Fridays & Saturdays at 8:30 PM
August 8 – 23, 2008 at CRS
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) Presents
An Evening of Dance, Theatre, and Film Adaptations
of the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme by
Yoshiko Chuma & Shirotama Hitsujiya
Nathan Dame
Jonathan Hayes
Harold Lehmann
Christopher Pelham & Hazuki Homma
CRS presents a rare staging of the work of Donald Barthelme, father of postmodern fiction, by an appropriately eclectic array of dance, theatre, and film artists including multiple Bessie Award winner Yoshiko Chuma and Yubiwa Hotel artistic director Shirotama Hitsujiya (one of "The World's 100 Most Influential Japanese Women," Newsweek Japan). Also on the program are works by experimental theatre directors Nathan Dame and Harold Lehmann; a multi-disciplinary work by Christopher Pelham and Hazuki Homma; and making its NYC premiere is Jonathan Hayes' short film "The School" (2003 Worldwide Short Film Festival Audience Award and Sundance Film Festival 2004), adapted from the Barthelme story of the same title. Lighting design is by Poe.
General Admission $20
Students/Seniors/CRS Members $10
"Yoshiko Chuma is a maverick, utterly unique, a 'one-off' as the British say, on the stage of world dance. Her career has spanned almost 30 years and 35 countries. Her work is a mixture of play and seriousness, anarchy and reflection, and her hallmarks are collaboration and cultural exchange. Chuma cuts across categories. One might call her a postmodern choreographer, a movement designer, or a visual artist whose primary medium is human beings—dancers, musicians, pedestrians. She is unusually alive to space and landscape, indoors or outdoors. Gifted with great personal force and intelligence, at heart she is an experimentalist, a fierce explorer with a profound sense of structure." — Amanda Smith, Dance Magazine, 2007
"YUBIWA Hotel was one of the most successful events we presented at PICA TBA06. It was a beautiful and affecting show and really struck a chord with the Portland OR audience. The image of the YUBIWA Hotel cast doing their stomping smoking dance at the end will stay with me forever." — Mark Russell, former Artist Director P.S. 122
About the Artists
Yoshiko Chuma (yoshikochuma.org) has been a firebrand of New York's downtown dance scene since arriving in 1978. She has created more than 45 full-length company works, commissions and site-specific events for venues in 35 countries, constantly challenging the notion of performing for both audience and participant. She is, was the director of two major dance companies, (The School of Hard Knocks, USA and Daghdha Dance Company, Ireland). Her work has been presented in such diverse venues as Lincoln Center, the former National Theater of Sarajevo, the perimeter of the Hong Kong harbor, and an ancient ruin in Macedonia among many others. She has received fellowships and awards for choreography and career work from John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, New York Foundation for Artists, Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer Choreographer/Composer Commission and Philip Morris New Works. Chuma has led workshops and master classes and been commissioned to create new work in East and West Europe, Asia, Russia and the U.S. She received a 1984 BESSIE award for choreography and four more Bessies were awarded to her productions in 1992 and 1998.
Nathan Dame is originally from Ogden, Utah but has lived and worked all over the country, including in Chicago, Alaska, and California. He has a degree in Acting and Directing from Weber State University in Utah. He is particularly interested in ensemble theatre, magical realism, and theatre of the absurd, and has previously worked as a director, producer or actor on productions of Pinter, Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and others.
Canadian Jonathan Hayes, a filmmaker with several shorts to his credit, wrote and directed the acclaimed 2003 short film "The School," which was named one of 10 must-see films by programmers of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it screened in competition. Adapted from the Barthelme story of the same title, "The School" tells the story of Edgar, a grade school teacher who attempts to demonstrate the wonder of life to his young students. The film began as a winning pitch at the CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival and went on to win the 2003 Worldwide Short Film Festival Audience Award and screening internationally. Hayes has directed commercial spots for Spy Films where he won the First Cut Saatchi & Saatchi award. He was also named one of the top young directors on the Toronto Star/One campaign. He was the original director of Kids Canada, premiering this year on CBC where he established the look and feel for this children’s series. Hayes runs a production company, Berkeley Films Ltd. with his partner Jane. He is represented in the United States by Endeavor Talent Agency.
