Yoshinojo Fujima has been making Yu, Japanese for “do something with joy” as a traditional Japanese dancer, choreographer, and increasingly a producer and curator for nearly twenty years. She is a prolific performer who is reclaiming willfulness for female artists by building spaces, from festivals to small works, that promote the full person, strengths, and expressions left out in the accepted norms of traditional Japanese performance. Her collaborations embrace musicians, media and visual artists equally, furthering a meticulous investigation of traditional forms and their progenitor contemporary expressions that come into existence by truly empowered artists.

The Project

A focus as part of Yoshinojo Fujima’s yearlong Fellowship unfolds in the beginning months with Kurokami - E {m} urge, eponymously titled for “Kurokami” (Black Hair), the lyrics for the classic Nagauta Dance. She is developing this new collaboration between Japanese classical dance, calligraphy, and shamisen with master artist Hekiun Oda and musician Tatsu Aoki respectively. The performance is a point in time in Yoshinojo Fujima’s investigation, and an invitation to viewers to abandon their own assumptions, about perceptions of gender archetypes, race, and character types.

Technology and the reality of Covid-19 play a part in this experiment. It opens for the artists the possibility of potential virtual collaboration for Kurokami - E {m} urge with Nozawa Matsuya, a Kabuki Gidayu Shamisen player in Kyoto, Japan, for the performance; and Subhash Kumar Maskara, a filmmaker in Mumbai, India, to direct the filming. Their performance Kurokami - E {m} urge is being premiered without a live audience and filmed for future streaming.

Attentive to the transfer of the intended affect in the viewer, Hekiun Oda is experimenting with the ukanmuri or ‘crown’ (i.e. corona) radical in the Japanese kanji characters (or words), by writing the characters vertically, using excessive amounts of ink allowing running and dripping into the lyrics, and other gestures to free human feelings and notions about stability, turmoil, and suffering to surface. Undergirding this effort of writing is the universal need, in the performers and viewers, for transformation, for moving through the fear, for seeing the value of the value of life.

The work’s central design element, a ceiling-hung bamboo hexagonal, untypically support Hekiun Oda’s live painting onto the frame’s free-hanging Japanese rice paper. This mobile alludes to natural elements such as the honeycomb and benzene at the same time that it deviates from tradition. The space created underneath is left reserved for a lone dancer in kimono, with the musician and calligrapher outside the center. Is the dancer able to break free? What is willfulness under the current limbo? Anticipating their unusual collaboration year, Hekiun Oda reflects: Shodo is an illuminating of the calligrapher's heart. I am exploring the beauty in the art of calligraphy by way of re-imagined encounters with life and nature. I am finding in the thin or thick lines and powerful or gentle strokes the intensity of the moment, the embodied knowing to move the brush because a stroke once laid out cannot be fixed.

Artist Bio + Collaborators

Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin) is “shin-nisei”, part of the postwar Japanese American diaspora. She is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and Grandmaster in Fujima style Japanese classical dance. She has performed her original works and as part of many collaborations at Links Hall, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where she premiered her full length work Asobi: Playing within Time in 2018. A core member of the organization Asian Improv aRts Midwest, she promotes identity and tradition through performance as well as her teaching practice in Japanese classical dance. She is recipient of a John D. and Susan P. Diekman Fellowship Djerassi Resident Artist (2019), has received residencies at Ragdale Foundation (2019) and High Concept Labs (2018), a Links Hall Artistic Associate Curatorial Resident, 3Arts Make a Wave artist, and Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2017.)

Yoshinojo’s curated series “Beyond the Box”, launched in 2017, centers on female performers and creatives. Her own dance investigations alter the traditional pedagogy of Japanese dance with humor and subtle transgressions by way of questioning ideas of role and identity. Her collaborative project, Suji: Lines of Tradition, with the puppet artist Tom Lee, was featured as part of the 2019 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, Links Hall 40th Anniversary LinkSirkus, as well as her Beyond the Box series. In March 2020 she performed in Kyoto, Japan at UrbanGuild as part of the MushiHime Festival, just before the pandemic came into full force. She is a recent Master Apprentice Ethnic Folk Arts Grant recipient, and adapting the pedagogy of traditional Japanese Classical dance with her mentor/teacher.

For more information visit yoshinojo.org.

Tatsu Aoki (aka Sanjuro Toyoaki) is a prolific composer, performer of traditional and experimental music forms, filmmaker, and an educator. His recent collaborations with Yoshinojo Fujima include the Revitalizing Tradition XII performance at High Concept Labs, the Beyond the Box Series at Links Hall, and Asobi: Playing within Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Aoki was born in 1958 into the Toyoakimoto artisan family and active in Tokyo’s 1970’s underground movement of experimental arts and music. Moving the Chicago in 1977, he is one of the most in-demand performers in the U.S. of the bass, shamisen, and taiko, and was the longest associated bassist for the late Chicago legend Fred Anderson. Aoki has contributed to more than ninety recording projects and has toured internationally over the last 35 years. He is Founder and Artistic Director of Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, which in 2020 celebrated its silver anniversary. He has been recognized with a United States Artists Fellowship for Traditional Arts (2020), an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award for Ethnic and Cultural Arts (2020), and the Community Service Award from the Asian American Coalition of Chicago (2019), to name a few. In 2017 he was honored with a Commendation for Promotion of Japanese Culture by the Foreign Ministry of Japan.

Hekiun Oda is a Grandmaster of Shodo, traditional Japanese calligraphy. He has been collaborating with Yoshinojo Fujima since 2018, for the projects Revitalizing Tradition XII: Lines of Tradition, at High Concept Labs, and Summer Thoughts, as part of the Chicago Obihiro Exchange at the Hairpin Arts Center in 2019. Oda was born in 1963 and grew up in Kobe City, Japan, the municipality known then for many shodo masters. He became a student at the age of five and continues studying under Goun Katsura, a shodo Grandmaster. Oda has lived in Chicago since 1990. He teaches students and has received solo exhibits of shodo at the Japanese Culture Center, the Japanese Cultural Institute, the Kizuna East Japan Great Earthquake Disaster Photography Exhibition, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Noho N55 Gallery in New York. Honors include “Shihan”, the highest rank in shodo,in 2011 by Genshinkai, the association of calligraphers in Japan.