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NOHspace Presents |
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Past Events
Kathy Foley
NOHspace Presents
Fox Hunts and Freedom Fighters: Korean and Western Women in Seoul 1894-1920
by Chan Park and Kathy Foley
September 14th & 15th, 2009
Monday & Tuesday at 8pm
Korean pansori story singing, porcelain dolls and powerful acting bring to life tales of remarkable women: martyred Queens and Victorian women who defied gender to help change their world, and a straight-laced missionary trying to curb her radical student as she called for national independence at the first Korean school for girls. Cross-cultural encounters fuse Korean and American arts in this new work from the renowned pansori singer Chan Park and puppeteer-director Kathy Foley.
Noted Englishwoman geographer Isabella Bird came to Seoul as Korean Queen Min struggled with Japanese and Western colonialism as the "hermit kingdom" was forced to open to Western trade and missions. The women's friendship grew even as a plot for the assassination of the queen,“Operation Foxhunt,” was being hatched. The history of early Korean-Western exchange is seen in the lives of two women who redefined what it meant to be female.
Exploratory encounters deepened in the early twentieth century. American missionary Jean Walters taught the fiery Yu Kwan Sun, a female revolutionary who lived to oust the Japanese. While the mission lady saw her school, Ehwa, as a site to "uplift Korean womenhood, Yu Kwan Sun saw it as the site to organize and agitate for change. Korea's “new woman” sparked the flame that was the 1919 Independence Movement. Christian hymns and the noted pansori of Yu Kwan Sun, intertwine to tell of a young girl whose self-liberation far outstripped her teacher's.
Chan Park performs extensively in the US and around the world. Her unique blending of Korean singing-storytelling (pansori) and her western training in theatre have made her renown. She frequently performs all over the the country and has collaborated with companies in Hawaii, Alaska, California, and Central Asia to create new works. She teaches at Ohio State University.
Kathy Foley regularly performs puppetry, mask, and dance work in the Sundanese style of West Java. She is a director (Ramayana, Nicolas Nickleby), actress, and author (Farewell to Manzanar, based on the life of Jean Houston). She is a professor of theatre arts at UCSC. The pair first worked together as graduate students at the University of Hawaii and bring their voices together to animate the words and actions of women whose lives intertwined on the cusp of modernity.
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Dance Monks: Rodrigo Esteva Photo: Mike Slack
BodiGram: Julia Graham
NOHspace Presents
ORIGINS (World Premiere)
by Dance Monks & Samavesha
&
Related to a Distinct Entity
by BodiGram Dance Company
November 17th & 18th, 2008
Monday & Tuesday at 8PM
ORIGINS is an interdisciplinary project silently inspired by traditional legends from several ancient cultures. A live original music score by renowned Samavesha artists: Laura Inserra (Italy), Pauchi Sasaki (Peru/Japan) and Claudia Cuentas (Peru) is composed to immerse the audience in a work that ignites the senses. Created in partnership with DANCE MONKS Olivia Eng (China/US), Rodrigo Esteva (Mexico), Mirah Moriarty (Roma/US) and Rodney Bell (Maori/Aotearoa), the work addresses and embodies the concept of origin. Origin as a legendary place, a cultural landscape, an ancestral identity, an inescapable longing, a source of life, a spring, a seed of creation, an essential beginning. DANCE MONKS were last seen at their sold-out performances at CounterPULSE SF in 2007. ORIGINS is their latest interdisciplinary collaboration with these powerful and breathtaking artists from around the globe.
Related to a Distinct Entity explores interests in Asian themes through the Western eye. Integrating movement inspired by Japanese techniques including Nihon Buyo, Kabuki Buyo, the Suzuki movement system, and Bunraku puppetry. By adapting a contemporary vocabulary to these forms the dancers explore ideas of self reflection in regards to culture, history and the present state. BodiGram Dance Company is an emerging dance company formed by choreographers Blair Bodie and Julia Graham. Brought together by their interests in Asian philosophy and movement traditions as well as improvisation and somatic awareness, they blend Western and Eastern thought and form. This is BodiGram's first performance as a company however the work of Julia and Blair has been seen in NYC, Colorado, Philadelphia, Virginia, San Frarnacisco, and Kuala Lampur.
NOHspace Presents is a series produced by Theatre of Yugen that showcases emerging and established experimental, ensemble, and Asian-based performers, as well as visiting artists from Japan.
Mr. Yoowho, credit Peter Kuku Cunningham
Moshe Cohen and NOHspace CoPresents
Mr. Yoowho's Holiday
Mr. YooWho discovers his dream of traveling the world in the most unlikely of places, a field of sunflowers. He travels through a potpourri of wonder generating laughter that reaches far across generational lines. Enter a world where humor and poetry intermingle with precision mini-board high diving, a world where European clown and mime mix with Japanese Kyogen and Yiddish Absurdism.
