Women Center Stage: Japanese Performance Artists in Conversation

Event Date: Friday, September 13 · 6 - 7:30pm CDT

Join the Japanese Arts Foundation at Asian Improv Arts Midwest’s home dojo for a one of a kind conversation with today’s leading Traditional Japanese performing artists! This conversation highlights women performers who are leading the future of their art through teaching and performance, while handing down traditions as they continue the centuries long legacy of Japanese performing arts.

Among the international performers:

Umeya Takane: certified performer from the traditional Umeya clans (Tsuzumi & Narimono) respectively. She has been active in Nagauta, a form of Japanese Classical music used in Kabuki, the theater genre with origins in the dramatic dance of the early seventeenth-century Tokugawa shogunate. Performed first by all-female ensembles, Kabuki gained

popularity for its eroticism among the lower-class population before being banned and changed to all-male ensembles. Kabuki re-emerged in the early Meiji period and today is per-formed frequently in theaters and on television. Nagauta was incorporated into Kabuki theater in the eighteenth century and is still performed by an ensemble utilizing traditional Japanese instrumentation, with shamisen as the main instrument accompanied by taiko drum, tsuzumi hip drum, kotsuzumi shoulder drum, and n kan flute. Takane Umeya is among only a handful of certified classical players in Japan today and in high demand as house musicians for Kabuki and Nagauta Music. She performs frequently in classical and festival music concerts, and collaborations with contemporary music and media arts.

Kioto Aoki: is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician whose playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma and emphasizes the melodic phrasing of space and choreography to reorient the notion of percussion as mere rhythm. Her stoic, durational explorations elicit soundscapes that straddle the organic textures of live performance and sonic nuances of cyclical, droning sustain. Aoki balances the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a contemporary sensibility, bringing taiko to contemporary artistic ecologies of music, sound and performance and extending her practice beyond measures of cultural preservation.

Aoki is the 5th generation of the Toyoakimoto performing arts family from Tokyo with roots dating back to the Edo period. On stage from age 7, and studying under father Tatsu Aoki, she continues the family legacy as musician on taiko and tsuzumi, and as Toyoaki Chitose (豊秋千東勢) when on shamisen.

Yoshinojo Fujima: 淑之丞藤間 studied under the late Shunojo Fujima for over 35 years, starting as an apprentice and now certified grandmaster in Fujima style nihon buyou(Japanese Classical Dance). It is one of the five major Nihon Buyo Schools in Japan. She is a part of the postwar Japanese-American diaspora. Her process and art springs forth from a complete immersion in traditional practice. Her works embody identity and tradition through performance as does her teaching practice in nihon buyo; contemporary applications also provide a vessel of inquiry towards traditional aesthetics. Her presented views often bridge across an eclectic personalization and questioning of convention; projects include virtual reality implementation with “Kurokami E{m}Urge, #ChooseYourReality” and her ongoing “Beyond the Box” series, which centers on female performers/creatives.

The conversation will be moderated by JAF Executive Director, Saira Chambers and will include a Q&A.

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