Kimi making a jado body at Kuwanokien www.kagura-shop.com、www.iwamifukushikai.or.jp
Like the elusive sands of time shifting in an hourglass, Kimi Maeda captures the intangible nature of memory in the sand drawings central to her most recent project, Bend. Connecting the past with the present, interwoven with archival video footage projected on a screen, Maeda tells the story of her father’s experience in an Arizona internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Behind the project’s inspiration also lies the unique dimension of her father’s uncertainty of time and place due to Alzheimer’s Disease at the end of his life.
Kimi Maeda wearing mask that she made with Kenji Kakita at the Kakita Katsuro Mask Factory in Hamada, Shimane-ken http://kakita.ai-fit.com
“We can’t hold onto the drawings that are created; they always get erased,” she explains. “There’s a feeling of being off-balance with our inability to hold onto the images, like our memories. Yet there is also a transformative power of the sand drawings as I shift one image into another.”
With support from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission’s Creative Artists Fellowship Program, Maeda took Bend to Japan last year. A five-month residency grant funded her study of iwami kagura, a form of Shinto dance specific to her mother’s hometown of Hamada, located in the Shimane Prefecture of western Japan. For this artisan, the opportunity enhanced craft-making skills that infuse her puppetry and shadow-based theater work, a medium she first fell in love with during college.
“Puppetry appealed to me because it can work on a small scale,” she shared. “Because it falls outside traditional theater norms, it gave me an intrinsic platform to create stories that reflected my experiences as a Japanese-American, which I couldn’t find elsewhere.”
Iwami kagura group in Hamada performing a Tamamo no Mae
During her residency, Maeda learned various local handcrafting techniques such as elaborate costume embroidery, paper and wooden mask making, bamboo and paper prop design, and papermaking. She stayed at the home of her late maternal grandparents, which also allowed her to explore her mother’s history. In the home and throughout the town, she was surrounded by acclaimed paintings created by her maternal grandfather. Having traveled to Japan as an artist in her own right, following in his footsteps lent her residency a special context.
“Thanks to the extended time of the JUSFC residency, I was able to truly immerse myself,” Maeda recalled. “Beyond just reconnecting to my culture, I took part in the life of the community. I was able to form so many new personal connections.”
The appeal was reciprocal. Her Japanese audiences were as fascinated with her “out-of-the-box” style as American audiences, despite the cross-cultural linguistic challenge. “Adding Japanese subtitles to the show made me realize how text-heavy it is, creating a gap with the audience because they had to read more during my performance to understand it.”
Performing in Japan also illuminated the bridge-building impact of Maeda’s work. “American audiences have an instinctive indignation about government taking away the rights of its citizens, but in Japan this history is unfamiliar. My show is not just about remembering history, but also understanding it.”
Maeda returned home immensely motivated to augment her work. She plans to incorporate video and audio recordings from her residency in future projects.
To learn more about Kimi Maeda’s innovative work, visit kimimaeda.com. Click here for more information about JUSFC’s Creative Artists Fellowships.