to

Isak Immanuel (SF) Luigi Coppola (Torino) Yuko Kaseki (Berlin)

Musical contributions:

Kanoko Nishi (Oakland), Theresa Wong (Berkeley), Zachary Watkins (Santa Cruz), and Maruta/Phnonpenh MODEL (Tokyo)

Mail Art/Paper Sculpture: Yachu Kang (Taipei) Installation: Isak Immanuel

With a question of “To” comes one of “From”, between makes trace.

To whom to write a memory... To go, to take flight.

To return in a question of address, an untitled portrait.

To (untitled portrait and ocean) is a meeting of performance art installation, videologue, and intimate dance theatre remapping the transient spaces of a city and the gravity of location. The work is pieced together by an international collaboration of artists from three different countries: Luigi Coppola (director of the Italian based performing arts company LOSS), Yuko Kaseki (Japanese Butoh dancer and physical theatre artist based in Berlin working with cokaseki and inkBoat), and Isak Immanuel (interdisciplinary performance and visual artist and founder of the Tableau Stations / Floor of Sky series in San Francisco). With amplified bicycle/sound sculpture and musical contributions from Theresa Wong, Kanoko Nishi, Zachary Watkins, and Maruta/Phnonpenh MODEL.

As an ongoing site/city specific work, "To" creates a series of theatrical tableaux taking apart and re-piecing the quotidian, bizarre, and fragile ways in which people meet, miss, mirror, glimpse, erase, and trace one another. Following the dynamics and deviations of a fugue (in terms of the musical, psychological, and linguistic paths) the work is created from a multiple voice perspective. Just as the word fugue is traced back to the Latin “fuga” (flight, running away; especially: flight from one’s country, exile, banishment; escape; or to flee), the artists each develop a line framed in the real and imagined cityscapes of uproot. This layered motion is framed by an international dialogue highlighting the social opacities, mental baggage, and overall weight, wonder, and often desired amnesia of travel. The work rests in discursive space, questions of return and the personal carrier space of one’s everyday life that can fall open when parallel lives collide.

The subtitle (Mario Rossi, Wúmíng Shì, John Doe, Erika Mustermann, Nanashi-Gonbee) is comprised of the names for unknown or unspecified persons in Italy, Taiwan, The United States, Germany and Japan - the countries of the artists own nationality, collaboration and domicile. Drawing from this thread, the immediacy of the body and the real and imagined distances to civic space are cross-referenced from artist to artist. Photography and video documents done in the context of each country’s unique urban topography are interwoven to give concrete touchstones while movement engages the ephemeral ghostlike absences of people and place that linger outside a given picture frame. As a shared work, it traces the outlines of urban intimacy and the incomplete formations of portraiture.

To (untitled portrait and ocean) has been supported in part by: Theatre Bay Area (CA$H), MOVIN’UP Action - Italy, HweiLan International Artist Workshop, The Taipei Artist Village, Taiwan, Berlin Senate Cultural Exchange/Der Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin and Farmlab Los Angeles.

Individual Artists (partial list):

Isak Immanuel

Isak Immanuel is an interdisciplinary performing artist and image maker working in outdoor city spaces, artist residencies, theatres, galleries, and for camera, he has done numerous solo and collaborative works both locally and internationally. His work is influenced by the crossing threads of Contemporary Dance, Butoh, Action Art, Painting and Tableau Photography, working with Anna Halprin, Katsura Kan, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, Thomas Langhoff, Shinichi Iova-Koga, and William Dere and studying at the California College of the Arts (BFA 1999). In 2004 he founded the series Tableau Stations / Floor of Sky. www.tableaustations.org

Luigi Coppola

Luigi Coppola is an interdisciplinary performance artist based in Torino, Italy. He works extensively in both solo and collaborative projects in the visual arts and the theatre/dance context. He is director of the Italian performing arts group LOSS. He trained both as a scientist (graduation in Engineering) as well as in the art field (Performing Art with specialization in Theory and New Media). Looking for an approach as open as possible to research the unconventional, crossover paths, and our contemporary moment, his projects have participated at numerous national and international artistic residencies, festivals and exhibitions. www.lossnet.com

Yuko Kaseki

Yuko Kaseki lives and works as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher in Berlin (1995-present). She studied Butoh dance with Anzu Furukawa and danced in her company Dance Butter Tokio and Verwandlungsamt in 1989-2000. With Marc Ates she founded the company cokaseki in 1995 and since has presented many solo and ensemble projects with musicians and visual artists throughout Europe, Japan, and the USA. Alternately, since 2001 she has worked consistently with the Bay Area performing arts company inkBoat and in 2004 was awarded an Izzie for her work apart of ‘Ame to Ame’ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. www.cokaseki.com

Kanoko Nishi

Kanoko Nishi began playing piano at age three, koto at age 18, studying with Kazue Sawai and Brett Larner for koto and Marc Shapiro for Classical piano. As a Graduate of Mills College with a BA in piano performance she is active as an improviser on koto and piano, performing in Japan and throughout the Bay Area. She currently plays solo and in local musical groups Slow, Children, with MaryClare Brzytwa and Shayna Dunkelman, and Silk, Bamboo and Catgut, with Kiku Day and Anne LeBaron.

Theresa Wong

Theresa Wong is an improviser and composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her current work spans the areas of improvisation, composition, performance art, video and large scale performance pieces. With cello, voice, piano and amplified bicycle, she performs solo as well as with Carla Kihlstedt, Kanoko Nishi, Ellen Fullman and Gianni Gebbia. Her works have been presented at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria, San Francisco's Other Minds Brink series, Radio France broadcast, "A L'improviste", and at The Stone in New York City. www.theresawong.org

Timeline

The collaborative effort began in November 2007 in Taiwan (working with Taiwanese artists Meng Yeh Chou, Yachu Kang, Sunwei Liuo, Shu-yi Chou, Lan Huang, Shoozoo Tsai and Sandra S. Chiu, and with the Chinese Germany based artist Yingmei Duan). The work acts as trace and glimpse to many people and place. Site/city specific work was done in Tokyo, (with Maruta/Phnonpenh MODEL). Berlin (with Alessandro Bedosti), San Francisco (with Peiling Kau, Sherwood Chen, and Folawole Oyinlola), and in Los Angeles. In September 2008 the project was hosted by Moving_Movimento/Fabrica Europa in Florence, Italy and in October by Dock 11 in Berlin, Germany

October 23, 24, 25, 26, 2008

Dock 11, Berlin - GERMANY

www.dock11-berlin.de