Granville Island
1601 Johnston St. Vancouver
Tickets $28.50 (general)  $25.50 (seniors) $23.50 (students)
www.vancouvertix.com 604.629.8849

Identity – Ancestral Memory was first presented a year ago at Centre A in a preliminary form. It has since been re-worked and is now presented in its finished form. Jay Hirabayashi, a dancer and choreographer best known for his work with Kokoro Dance and a member of the artistic team, spoke to The Bulletin about the evolution of Identity – Ancestral Memory.

The performances last April at Centre A presented the results of an initial development period. Yayoi had initiated the project with meetings in 2009 with prospective collaborators and consultants, after which she drafted several revisions of an initial script. As a relatively recent immigrant to Canada, Yayoi was experiencing many of the questions that all Japanese Canadians have concerning what their identity is. As a hapa—to use the Hawaiian expression for half-Japanese—the question of identity, of who I am, resonated with me as well, but for different reasons. I agreed to participate in this project partly out of this interest in exploring a subject that has been a constant motivator in my own artistic practice, but primarily because I wanted to work with Yayoi, who is an amazingly talented mask and movement artist with a deep understanding of Japan’s classical performing arts.

I found the process of developing the initial workshop performances highly stimulating. As a hapa-guy, and a sansei, I did not really understand that I was not white until I was nineteen and looking for a job in Colorado where a woman from Texas told me that “my kind” would have difficulty finding work in her town. Up until that startling revelation, I had always thought of myself not in terms of race but nationalities. Until the age of twelve, when we moved to Canada, I had been raised outside of North America in Lebanon and Egypt so always identified myself as an American. My last name was Japanese, but the only Japanese face in my life was my father’s and I never thought of him as Japanese. He was just my Dad. I knew he had been sent to prison in the States because other people had thought he was Japanese even though he had unsuccessfully insisted that he was American, but as a kid, such history had little personal resonance. That experience as a nineteen-year-old was the first of many encounters with racism, some far more subtle but nonetheless felt, that I have experienced in the subsequent forty-five years of my life.

That summer I also met a law student, also from Texas, who asked me if I was related to Gordon Hirabayashi. He explained to me that my father’s Supreme Court case was one of the most infamous in the history of US law and for that reason was a subject of high interest in his studies. That realization prompted me to learn more about my father’s family’s history. In many ways, Yayoi’s experiences paralleled those of my grandparents. There is the initial challenge of communicating in an unfamiliar language and of assimilating in an often hostile society. There is the shock that cultural values deep to one’s own sensibilities have little or no relevance to Canadians. There are the barriers to finding funding support for art forms that are revered and respected in Japan but thought of as insignificant and irrelevant in this country.

Yayoi’s remembrance of Roy Kiyooka was much different from mine. She billeted with Roy during one of her visits to Vancouver as a performer in the Vancouver Fringe Festival. I had forgotten that Roy had brought her to one of our rehearsals of Rage in the early nineties. For Yayoi, Roy was a mentor who helped to welcome her into Canadian society. Roy, at that time, was very involved with researching his own family history and Yayoi was a living conduit to his Japanese heritage. For me, Roy was a super-cool, pot-smoking artist who was out there in a place that I wanted to go. I loved his lack of inhibition, his courage, in doing exactly what he wanted to do, even if it was doing something that he was just learning about. He had an insatiable curiosity and a consuming creative drive to express himself.

Working with Yayoi in the year preceding the Centre A performances was a period of discovery, conversation in words and movement, and creative development. I learned firsthand about the astonishing power of masks and about how effective simple, or rather, essential, actions can be. Yayoi can transform instantly, magically, from herself to a young man or to an old woman. The mask changes the face, gender, and age, but her body transforms as well. She becomes her characters. Butoh artists also aim to transform, to become the images that motivate their movements.

The difference is that butoh is less concerned with literally conveying the imagery that motivates the movement. It is more abstract than mask work which is more akin to mime. In our collaboration together, we endeavoured to push ourselves into integrating each other`s artistic practice. The performances with Yayoi, dancers Tomoko Hanawa and Carolyn Chan and musicians Kozue Matsumoto and Minoru Yamamoto with video integration by Sebnem Ozpeta were exciting for me. They were challenging and new but satisfying because I was surrounded by talented and committed artists. It is always a pleasure to perform in conversation with live musicians and Kozue and Minoru created music that made every movement seem the right one.

The performances that resulted from this initial research period largely reflected Yayoi`s viewpoint as a shin-issei. In our post-mortem discussions about what worked and what did not, I mentioned that I thought the piece was perhaps too much concerned with Roy`s Japanese heritage to the extent that we had little insight into his contemporary artistic practice, the place where his own search was starting from. We never actually got to see or hear him in action in any of the video clips. We were missing his wonderful sense of humour and the richness of expression in his voice and words. We were also not investigating the thoughts and reflections of the other nisei and sansei artists deeply enough. In addressing the complex subject of identity as well as paying homage to Roy, the performances perhaps also attempted to say too much. We needed to pare it down, keep what was essential and cut what was not.

Yayoi spent the summer contemplating the feedback from the performances and generated several more revisions of the script. She cut several scenes and added five new ones. She commissioned my son, Joseph Hirabayashi, who had written the score for one of the scenes in the first version, to write four new compositions using words by Roy, Bryce Kanbara, Louise Noguchi, and Nobuo Kobuta. We no longer use the mime white-face makeup. She added video footage of Roy in performance reading his own poetry and Sebnem is creating new video montages for the new sections and has further edited the initial versions. In our rehearsals, we have reworked the sections that we have retained and created new movement for the new sections. Tomoko and Carolyn have been contributed much of their new movement material. The performances May 12th to the 14th at the Arts Club Revue Stage on Granville Island will look very different from the studio performances at Centre A. Gerald King will add his lighting artistry to the production heightening its theatrical impact. With all the new elements and the revisions of the previous sections, Identity – Ancestral Memory will be a very different experience from its initial work-in-progress performances at Centre A.