Following rave reviews this summer in Europe (“Charlie Chaplin of a modern time”,) Moshe Cohen brings his new show back home to San Francisco. This fall, Moshe traveled to Krakow to work intensely with director Marek Pasieczny, bringing together work that Moshe has developed over the last twenty years. After serious dramaturgy work, Moshe unveiled his new work at the basement cabaret theater Loch Camelot. Now Moshe returns home to San Francisco, and builds upon this foundation in collaboration with the Theatre of Yugen, injecting a Noh and Kyogen influence to his insightful ritual of travel, and holiday celebration.
December 12th - 28th, 2008
Friday and Saturdays at 7pm, Sundays at 2pm
NOHspace Presents
Oleg Liptsin’s International Theater Ensemble
in a workshop production of an original adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat
January 12th & 13th, 2009
Monday & Tuesday at 8PM
Experimental modern approach to the classic short story by Nicolay Gogol, with a goal to transform the 19th century humanistic myth into an interactive theatrical performance that will appeal to an audience of IT-era.
The project is a joint effort of the following internationally acclaimed and local Bay Area artists and companies:
shadow puppets director and performer Larry Reed and his ShadowLight Productions;
surrealistic robots’ creator Frank Garvey and his OMNI Circus;
video artist and software developer Kevin Quennesson;
movement and modern dance performer Ai-Cheng Ho (member of ITE);
and local costume designer Margarita Soyfertis.
NOHspace Presents is a series produced by Theatre of Yugen that showcases emerging and established experimental, ensemble, and Asian-based performers, as well as visiting artists from Japan.
Mantra Plonsey Credit: Hiroki Saito
David Ryther and Anne-Lise Reusswig Credit: Hiroki Saito
NOHspace Presents
an installation of Dandelion Dancetheater’s new project
Love-Child Gets Sliced
(Chapter One of Mutt)
April 6th and 7th, 2009
Monday and Tuesday at 8pm
"Love Child Gets Sliced" examines mixed identity by following the fractured story of Miyomi, a mixed-race girl who was born in an Internment Camp in Rower Arkansas during WWII to a Japanese American internee and a Caucasian prison guard from Texas. The dance-play will begin just after Miyomi's death, when she wanders into a strange, after-life honky-tonk inhabited by a motley crew of characters, all ghosts who have been players in her life story in one way or another. Miyomi, herself an aspiring country singer who has always been an outsider due to her mixed Japanese and Causacian ancestry, feels at home for the first time in this odd place in-between life and death.
The featured music of the night is special guest band "MUTT 49," an undead country-punk band whose members and music embody the off-kilter state of split-identity. "Love Child Gets Sliced" will follow the days-forty-nine-that Miyomi spends in this honky-tonk, during which time she wrestles with issues and ghosts from her last identity as she simultaneously faces terrifying questions about future ones. This surreal dance-play will take Miyomi into many surprising, absurd, often humorous and liquid realms inspired by states of in-between. Mutt is supported by the Japan Foundation, the SF Arts Commission and the Wattis Foundation.
Mutt will be directed by Dandelion's Eric Kupers and Kimiko Guthrie and Gogh Nakajima, a physial theater director from Osaka, Japan, and will showcase various forms of Japanese and Western dance, theater, and music.
foolsFury and NOHspace CoPresents
FURY FESTIVAL
a festival of theater work by ensemble theater companies.
June 8th - 21st, 2009
Julie Brown
Theatre of Yugen’s ART Bursts Program
Helen Keller
September 4th - 6th, 2009
Friday, Saturday & Sunday at 8pm
Helen Keller is the story of Helen Keller’s journey from sensory isolation to communication with the outside world she inhabits. Annie Sullivan speaking only in Japanese throughout the play leads Helen to discover her abilities to communicate reach beyond her immediate surroundings. Helen Keller explores the challenges of her isolation through the use of language in hope to illuminate our need for personal interaction in a technological non-personal world.
Helen Keller directed by renowned Japanese director Gogh Nakajima, coming to the U.S. specifically for this production. Japanese actor Ryousuke Kitaoka, traveling from Japan will play Anne Sullivan, and Julie Brown (Theatre of Yugen) will play Helen Keller.
TICKETS: $10-15 sliding scale
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Theatre of Yugen's 30th Anniversary Season
is generously funded in part by our supportive individual donors, The William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Rockefeller MAP, and the San Francisco
Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts.
Theatre of Yugen is a proud member of Theatre Bay Area, Project Artaud, Theatre Communications Group and the Network of Ensemble Theaters.