WIND STATIONS
WIND STATIONS
— a curation of missing people
ARTISTIC DIRECTION, CHOREOGRAPHY: Isak Immanuel
PERFORMANCE, DANCE, COLLABORATION: Pijin Neji, Marina Fukushima, Mika Masuda, Isak Immanuel, and local guest performers
PERFORMANCE FOR VIDEO: Kota Nagaya, G Hoffman Soto, Justin Palermo, Juri Nishioka, Osamu Jareo, Reina Kimura, and the performance cast for stage
SOUND, AUDIO, TECHNICAL: Jorge Bachman, Taku Ito
LIGHT, PRODUCTION, TECHNICAL (SF) : Beth Hersh
TEXT (fragments): Missing Person posts gathered by the ensemble, and writing/poems from Craig Arnold, Naoki Ishikawa, and Johanna Adriana Ader-Apels
DRAMATURGICAL ASSISTANCE: Taku Ito
INSTALLATION, VISUAL DESIGN: Isak Immanuel
Composed from collaborations in Japan and San Francisco, the interdisciplinary dance work intersects the agency of wind with inquiries into “missing people”. As a multi-year project, it serves as a performative examination on how absence is carried and shared as a resonant existence. Overall, looking into what is present with and without body.
The collection of “missing people” and the tracings that influence the work include the Dutch American artist Bas Jan Ader who disappeared sailing a small boat across the Atlantic Ocean (as part of a serial work entitled “In Search of the Miraculous” in 1975), Japanese explorer Michio Kanda who also went missing in a transoceanic journey, flying a hot air balloon entitled "The Starlight" in route from Japan to the US (2008), the American poet Craig Arnold who was last seen researching volcanoes (as inspiration for poetry) on the small island of Kuchinoerabu-jima in Japan (2009), and also, the exodus of several artists from the San Francisco Bay Area in recent years (some of whom make appearances/disappearances in the work for video).
These discursive traces and others, in relation to family members, friends, and fellow artists, serve as open-ended meditations on the sentimental and elemental relationships to a sense of location, stability, and ambiguous loss. Reflecting through conceptions of nature, the work acts between a resting air, harsh wind, wind that enacts loss, or a wind that enables a boat to sail a great distance to a new place.
As an inquiry to the resonant natures of place, throughout the project's long term trajectory, its construction has shifted between the port areas of Kobe and Maizuru in Japan (in late 2014), and intersects with development at the Kinosaki International Art Center (early 2017) and ongoing artistic and culturally specific layers of creation and presentation in San Francisco (2016-17).
Tableau Stations / Isak Immanuel and the WIND STATIONS project is supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Center for Cultural Innovation, Kinosaki International Arts Center, Dancers’ Group’s CA$H Grant, Dance Box Kobe, Yashima Art Port, and is fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts.
PHOTOS (this page, clockwise from top left):
1.at Dance Box, Kobe, featuring Pijin Neji, Mika Masuda, Rui Aun, Isak Immanuel, by Junpei Iwamoto.
2.at CounterPulse, San Francisco, US, featuring Marina Fukushima, still from video
3.at Kinosaki International Art Center, featuring Marina Fukushima, Pijin Neji, Mika Masuda, Soutaro Tanigaki, Isak Immanuel, by Maki Igaki
4.Still from video, Isak Immanuel
full ensemble iterations:
works: