Program Order

There will be set changes between each piece and a short Q&A at the end of the show.

CHIH-HSIEN LIN | Open Diary: Shedding, Shredding, Forgetting

Duration: ~ 30 mins

An open diary, inviting the audience into a dream space to witness and be witnessed in experiences of love, longing  for and othering from home, forgetting, ambiguous loss, intimacy, rebirth, and reshaping memories. Private yet also public; personal yet also collective. The work weaves through movement, shadows, textiles, writings, and sounds in lighting up moments and paths where we can find our most precious and vulnerable selves.

** Audience is invited and encouraged to make fluid and evolving choices regarding their seating positions around the outside of the curtains during the piece. Audience is welcomed to not be confined in the original seating, options include standing up, lying down, peeking through, or quietly moving around as long as they don’t block other viewers or move the chairs. **

RAY NAKAZAWA | Respawn

Duration: ~30 mins

Conception, Dance, & Videography by Ray Nakazawa

Game Play by Fugo Nakazawa

Music by Kentaro SUZUKI

“Respawn” is a video game term that refers to “coming back to life”. In online First person Shooting battles, if a player is defeated, they are able to come back to life, and the game continues and restarts from a specific location.

This work draws from Ray’s original documentary piece “Jargon~shapes of things~” (streamed at the 2021 Bridge Dance Festival) and is a dance documentary depicting the daily life of  single mother Ray Nakazawa raising her son with an incurable disease.  In addition to this medical condition of nephrotic syndrome which he hasstruggled with since he was 3 years old, he is also unable to go to public school due to a social anxiety disorder.

It is an inevitable game, whether it is life or dance; almost dying many times, but then restarting over and over where you left off.

RAY NAKAZAWA & AYAKO KATO with Guest Artist SELINA TREPP | Persona

Duration: ~15 mins

Dance by Ray Nakazawa & Ayako Kato

Videolah by Selina Trepp

Recorded Music by Kenshi Yonezu

“Persona” is the celebration for strength in femininity and allowance to give your restless fighting spirit a break.

Production Team

Ale Chanti, Lighting and Sound

Giau Truong, Technical Director

About Bridge Dance Festival

The Bridge Dance Festival began in 2018 as the culmination of four years of Japanese-focused programming at Links Hall, including the National Performance Network Asian Exchange, Beyond the Box, and Links to Japan.

In 2019, producers Links Hall and Asian Improv aRts Midwest partnered with curator Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin) to maintain the mission of international cultural exchange and connection in the face of rising US nationalism and its aggressive political reality. The importance of global connections is inspired and supported by mutual respect for both cultural similarities and differences.

Now in its sixth year, Bridge Dance continues to facilitate collaboration among AAPI Dancers from Chicago, Japan, and Taiwan, who present their new experimental pieces exploring the expression of 'self'.

About the Artists

Chih-Hsien Lin, a native Taiwanese, is an independent movement artist, embodied thinker, and a clinical counselor specialized in somatic-based approaches. She currently works as a founding member and collaborator of IS/LAND (an Asian and Asian American identified performance collective group), a working artist with Khecari, and running her solo practice Embodied Way Psychotherapy for mental health services.

As an immigrant artist, Chih-Hsien works passionately with an integrative and authentic sense of self and movement directions. She forges continuous collaborations into inclusive embodiment and emotional experiences in her own being and dance making; her movement language and aesthetics reflect a rich cultural bearing from traditional Asian ethnic dances and martial arts to a vast array of somatic modern integrations. She creates circular worlds of kinesthesia, juxtaposition, and reflection, elucidating the subtlety, complexity, and fluidity of living.

Open Diary – 100th Day Offering is Chih-Hsien’s most recent dance brainchild, exploring the most common human experience of grief, Otherness, home, witnessing, blessings, and the intersection between language, movement, psychology, and human ecology. As a therapist, Chih-Hsien believes that trauma heals in relationships, and by engaging in embodied realities it can bring wholeness and truthfulness in processing pain and struggles. She also values the differences and uniqueness in people.

