Archipelago by Denise Uyehara and Adam Cooper Teran

To reserve special $10 tickets call (310) 315-1459, give the code word “Denise,” and pay at the door.

Press Kit

Preview articles in Blue Fat’s Triple Echo
and The Rafu Shimpo

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Denise says "Submit!"

Happy 2012!

We’re holding a Prophecy and Origin Myth Contest leading up to the show Archipelago (view video here) at Highways Performance Space.  We want to hear from you!

Here are the questions:
- “What is the origin myth of your people?”
- “What is your prophecy for 2012?”

Winning submissions will be illuminated during Archipelago on FEB. 17 AND 18, 8:30pm, at HIGHWAYS PERFORMANCE SPACE.

I’ll recite the TOP TEN origin myths from an ancient compendium in the prologue for our show.  And I’ll perform the WINNING PROPHECY for 2012 during the show.  Hope to see you there!

All your submissions will be posted here on my website.
Deadline to submit if Feb. 16, 5pm PST.

Enter here:

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(image by Adam Cooper-Teran)

Some highlights:

In 2012 there will be an explosion of mixed-race babies and rivals the post-9/11 baby boom.
- Geo

My prediction is that the world will not end, but that it will be restarted anew.  I don’t think the Maya calendar predicted the end of the world, but the beginning of a new cycle.

- Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye

Prophecy for 2012:  That people will learn from each other, grow, give, receive, and give back through compassion, love, and communication.

- Lee Ann Goya
Origin Myth:
The Rana said to the arrivals in his kingdom in western India. Go back we have no space here. You cannot remain. Their emissary asked for a glass of milk filled to the brim. Then he asked for sugar. Gently he added more and more sugar into the milk and it dissolved.  And the emissary said to the Rana let us stay and we will be the sugar in your milk.  So we stayed.

Prophecy: We will become invisible everywhere outside our ancestral home (Pars in Iran) from which we will disappear.
- Asha Coorlawala

…

Prophecy:  and things shall get lost in 2012…

- Marcel Schaap

….

Origin Myth:

before the war
[after Lawson Fusao Inada]

there was no me before the war
my people’s faces were not even a dream before the war

before the war, we had no ancestors
to imagine us into being

before the war
we didn’t exist
the war made us, shaped us like figurines
out of the mud of battlefields
out of blood spilled by enemies in enmity
out of bloods mingled in the mud

before the war
there was no me
the war was always there with us
my mother and my father were
forever in the war
they battled
over the halves of me like
starving soldiers over rations

I am not a territory

my body is a landmine
and I am always exploding

- submitted by Wei Ming Dariotis, PhD, originally published in 580 Split, Issue 12.

…

Origin Myth: According to legend, the first Vietnamese descended from the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the female heavenly angel Âu Cơ. They married and had one hundred eggs, from which hatched one hundred children. Their eldest son Hùng Vương ruled as the first Vietnamese king.

- Erin O’Brien

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Free Workshop at USC
Saturday, February 11, 2012
2 – 4 p.m. –Interactive Performance Workshop
“Performing the Objects of Memory”  Click here for details.

Performance artists Denise Uyehara and Erin O’Brien will lead a hands-on workshop that explores the materialization of memory in everyday objects. Through embodied practice, we will explore how memory becomes embedded in or evacuated from objects. Participants are encouraged to bring an object from their daily lives that holds some meaning them. Objects will also be available at the workshop for participants to use.  Space limited.  To secure your spot please RSVP to: tdc@dornsife.usc.edu

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“Arts, Culture and Democracy” hosted by TPAC on Nov. 17, 9am.  
Temple of Music & Art at the Cabaret Theatre in Tucson, November 17^th, from 8:30 am – 11:30 am.  Admission is free, but seating is limited.

Keynote by Douglas McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal, featuring Ron Barber, District Director for the Office of Gabrielle Giffords; and James Garcia, Co-founder of the Real Arizona Coalition and the Producing Artistic Director of New Carpa Theatre; Denise Uyehara, an award-winning performance artist, writer and playwright.

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Part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty

Great news! Artists2Artists and an anonymous donor have now set up a matching fund for our project.  This means that every dollar you donate is matched, up to $500!  If you donate $5, your donation becomes $10; donate $25 and it becomes $50.  Click here to donate before funds run out!  Check out our fundraising video:

Everybody has a past.  For James Luna and myself, that past began in Orange County — land of malls, surfers and the 405 Freeway.  How did we evolve from being ethnic minorities in suburbia to the artists we are today? And in the sea of consumerism and cultural amnesia, what makes an Indian or Asian American truly “authentic?”

I need your help support a new collaboration with Native American artist James Luna, to premiere at LACE November 10, 2011. It’s part of LA Goes Live, as part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. In this project we revisit one of James Luna’s performances from the 70′s, also entitled Transitions, in which he unpacked a bag full of “Indian” objects and created a new rituals with them.

We’ll spring board off the earlier work and unpack the metaphorical bag to revisit what’s inside.  Together we’ll conduct a series of rituals that recount surviving life behind the “Orange Curtain.” We’ll be remixing surfing music, disco, narrative and home movies and surfing footage projected onto a psychedelic kimono with 30 foot long arms that can wrap around Denise like a cocoon or straight jacket.

