Musing on the making of IzumonookunI

By Aretha Aoki

On a stage lit in purple and blue, a female-presenting dancer in a short-sleeved dark shirt and dark shorts presses a knee onto the ground and extends the other leg, while tilting her head down and swinging it so that her long black hair flies out away from her skull. In front of her is a rumpled and highly reflective swatch of fabric, and behind her a disco ball rests on the ground. The left side of the background shows part of a backdrop for the performance, which is a series of sets of thin white lines crossing over each other like string art. On the right side we can see part of what appears to be a DJ table with cables and equipment.
Performance of IzumonookunI at Motion State Dance Festival, 2023. Photo credit: nikki lee.

Choreographer Aretha Aoki and sound designer and artist Ryan MacDonald were named awardees of NPN’s Fall 2023 Development Fund for IzumonookunI, a hybrid dance/punk/glam-goth/synth-wave performance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, the 17th-century cis-female founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, kabuki.

My name is Aretha Aoki and I am a choreographer and dancer. With my collaborator and partner of over ten years, multimedia artist and sound designer, Ryan MacDonald, we make experimental, interdisciplinary performances that center themes of lineage, authorship, and the body and sound as mediums for time/space travel.

Our process is rooted in improvisation, rigorous collaboration, and a style that sometimes draws attention to itself and the contradictions of movement. Together we collide, clash, synergize and ultimately create worlds that neither of us could independently conceive.

We are often drawn to what is left out, discarded, erased from dominant narratives — that which cannot be contained within the boundaries of the clever tweet, the pristine image, or the sound bite. We appreciate strange and unexpected juxtapositions; a desire for a kind of buried treasure (or presumed “garbage”) of truth is what moves us to make work and to dance.

On a darkened stage covered with what appear to be ripped pieces of paper, a figure in a red pant and matching red shirt, and wearing a black helmet the obscures their face, crawls on their hands and knees. A smaller figure dressed in black with long yellow hair sits on the crawling figure, as if riding them. A thick, bluish-purple diagonal stripe runs across the backdrop from the upper left to the bottom right. On the far right side of the stage is a DJ table with cables and equipment.
Still from video by Colin Kelley of IzumonookunI in-progress showing.
On a brightly lit, fog-covered stage, against a backdrop of purple, lavender, and pale blue lines crossing at random angles so that they form a nearly solid mass, a performer in a red pant and matching red shirt, and wearing a purple, white and red flower patterned robe, poses with one leg stepping forward and head thrown back . In the background, far upstage, another figure in black sits in a blue fabric harness and swings. Four disco balls hang above the performers. On the far right side of the stage is a DJ table with cables and equipment.
Still from video by Colin Kelley of IzumonookunI in-progress showing.

When I dance, I imagine myself as a vessel for a larger, mysterious radiating force of existence, guided by intuition, a felt sense of rightness, a vibrational heftiness propelled or informed by persistent questions or pangs. What is my relationship to my ancestry after generations of censorship, assimilation, and geographical distance? Can we inhabit multiple facets and dimensions at once? Can we embody the rub of contradiction that potentiates new ways of thinking, knowing, and being?

Since 2014, our work has touched on my Japanese ancestry, creating formal containers for ancestral research, and braiding and bridging disparate communities and artistic modalities. Our research has taken an even more personal turn with the inclusion of our 7-year-old daughter in our performances. Living in Maine, far away from my family of origin or a robust AAPI community, our work is a way of extending tentacles back home and connecting our daughter to a significant part of her cultural heritage.

Our latest project, IzumonookunI, reaches forward and backward. It is inspired by Izumo no Okuni, founder of Kabuki theater. This eccentric, bawdy, cacophonous dance-drama form first took place on a dry riverbed in Kyoto in the early 17th century. Okuni and a group of all-women social outcasts and prostitutes drew large crowds with their comical and licentious portrayals of everyday life and renditions of Buddhist folk dances. She is said to have invented the hanamachi or “bridge of flowers,” the runway that extends from the audience to the stage and, despite her disappearance from historical records around 1610 and the eventual outlawing of women performers, kabuki itself has lived on.

