New work

The Senkotsu (Mis)translation Project

Senkotsu (Mis)Translation Project from Denise Uyehara on Vimeo.

The Senkotsu (Mis)translation Project is an interactive interdisciplinary performance installation that explores the entangled history of Okinawa and the U.S. military which has had a presence on these southern-most islands of Japan since World War II. It evokes the battle of Okinawa in which one-third of the local population perished, the later occupation of the islands by the U.S. military, and ethnic/national identity in these times of globalization.The audience is invited to play a series of “bone” and “egg” and "mistranslation" games. They take care of a bone and walk with it throughout the space, burying it in shells, washing it in video projection light, speaking messages to it through a (Mis)translation machine. The games are themselves a bastardized version of the traditional Okinawan bone-washing burial ritual senkotsu. Denise will is currently developing the script and choreography and will work with an small ensemble that will perform in the installation. The ensemble will also give voice to local Okinawan Americans who offer up stories of war, occupation and connection to a distant homeland. Senkotsu will be presented at Highways Performance Space May 8-9, 2009.

Support and development history: Support for this project includes the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the COLA mid-career fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Asian Cultural Council and the Kawahara Fund. "Senkotsu" has been workshopped at REDCAT (in Disney Hall) Studio seires and Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery.

Ongoing

Mama/Baby/Dada

Mama-Baby-Dada is an investigative performance project created by Denise Uyehara and Natalie Brewster Nguyen with their young children. This three-year project includes a series of investigative play activities, or games. In the Tracing Game the artists follow behind their children with colored markers in a room covered with muslin cloth, tracing the pathways create as they work and play. These tracings create a “map” that documents the movements of the parents and the children and the areas they frequent. There will be several variations of the Tracing Games, including changing the shape of the play areas (e.g., a long corridor, an L-shaped room, semi-circular courtyard). Other activities will include the Mirror Game in which artists and children draw mirror images of each other’s movements on a window that separates them. In the Ball Game, an areal videotape documents the pathway of rolling balls as children play. These images will be re-projected onto the floor as the children continue to play, responding to their own game and its spontaneity. Mama/Baby/Dada explores the territory between home and work, mamahood and artmaking and everything in between. Originally inspired by the Postpartum Document (1973-1979) by visual artist Mary Kelly in which she documented the language of her son, Mama/Baby/Dada explores a woman’s investment in her child’s growth while tracking the merging geographies of work and play.Click here for workshop video

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.

Development history: Mama/Baby/Dada arose from early work Natalie and Denise created as resident artists in Guilllermo Gomez-Pena’s La Pocha Nostra workshop at MOCA in Tucson (summer 2007). Early works in progress of have been presented at the Teatro Caliente Festival, in Phoneix, AZ (2007) and MOCA-Tucson.

Special thanks to our workshop participants:
June, Adam and Amy Robinson
Porter and Kate Albers
Yaju Kuo and Hannah and Jake Feinberg
Hannah and Todd Shipman
Ian and Leslie Sult
Tanya Hammond and child
Nick Hollister and Rebecca Senf
Benjamin, James and Gallagher Witmer
Leif Terre, Edna Fedler and Walter Sipes
Sula and Rene

touring performances

Denise Uyehara is a member of the California Arts Council Touring Roster. Performances require a theater venue and technical crew. Uyehara is also available for lecture/performances and other residency activities. Click here for booking/contact information.

Big Head

Big Head revisits the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and considers current-day treatment of those perceived as "the enemy now", including Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and South Asian Americans. 

A work that has been in the making since early 2001, this poetic, interdisciplinary performance offers up letters from Rohwer Internment Camp in Arkansas, responds to recent hate crimes and imprisionments, and considers the coalition-building between these various communities during times of crisis. 

A non-linear montage of images, clay animation, movement, and text, Big Head evokes the mysteriously winding path of collective memory, and how we interpret our past to provide hope for the future.  

Performance includes testimony by Edina Lekovic, Shady Hakim, Lulu Emery, Tamadhur Al-Aqeel, and Lillian Nakano.  Dramaturgy by Tamadhur Al-Aqeel. 

photo: Craig Schwartz

"Mesmerizing...a coup de théâtre. Uyehara, a virtual conflation of Laurie Anderson, here addresses imperiled democracy in the present war-shrouded landscape."

- Los Angeles Times

"Powerful, compelling, potent and deeply chilling."

- LA Weekly

Maps of City and Body

Uyehara draws shimmering blue and green maps over her body as she evokes what marks us in our migration towards more borderless identities: blue numbers on a Jewish woman's arm; a Chicana biker neighbor; queerness; love and violence between Asian women and men; a grandmother's fiery suicide.

In this moving and provocative performance, Uyehara reveals to us the marks on her body as memories, and through them, she shows us our life destinations.

Visuals by Lee B. Directed by Chay Yew. Commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum's Asian Theater Workshop. Maps premiered in 1999 at Highways Performance Space, co-produced with the Taper's Asian Theater Workshop. Also presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, East West Players, The Asian Art Museum and the Modern Language Associan conference in San Francisco, the 3rd Conference on Asian Women in Theater in Tokyo, and for the MuuMedia festival at the Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland.

Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels

This show excites all the genders to laugh, talk and respect each other. Uyehara tells it like it is through the Vegetable Girl, Mad Kabuki Woman, Asian Queer/Bi Girl, an Asian Guy, "that Asian male/female thang", 'The Joy Fucked Up Club'.

She examines love, violence and respect among men and women, HIV/AIDS, women loving women. Premiered in 1994 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, and toured nationally at venues including the Painted Bride, PA, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, Northwestern University, the excerpts at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Hairou, China.

"Best Performance Artist, Western Region...Serious but hilarious, she strips away performance-art pretenses while gleefully subverting her audiences' expectations."

- Entertainment Weekly

"Critic's Choice"

- L.A. Weekly
- San Francisco Bay Guardian