Image by Olivia Moon Photography, Bates Dance Festival 2024
See TEASER
Created by Aretha Aoki and Ryan MacDonald
Choreographed by Aretha Aoki
Sound composition and design by Ryan MacDonald
with music by Anny Lin and Linda Uyehara Hoffman
Performance by Aretha Aoki, Frankie Aoki-MacDonald, Anny Lin, Ryan MacDonald, and Linda Uyehara Hoffman
Costume Design: Claire Fleury
Technical Director and Lighting Design: Gregg Carville
Project Manager: Lila Hurwitz
Production Associate: Lucia Gagliardone
IzumonookunI is a multidisciplinary dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, 17th century cis-female founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of its women-centric, grassroots, counter-cultural origins. Kabuki was born in a dry riverbed in Kyoto by Okuni and a group of women outcasts and prostitutes. Their humorous parodies of Buddhist dances and dramatizations of everyday life were wildly popular. Okuni disappeared from historical accounts around 1610 and soon afterward, during a time of moral reform, women were outlawed from performing kabuki due to its associations with prostitution. What remains of kabuki is a strictly cis-male, patrilineal form made up of highly formalized movement performed in established theaters.
Choreographer Aretha Aoki and Bessie-nominated sound designer and artist Ryan MacDonald are resurrecting re-imagining Okuni as a punk/synthwave/glam-goth figure. Aoki plays the role of Okuni in a mythical and reimagined form; MacDonald provides a live soundscape of synth loops and beats, and both covered and original songs. Moving between live music with Aoki at the mic—drawing from a range of glam/synthwave influences such as David Bowie, Gary Numan, and Siouxie Sioux—live taiko drumming, and hyper-stylized experimental dance choreography and improvisation, IzumokookunI aims to reclaim the origins of kabuki, collapse reductive binaries, and allow audiences to make new connections between seemingly disparate forms.
Musing on the Making of IzumonookunI
Images by Olivia Moon Photography, Bates Dance Festival, 2024
CALENDAR
IzumonookunI Performance excerpt and lecture
FirstWorks @ Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Arts (JMW)
Nov. 25, 2024
IzumonookunI World Premiere
Bates Dance Festival
July 12 & 14, 2024
“Topsham couple’s Bates Dance Festival performance is inspired by kabuki, punk rock and their 7-year-old”
~Portland Press Herald
IzumonookunI (excerpt)
Salem State University
Sept. 15, 2023
IzumonookunI with Sawagi Taiko (in development)
Powell Street Festival Society
Aug. 5 & 6, 2023
“A boundary-breaking Japanese legend gets a modern punk makeover in IzumonookunI”
~Georgia Straight
“Aoki and her partner in life and art, Ryan MacDonald, use the classical Japanese art form as a springboard for theatrically charged ideas about ancestral heritage, personal history, empowerment, and reclamation.”
~Stir, Arts and Culture Vancouver
IzumonookunI (in development)
Bowdoin College
April 15, 2023
“…a multidisciplinary, multigenerational ode to Kabuki…”
~Bowdoin Orient
IzumonookunI (excerpt)
Motion State Arts
March 10 & 11, 2023
IzumonookunI (excerpt)
School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (SCDT)
November 12, 2022
IzumonookunI (excerpt)
Bates Dance Festival
Shared show with Shura Baryshnikov and Adrienne Taylor
July 22, 2022 at 7:30
IzumonookunI (work-in-progress, excerpt)
estrogenius festival, Frigid NYC
Kraine Theater (NYC), March 26, 2022 at 7 pm
IzumonookunI (work-in-progress, excerpt)
New England Now Dance Platform
Institute for Contemporary Art (Boston, MA)
March 18-20, 2022 at 8 pm
Boston Globe Critics’ Top Ten Dance Performances of 2022
IzumonookunI (work-in-progress) and Wind in the Pines (video and live excerpt) 2020
Arts Alive at Roger Williams University, Rhode Island, Feb. 12th, 2022 at 7:30 pm
Funding Credits
IzumonookunI is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Bates Dance Festival, The Powell Street Festival, The Chocolate Factory and NPN. More information: http://www.npnweb.org.
IzumonookunI is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Powell Street Festival Society and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: http://www.npnweb.org
Support for IzumonookunI is provided by The Kindling Fund, a grant program administered by SPACE as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation For The Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program. Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.
Supported through work-in-progress showings at Bates Dance Festival, Bowdoin College, Salem St. University, Roger Williams University, estrogenius at the Kraine Theater, the New England Now Dance Platform at ICA/Boston, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Motion State Dance Festival, and the Powell St. Festival.
arethaaoki.com 