IzumonookunI crosses borders to bring together an international cast and partners and creates a hybrid, sci-fi kabuki/dark synth world of multigenerational, mostly Asian women-identified performers. Ryan is building an original sound score, with taiko accompaniment by two members of Sawagi Taiko, Anny Lin and Linda Uyehara Hoffman, intricate costuming by Claire Fleury, singing, and of course, dancing. Dancing that traverses multiple states and characters: a baby, an aging man, a horse, a horse rider. The dance and the sound exist in a constant state of transformation, emergence, regeneration, looping through life and death, never closing in on one fixed state.

A figure in a patterned bodysuit moves across the stage from right to left in a stylized and elongated crawling pose, with their body and face close to the stage. They are lit in blue and green lights, and the blue backdrop behind them is illuminated with a brighter light, upon which is projected in thin white lines what look like the jagged spikes of a graph or ongoing measurement similar to an EKG.
Performance of IzumonookunI at Motion State Dance Festival, 2023. Photo credit: nikki lee.
Against a red and purple background decorated with white lines, a person wearing a dark reflective jacket and illuminated, fully enclosed helmet made out of fir tree branches, stands in front of a DJ table.
Performance of IzumonookunI at Motion State Dance Festival, 2023. Photo credit: nikki lee.
A person wearing a patterned bodysuit and dark reflective jacket crouches in the left foreground and holds a microphone in their right hand. They appear to be yelling or singing, and their long black hair is swinging out as if they've been photographed midway through a large physical movement. They are lit in red and purple. In the far background there is a blue backdrop upon which are projected white stripes that converge at a point just outside the boundaries of the photograph. The stage is otherwise dark, and on the right side in the middle distance you can faintly make out a DJ table with cables and equipment.
Performance of IzumonookunI at Motion State Dance Festival, 2023. Photo credit: nikki lee.

The result, we hope, is an immersive, uncanny, multigenerational, East Asian and womxn-centric world that makes visible what has been lost, erased or deemed inappropriate, while complicating tyrannical and reductive notions of what qualifies as authentically “Asian,” through exploring how these seemingly unrelated art forms can converse and converge.

Ultimately, we aspire to get closer to the primordial pulses that give birth to life; to the wild, uncontainable, strange, and indecent — burps, groans, whispers, and wails — from which anything is possible.

Footnotes

  1. Not much is known about the origins of kabuki. I have gleaned information about the form — not to be taken as definitive or authoritative — from a range of non-peer-reviewed online sources, including Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki) and the fictional portrayal of Izumo no Okuni in the novel, Kabuki Dancer by Sawako Ariyoshi.
    Back to reference 1 in content


About Aretha Aoki

A promotional head shot of the artist Aretha Aoki.
Aretha Aoki. Photo by Maria Baranova Photography

Aretha Aoki is a choreographer, performer, and educator. Her choreographic work in collaboration with Ryan MacDonald has been performed nationally and internationally with funding from the National Performance Network Creation and Development funds, the Kindling Fund, Maine Arts Commission, New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Northampton Council for the Arts. As a performer, Aretha has worked with choreographers Heather Kravas, Emily Johnson, Juliette Mapp, devynn emory, Vanessa Anspaugh, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Dance at Bowdoin College.

About Ryan Alexander MacDonald

A promotional head shot of the artist Ryan Alexander MacDonald
Ryan Alexander MacDonald

Ryan Alexander MacDonald is a multimedia artist and author. He was a 2017 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. He works with long-time collaborator and choreographer Aretha Aoki and has designed sound for choreographers such as Vanessa Anspaugh, Devynn Emory, and Tristan Koepke. He lives in Maine where he teaches courses on sound design and digital art.