Transitions is commissioned by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) for Los Angeles Goes Live as part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene, beginning this fall. Your contribution will directly support production and travel expenses for this new project, and ready it for premiere at LACE on November 10, 2011. This is a great opportunity to for us to work with LACE and the Getty and be part of this city-wide celebration. After the premiere we hope to continue to tour with this project and bring it to a community near you!

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Denise and Cheri Gaulke speak at Pomona College November 14

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Community Workshops: Community members are also invited to participate in this project with their young children. The sessions will be videotaped and the maps will be saved for the future performance. Discussion with workshop participants – including feedback from young children – follows. The next workshop will take place at MOCA-Tucson on December 20, 2009, as part of the museum’s MOCA NOW series.

The project will culminate in a “living living room performance. ” The children and mothers will interact, eat, play, work, read, nap in the room. Video images will project onto the map tracings and on objects in the room. In addition, the children will have an opportunity to trace where their mothers travel and this will be projected onto the floor, as a type of remapping of space.

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BIG HEAD. By Denise Uyehara. With additional words by Masamori Kojima, Edina Lekovic, Shady Hakim, Lulu Emery, Tamadhur Al-Aqeel, Lillian Nakano. Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica. 21 February 2003.

Denise Uyehara’s Big Head begins with a disarmingly familiar trope often used in autobiographically-based solo performance. Addressing the audience directly, Uyehara recalls a childhood coincidence when her hand and a neighborhood apartment were burned on the same Fourth of July holiday. She remembers her own burns as vividly as the burning apartment, although she had only witnessed the latter incident from her father’s home-made Super 8 film. The nature of her experience has become blurred, for memory collects her actual and vicarious encounters at the same album.

Empathy, or the ability to experience others’ pain and pleasure as one’s own, motivated the creation of Big Head. In our post-2001 consciousness, Big Head seems an immediate response to the trauma of September 11th. But it was an irony of history that made Big Head as topical as it is. Uyehara actually began the project in late 2000, inspired by a coalition between Arab Americans and Japanese Americans. The principle of coalition, an activist strategy fueled by empathy, serves to turn Big Head from a performance of recollected self into one of a collective self, which might be described as the collage of a responsive U.S. citizen during times of crisis. “I’ve come to believe there is no more important time for me to be an American, an accountable one,” as Uyehara notes in the program.

Coalition-building among diverse Americans is the politics to which Big Head adheres; it also provides the project with a working method. Big Head proceeds in a montage of disparate scenes, incorporating Uyehara’s own voice with those of many others whom she interviewed for the piece. Simple narratives with movements work in tandem with the video footage of a vigil, live Super 8 film projection, and an interactive sequence of clay animation. Intermittently, audience members are called upon for participation–once to join the artist in her persona as a fourth grader to recite the Pledge of Allegiance collectively.

The tonality of the scenes varies between the humorous and sombre, the solemn and outrageous. Donning a headgear sporting two U.S. flags, Uyehara becomes an SUV driver and vehicle in one, cruising and cursing through freeways. She reaches her destination, marked by the deus ex machina intervention of a stage hand holding an electric fan. The “gravity” of the scene suddenly shifts, while the stage hand recedes from view. Uyehara, as if blown by a storm or walking on another planet, struggles to reach a table where the fan is set next to a mound of red clay. Washed by an eerie blue light, Uyehara molds the clay into several ambiguous shapes, the most distinct of which appears to be a human figure. She has the figure decapitated, its head blown away by the fan, in a stroke that brutally evokes the crashed twin towers. The coda to this scene suggests a reason, if not justification, for the terrorist acts. Uyehara removes her headband and places a lone U.S. flag on top of the clay mound. She holds her palms up to reveal their imperialist red dye from the clay: caught red-handed.

Central to Big Head is the analogy that Uyehara draws between this country’s treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and that of the Middle Eastern Americans after the 9/11 tragedy. This thematic thread finds a visual counterpart in an ingeniously deployed large piece of paper. The paper is the letter composed by Uyehara’s great uncle Masamori Kojima from Rohwer Relocation Center where he was interned and becomes a symbolic veil of self doubt and humiliation for Edina Lekovic, a Muslim editor-in-chief whose journalistic integrity is questioned because of her religion. Uyehara holds the paper flat to stand amidst images projected onto the wall; her portable screen brings into relief the candle-lit faces of Japanese, Arab, and other Americans from a vigil videotaped by John Esaki on Sept. 28, 2001, at the Japanese American National Museum. Testimonials from Shady Hakim, Lulu Emery, Tamadhur Al-Aqeel and Lillian Nakano consitute the scene’s soundtrack, weaving out an aural quilt of fear, determination, activism, retreat, and civil disobedience.

The pathos of Big Head comes into sharp focus in the claymation sequence, when Uyehara substitutes a white costume for the recurring paper. In turn imitating and reacting to the projected animation, Uyehara’s body doubles, conjoins with, and parallels the human-size clayman. The clayman gets punched, trodden, and torn by invisible forces, while Uyehara recounts a hate crime committed by some East Asian American youths against a South Asian American family. “What does it take to hate a body? What does it hate to take a body?” chants Uyehara in a loud whisper, as if mouthing for the baffled victims. The animated inanimate clay emerges as a big head, haunted by the question of failed empathy that turns one’s neighbors into mortal enemies. Suppose a piece of clay can feel and bear sorrow, what should a thinking human do?

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