FirstWorks presents
An evening with Aretha Aoki & Ryan MacDonald

Program Notes: November 25, 2024, Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Arts

Join Aretha Aoki and Ryan MacDonald for an evening of experimental performance and behind-the-scenes conversation about their lives as professional artists who blend dance, music, and theater. Together with their daughter, Frankie Mayfield, they will share segments of their new show, IzumonookunI.

IzumonookunI
by Aretha Aoki and Ryan A. MacDonald

Come, come,
The crow caws.
Come, come,
It caws, because,
It caws,
Come, come.

—Traditional Izumo children’s song, printed in Kabuki Dancer: A Novel of the Woman who Founded Kabuki by Sawako Ariyoshi

Choreography: Aretha Aoki
Sound composition and design: Ryan A. MacDonald
with lyrics by Kate Bush (“Wuthering Heights”), Izumo Children’s Song (“Come Come”), Sarah McLachlan (“Possession”)
Taiko composition and improvisation: Anny Lin and Linda Uyehara Hoffman
Shamisen improvisation and electric taiko: Anny Lin
Vocal improvisation: Linda Uyehara Hoffman
Performance and improvisation: Aretha Aoki, Ryan A. MacDonald, Frankie Mayfield, Anny Lin, and Linda Uyehara Hoffman
Video design and animation: Ryan A. MacDonald
“I went down to the river” text: Aretha Aoki
Costume Design: Claire Fleury
Lighting Design and Technical Director: Gregg Carville
Project Support: Lila Hurwitz/Doolittle+Bird
Production Assistant: Lucia Gagliardone

About the Work

Izumo no Okuni, the woman who founded kabuki—the eccentric, bawdy, cacophonous dance-drama form that ostensibly first took place on a dry riverbed in Kyoto in the early 17th century—is a bit of a mystery. She and a group of all-women social outcasts drew large crowds with their comical and licentious portrayals of everyday life and renditions of Buddhist folk dances. She impersonated men in an inversion of what would become permissible onstage. Despite her disappearance from historical records around 1610 and the eventual banning of women performers, kabuki itself has lived on but performed almost exclusively by men, and the dancing toned down in favor of narrative and drama. When we researched Okuni, we immediately thought of punk (a shared influence) and its counter-cultural ethos and goth offshoots, only to find out that Okuni was influenced by kabukimono—wayward samurai who wore women’s kimonos and lived on the fringes of society. Much of what we learned about Okuni and the genesis of early kabuki drew from Sawako Ariyoshi’s fictional novel, Kabuki Dancer.

We are reimagining Okuni in conversation with contemporary post-punk within a hybrid landscape, and in an uplifting of kabuki’s womxn and feminist underpinnings in a context we hope will resonate today.

Thank you, Suzanne Kim and Sam Zimmer of FirstWorks and the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing Arts for this wonderful opportunity to share and converse about our work with your community.

About the Artists

Aretha Aoki is a choreographer, performer, and the A. LeRoy Greason Chair in the Creative Arts and Associate Professor of Dance at Bowdoin College. She has been making dances and collaborating with artists across artistic disciplines since 2004, recently collaborating with Vancouver-based artist Cindy Mochizuki on her work, Cave to Dream. She was selected to be a part of the RDDI New England cohort, whose platform at the ICA/Boston was named one of the “top ten dance performances” in 2022 by The Boston Globe. As a performer, Aretha has received critical acclaim for her work with choreographers Emily Johnson, maura nguyễn donohue, Juliette Mapp, devynn emory, Vanessa Anspaugh, and others. She recently danced in a new trio called overly merry by Heather Kravas that premiered at the Chocolate Factory Theater in NY.

Ryan A. MacDonald is a multimedia artist and author. He is a 2017 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award nominee in “Outstanding Composition and Sound Design” for his work in Vanessa Anspaugh’s The End of Men. He is the author of the story collection The Observable Characteristics of Organisms (FC2) and the winner of the 2012 American Short(er) Fiction Award. His work, in collaboration with Aretha Aoki, has been performed nationally and internationally with funding from the National Performance Network, Maine Arts Commission, and the Kindling fund. Ryan has designed sound for choreographers such as Vanessa Anspaugh, deynn emory, Sara Juli, Tristan Koepke, and Rebecca Steinberg. He has developed a wide variety of media art and animation for artists such as Tom Friedman, publishing companies such as Queen’s Ferry Press, and Theater productions for Bowdoin College. Ryan teaches a range of media art and sound design courses at SMCC.