In 1990, Shirotama Hitsujiya (yubiwahotel.com) started singing in clubs and performing in Tokyo. In 1994, she founded YUBIWA Hotel as artistic director. Since then, she has used a warehouse, a tennis court, a strip club and an art gallery as performance venues. The performers of YUBIWA Hotel are all female and Hitsujiya tries to seek and suggest new views and images of society, the world and women. Transcending conventional definitions of dance and theater, the work of YUBIWA Hotel is characterized by a relentless attempt to re-imagine and represent the issues of contemporary womanhood in Japan through a spectacle of interwoven dance, text, mask and lush costumes. Their full-length productions "EXCHANGE," "Please Send Junk Food (Workshop Solution)," and "CANDIES – girlish hardcore" have toured Japan, Eurupe, and North and South America. Hisujiya recently collaborated with director Richard Foreman on "The Bridge Project" and "Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland." Hitsujiya is director of the Japan Directors’ Association.
Hazuki Homma is originally from Japan, where she studied classical and modern dance. Since moving to NYC, she has studied at Dance New Amsterdam (formerly Dance Space Center) and has worked with such choreographers as Mariah Molony, Jenny Jenonius, Naoko Kikuchi, and others. She recently appeared in Lasanta by the image-based performance company Sintroca at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church. Last fall she performed with Garnica Leimay AcTs Lab in A Timeless Kaidan at Theater for the New City as part of the New York Butoh Festival, presented by CAVE and The Japan Society. Hazuki has also participated in a movement-theater piece produced by Aylam Orian. She is currently studying at HB studio.
Harold Lehmann seeks through his work to reflect on an essential conflict between fabrication and authenticity in human history. Lehmann trained in a variety of European theatre techniques and in the Viewpoints work of Marie Overlie at NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing and throughout his long-time working relationships with the Hip Pocket Theatre in Texas, with puppeteer and Lecoq grad Lake Simons, and with the various denizens of John Brown Theatre, among others. With this palette of theatrical tools, he seeks to create work that will draw the audience into the drama of seeing in a hyper-conscious manner. For Lehmann the act of theatre in this hyper-materialistic age is necessarily violent: his theatre is literally a process of exorcism, not of demons but of material objects, or more precisely our relationships to material objects. Theatre becomes an act of fierce questioning. With Lake Simons, Lehmann has collaborated on The Idiot’s Audition, dogman, The Nose, Two and Two, Imagining Cain, Luki Laki, Paper Plane, and What's Inside the Egg? at New York venues such as HERE, La Mama, the Miranda Theatre and others. The Desire Microscope, developed with collaborator Jim Ford, premiered in the Red Lab series at One Arm Red as part of an evening of multi-discipline works that he curated. Most recently, he has written, directed and produced The Wheel of Seizures at One Arm Red, HAVE U SEEN MY SOUL? at the Stable in Williamsburg, and Gus & Fred Smash the TV at CRS.
Christopher Pelham is co-founder & director of CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing). Since he began producing in 1997, he has had the privilege of presenting dozens and dozens of wonderful artists from all over the world. He has also worked as a performer, writer/collaborator, director and videographer. He studied theatre and 20th century/post-colonial literature at Duke University. After briefly continuing his literary studies at New College, Oxford Univ. and the Univ. of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Christopher returned to the theatre to play the role of the Policeman in Rodrigo Dorfman's production of Fassbinder's Blood on the Cat's Neck. He then appeared for four seasons with the Hip Pocket Theatre in productions at Duke University and at the Hip Pocket's idyllic Oak Acres Amphitheatre in Fort Worth, Texas, appearing in a number of world premieres including Dabloids by Leonid Tishkov, and creating the role of the Snoid in Robert Crumb's R. Crumb Comix III. Since 1995 he has lived and worked in NYC where he has studied The Spiritual Psychology of Acting with John Osborne Hughes and improvisation with the late Gloria Maddox, who first introduced Chris to the idea of undertaking a spiritual path. As a member of MadWomanoftheWoods Productions, he co-produced five Off Off Broadway productions and performed in and helped to create Antigone Through Time and An Absolute Mystery. With Lake Simons and Herald Lehmann, he performed in The Nose, Two and Two, and Imagining Cain at HERE Art Center. He studied dance for nine years at Dance Space Center and has performed in several dance theatre works by Guido Tuveri, Mark Drahozal, Gitte Bastiansen, and Nana Masuda.
