The Watermill Center Residency

Project title: OPERA Ensemble 
Onsite and virtual residency 
Organized by Lucie Vítková
Onsite Members: Lucie Vítková, Sophie Leetmaa, Vered Engelhard, Muyassar Kurdi
Virtual Members: Aine E. Nakamura, Sydney Viles, Elizabeth Adams
Places: The Robert Wilson Watermill Center, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Peru
Duration: April 7-May 7 2021 

The postponed residency of the OPERA Ensemble was held both onsite and virtually at The Watermill Center in Long Island, NY. I engaged in the one-month residency from Tokyo, Japan. Using alternative scores we created, we performed and embodied multiple sites as a collective and one site for each body, investigating the intersections and designs of locations of each of the voices, sounds, bodies, visuals, and technical and theatrical sets. We experienced/communicated with objects and their backgrounds to the extent we could study, and we engaged in interdisciplinary discussions and storytelling, which took the forms of sending letters, sharing and engaging in bodily exercises, and music makings and drawings. Onsite members also engaged in multiple workshops, collaborations, and field trips. Weekly checking-ins were also parts of the communications with the coordinators and another artist-in-residence Candace Hill at The Watermill Center. In the middle of our residency, we presented our work-in-process on April 24. 

Here, I kept track of my work during the residency.

Bugs say they will eat it all. No, bugs, it is returned.

May 31 2021

Composition title: Bugs say they will eat it all. No, bugs, it is returned. 
Documentation of a performance; mixed media art
Composition and performance by Aine E. Nakamura  
Place: Tokyo, Japan
Duration: 05:00

This project was commissioned by The Association for the Promotion of New Music through the APNM Masked Music Commissions. My inspiration was my own bodily experience I had had for several years. The media of voices, with which I perform in the latter half of this work, are voices I recorded a few days after a surgery at a hospital and soon after I went back home for a continuing recovery process in 2020, when my movements were limited. Looking at sometimes only curtains, and other times, spiders and leaves, and listening to the loud sounds of cicadas, I was connected to my self and the time flow of a day and a night, which were crucial parts of my life and survival. In this performance, of which structure I created out from words I wrote, I perform, in my recovered body, where I walk every morning during the pandemic period, and where I dreamed of reaching during my recovery process, speaking to insects in the late spring. I embody how I feel one with the environment, each life and death including me being on the same level. The video work will be presented through The Association for the Promotion of New Music.

Bugs know 

about the firefly or the dream 

They say they will eat it all 

No, bugs, it will become the particle 

that shines and disappears 

The light from 

a seed or small leaf

虫タチはクッてくれるという

いや虫よ　あの光にしたいのだよ

パッと

光り消える

実や木の葉から発せられる粒に

Circle hasu art of voice and body

Composition title: Circle hasu 
Performance and video work 
Composition and performance by Aine E. Nakamura 
Place: Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
Duration: 27:00 (duration of the excerpt: 04:48)

The main performance work of the ongoing project Circle hasu was documented on March 18 2020 at Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts in New York City by videographer Jeffrey Yoon. This video work was presented at Earth Day Art Model 2020, and received The Honorable Mention Award for the 2020 Pauline Oliveros New Genre Prize, the International Alliance for Women in Music.
I further presented my lecture-recitals, "Voice as Body, Voice and Body" at the Music and Movement Virtual Conference, which took place January 22-24 2021 at University of Pittsburgh, and at The Penn State 2021 New-Music Festival and Symposium, March 19-20; and "Circle hasu: My Art of Voice and Body" at The 2021 McGill Music Graduate Symposium, March 12-14, at the Schulich School of Music. I performed Circle hasu, and showed several examples of my transborder art of voice and body: my idiosyncratic performance grammar; and possibilities of switching between “voice as body” and “voice and body.” I also discussed about site- and time-specificity in telling stories about different places from different time through my site-specific presence with and of my woman's body.

For the whole work and description, please see HERE.

Circle hasu Solo Exhibition

link to Gallatin Galleries

The postponed exhibition will be held from July 16 2021 until August 13 2021: details to be announced soon
Performance on Mar 30 2020 mon 6pm 
Performative installation everyday, and sound & poetry Installation: Mar 25 wed - Apr 1 wed (closed on Sunday)

Project title: Circle hasu
Performance, and poetic, sound and daily performative installation
Composition, production and performance by Aine E. Nakamura
Place and curation: Gallatin Galleries 1 Washington Place, 1st floor, New York

For more about this ongoing project, please see HERE.