Ichi Oku House/一憶ハウス
in process
I'm not one who throws things away easily. My eye is always drawn toward an untapped possibility, a moment when the seemingly exhausted object will once again prove useful. In our disposable present, my attention is often drawn to those objects, people, and communities who get left behind. My new project, Ichi Oku House (一憶ハウス), re-situates my experimental performance practice within the realm of the left-behind.
In Japan’s rural Shimane Prefecture I am transforming an abandoned house (“akiya” in Japanese) into an immersive documentary performance piece called Ichi Oku House. The piece explores the interwoven themes of transpacific migration, the burdens and richness of preserving family history within immigrant communities, and the depopulation of rural areas.
Ichi Oku House is a culmination of much of what I’ve worked toward in my career. It combines experimental performance, object theatre, puppetry, set design, personal essays and oral history collection into a single piece, in a beautiful old house tucked into the mountains in a rarely visited part of Japan. When finished, Ichi Oku House will mix the fantastical with the historical, sharing the fascinating multi-generational story of the Japanese and Japanese-American families that once occupied the house through a complex, but moving multidisciplinary narrative.
This project is being made possible with generous support from Creative Capital and the Asian Cultural Council.
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