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5/15/45 - the last dance, a 70-minute performance installation/1940s swing dance with audience participation, was conceived by June Watanabe, in collaboration with John Woodall. Composer Alvin Curran, lighting designer Alexander Nichols, musicians George Yoshida and his J-town Big Band, guest artist Frank Shawl, and six dancers also joined forces to create this work. The video is by Robert Nakamura and Karen Ishizuka, re-photographed by Ray Wang.
The Japanese American incarceration during World War II gives 5/15/45 - the last dance context, but the work extends beyond that period of history to portray universal tragedies of war, prejudice, injustice and destruction.
“The work is but a moment in the abstraction of time and past memories,” Watanabe said. “Where whispered silences of wartime displacement, relocation and transience speak of a legacy of mankind — of what man does to man.”
The audience is taken back to May 15, 1945, to one of the last dances at a Japanese American internment camp. Bandleader George Yoshida talks about the dance bands that were formed, and about one of the final dances that commemorated those years. These very American activities signified peoples’ hopes for survival, even as they were forced to live behind barbed-wire fences.
“Audience members are invited to join the performers near the end of the last dance,” Watanabe said. “Transforming them from viewers to active participants, so the boundaries are blurred between the past and the present to create a sense of both performance and community. The work thus serves as a metaphor for creating a mechanism for survival; reconstructing and reestablishing the self, home and community.
Watanabe was one of 13 Bay Area artists profiled in 1991 for KQED’s special series, The Creative Mind, and was a guest speaker for UCSF’s Women’s History Month. She has also been included in exhibits: Strength and Diversity: Three Generations of Japanese American Woman at the Oakland Museum, and Issei to Shin Issei — 50 years of Japanese American Women Artists at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco.
5/15/45-the last dance premiers on Friday and Saturday, April 27 and 28, 2001, at 8 p.m., at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Forum, 701 Mission Street near Third Street in San Francisco. Tickets are $20 general admission and $18 for seniors, students and Yerba Buena members. Tickets are available through the Center for the Arts Box Office at 415-978-2787. |