Gregg Carville is a freelance designer whose recent work includes shows at Bowdoin College, Portland Stage Company, Portland Symphony Orchestra, and Colby College. Currently Gregg is the Resident Technology Designer for the Bowdoin College Department of Theater and Dance. He has lit theater, dance, opera, concerts, fashion windows, parties, weddings, and architecture. He has an MFA from NYU.

With a profound history in dance and theatre, Claire Fleury creates her designs with a stage in mind. Her vibrant costumes are designed to evoke joy and fun, while also highlighting Fleury’s deep respect for the power of the body in motion. Fleury has made costumes for dance companies Judith Sanchez- Ruiz and the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Kathy Westwater, Antonio Ramos, David Zambrano and Mat Voorter (Brussels), Coco Karol, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, Yoshiko Chuma, Afrofuturist musical artists The Illustrious Blacks, former Warhol superstar and political poet Penny Arcade, Nightlife Icon Susanne Bartsch, and Laurie Anderson, to name a few. Fleury was one of four costume designers receiving honorable mention at the “Bessie” Awards for performance and dance in 2018. Fleury is a proud graduate of DasArts (The Amsterdam School of Advanced Research in Theatre and Performing Arts).

Anny Lin (she/her) is a Taiwanese Hō-ló, interdisciplinary taiko artist based in Vancouver, BC. Anny’s practice explores traditional ceremonies across cultural and intergenerational rituals through the movement and voice of wadaiko (Japanese drum) to inspire community connection to non-performance-based art forms. Anny holds a BFA in Music from Simon Fraser University, where she studied as an experimental musician. She also studied under Albert St. Albert Smith in dance accompaniment and attended a field study at the University of Ghana, focusing on dance, music, history, and culture. Anny is part of various groups based in Vancouver, Canada, including Dahaza, a Japanese instrumental (wagakki) group; Sawagi Taiko, Canada’s first all-Asian women taiko group; and Canada Miyake Taiko Kai, a traditional ceremonial drumming group affiliated with Miyake Jima Geinou Doushi Kai from Japan.

Frankie Mayfield is eight and has performed in seven shows with her parents. She loves dragons, reading, horseback riding, magic, drawing, dance, and swimming. She would like to be a chiropterologist when she grows up.

A founding member of Katari Taiko, the first taiko group in Canada, and Sawagi Taiko, the first all-women’s taiko group in Canada, Linda Uyehara Hoffman has been playing taiko for over 30 years. She performed in the Women in View production of Lear with three other taiko players, for which they received a Jessie Richardson Theatre Award nomination in Sound Design. She drummed and sang at the aboriginal Talking Stick Festival in a collaborative improvisation with singer/percussionists from different cultures (First Nations, Ukrainian, South Asian, Korean and Japanese) organized by Russell Wallace, Lilwat singer, drummer and dancer. Uyehara Hoffman has given vocal workshops covering speaking, singing and vocal improvisation at national and regional taiko conferences. As an actor, she had a principal role in the feature film Year of the Carnivore, directed by Sook Yin Lee. She appeared as a 175-year-old blind ghost in Cindy Mochizuki’s video installation Rock, Paper, Scissors, which was shown at the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, BC, and subsequently in Japan.

Funding Credits

IzumonookunI is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Bates Dance Festival, The Powell Street Festival, The Chocolate Factory and NPN. More information: http://www.npnweb.org.

IzumonookunI is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Powell Street Festival Society and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: http://www.npnweb.org

Support for IzumonookunI is provided by The Kindling Fund, a grant program administered by SPACE as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program. Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.

Supported through work-in-progress showings at Bates Dance Festival, Bowdoin College, Salem St. University, Roger Williams University, estrogenius at the Kraine Theater, the “New England Now” Dance Platform at ICA/Boston, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Motion State Dance Festival, and the Powell Street Festival.

IzumonookunI premiered at the Bates Dance Festival, July 12 and 14th, 2024

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Photo credit: Olivia Moon Photography