October – December 2007

As artists in residence we begun developing performance and installation work 1/2 Life, which at that time was titled Made in Japan, alongside teaching public workshops. Many of the participants of the workshops joined us as chorus for the work progress showing. 

This work investigates intimacy, control, geography and physics from deep in the heart of the nuclear Pacific working with the material of cultural translation through the mediums of video, dance, sound and performance. We are discovering the difficulty of utilizing the body in translating this cultural, historical and social material. As a response we are constructing this work as an unfinished product, an ongoing and unresolved situation or series of questions, like a never-ending origami puzzle that will install itself in different contexts as performance, installation or stand-alone video work. In the spaces in between the body is both processor and generator of information and experience. The cast of the work includes performers from New Zealand (a nuclear free country for 20 years), Japan (as the survivor two atomic bombs), the United States (the country that developed and dropped the bombs).

The residency and project is supported by the Jerome Foundation, the Archibald Bush Foundation, the Kyoto Arts Center & the Multi-Arts Production Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation.