Danspace Project presents City/Dans:
YOSHIKO CHUMA & THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS/ROOT CULTURE (USA/Japan/Romania)
Not About Romanian Cinema: POONARC
June 4-6 and 11-13, 2009 [Thurs-Sat] at 8:30 PM
Admission: $18.00 ($12.00 for members)

illustration by Hidetomo Mita

“Yoshiko Chuma is a maverick, utterly unique, a ‘one-off’ as the British say, on the stage of world dance. Gifted with a great personal force and intelligence, at heart she is an experimentalist, a fierce explorer with a profound sense of structure.” – Dance Magazine

“Using trained and pedestrian movers, virtuoso instrumentalists, film, video, and sculptural forms by collaborating artists,” writes dance critic Elizabeth Zimmer, “[Chuma] develops unusual time-based art works that blend the live and the recorded, the flat and the three-dimensional, people and things.”

Not About Romanian Cinema is inspired by films from the ‘golden age of Romanian cinema’ viewed by Chuma at a New York festival and her company’s subsequent visits to Romania to better understand the context for contemporary Romanian film and art making. As a dialogue between artists from three countries — Japan, the United States, and Romania — the piece is a part of The School of Hard Knocks’ multi-year research and performance project entitled A PAGE OUT OF ORDER. This ongoing dance/installation project creates platforms for in-depth cultural exchange between artists and has taken the company to Albania, Macedonia, and the Manipur region of India. Not About Romanian Cinema: POONARC is nearly at the final phase of Chuma’s 10 year project PAGE OUT OF ORDER, which will culminate in 2011.

The extraordinary cast of dancers, actors and musicians include Yoshiko Chuma, Sorin Calota, Andreea Duta, Ursula Eagly, Theo Herghelegiu, Kristine Lee, Jake Margolin, István Téglás, Sizzle Ohtaka, and Koichi Makigami.

Direction/Choreography/Multiple Screen Concept: Yoshiko Chuma. Music and songs created and performed by Koichi Makigami and Sizzle Ohtaka. Sound design by Soichiro Migita and Jacob Burckhardt. Costumes by Nick Vaughan. Lighting by Rie Ono. Text by project collaborators including Jake Margolin, Romanian playwright, Theo Herghelegiu, and the international cast.

ROOT CULTURE Creative Team (Kamakura, Japan): Nobuko Higuchi, Kohtaroh Inoue, Yoshitaka Ito, Junpei Katsumi, Gen Nagashima, Yuuki Sawada, Kohji Setoh, Hiroaki Sumiya, Seinoshin Yamagishi.

Featuring excerpts from films by Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu: Stuff and Dough & 12:08 East of Bucharest. Co-producers: Casa de Cultura a Mun. Arad (Romania), ROOT CULTURE (Japan) and GOH Productions (USA). www.yoshikochuma.org

Post performance discussions: Fridays June 5th & 12th
June 5: Moderator: Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director, Danspace Project
June 12: Moderator: Corina Suteu, Director, Romanian Cultural Institute of New York

http://www.danspaceproject.org/performance/events7.html