Dancer, director, and producer Ray Nakazawa started ballet and modern dance from an early age. She started presenting her works in her late teens at the Contemporary Dance Association of Japan. She organizes Orbitallink, an improvisational collective with musicians and other genres, and holds 20 raffle ‘improvisational battles’ around the world, including Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo, Paris, and Berlin, which is held throughout the year.

In the 2000s, she moved her base to Paris, France, and presented dance works that collaborate with video and technology. After returning to Japan in 2007, she moved to Mie Prefecture due to her child's illness. While conducting dance and yoga classes for people with mental and developmental disabilities, she began to question the imbalance and over-concentration of dance in Tokyo, and began performing dance in the context of social activities, architecture, welfare, and education, mainly in the Mie Prefecture.

Described as “moving everyday sculptures, artfully cast in naturalness” (Luzerner Zeitung, Switzerland), Ayako Kato, 2023 United States Artist Fellow, is a kinetic philosopher/poet, originally from Yokohama, Japan. Since 1998, Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape has been pursuing contemporary experimental dance/choreography/improvisation in deep collaboration with over 82 musicians and composers, presenting in Europe, Japan, and the US.

Advocating the principles of fūryū, Japanese for “wind flow,” constant ever changing cyclical transformation and human motion in nature, Ayako creates solo, ensemble pieces, and movement installations for traditional stages and large scale site-specific locations. In 2024, Ayako's epic outdoor and indoor socially-engaged work,  ETHOS IV: Degrowth/Cycle Rebirth, premiered at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago and the Grant Park in collaboration with Chicago Park District supported by the Sybil Shearer Fellowship at Ragdale 2024, a 2023 National Dance Project (NDP) Grant Finalist Award, A. Montgomery Ward Foundation, and beyond.

In fall 2024, Ayako is invited to perform as a part of the Black Air exhibition curated by Amelia LiCavoli at the Casino Luxembourg Forum d'art contemporain, commemorating a 1968 electronic environment of video and pneumatics by Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene. Ayako is also the mother of a teenager. 

ayakokatodance.com

Selina Trepp (Swiss/American, b. 1973) is an artist researching economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is a goal. “If in doubt be radical” is the best advice she ever got. 

She works across media, combining performance, installation, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups that result in photos, drawings and animations. 

In addition to the studio-based work, Selina is active in the music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer combined with her video exploder to create projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina, her long running audiovisual collaboration with Dan Bitney.

About Asian Improv Arts Midwest

Asian Improv aRts Midwest’s (AIRMW) mission is to build a vital, self-empowered Asian American Community in the Chicago area by advancing the understanding and profile of Asian American cultures through the traditional and contemporary cultural arts.

AIRMW is grounded in an understanding of tradition as an aesthetic lineage. AIRMW believes that Asian American artists represent and offer something more than a simple image of tradition and culture. Their resident artists are part of a legacy that one is born into or dedicates truly a lifetime to and as such is an immensely valuable and irreproducible experience. In an effort to continue preserving these experiences that only express themselves through the non-canonized pedagogical model, AIRMW offers training sessions in lieu of "classes" that are more applicable to folk art and craft histories. They recognize however, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve this form of rigidity of pedagogy, even in the classical arts, and especially in the US. But AIRMW believes there is a way to retain the aesthetic and philosophical principles that still can flourish within the contemporary world.

AIRMW’s artistry is founded in the preservation of a philosophy that is rooted in traditional performing, musical and visual arts: the aesthetic lineage. AIRMW artists are more than just craftsmen or artisans, but artists who can recontextualize the practical applications of our technical expertise to create new and contemporary works relevant to the current cultural landscape. To do this, one must understand the underlying aesthetics of what makes a work "traditionally Japanese" or "traditional," and it is this philosophy that AIRMW continues to share through taiko, nihon-buyou and shamisen. 

Through their in-house programs and collaborative projects, AIRMW is dedicated to creating productive relationships with artists, communities and institutions. They continually strive to maintain the responsibility of professionalism as part of cultural preservation by producing high quality arts programs that accurately reflect the multicultural, multi-ethnic reality of Chicago and the nation.

About Links Hall

For 46 years, Links Hall has played a pivotal role in Chicago, encouraging artistic innovation and public engagement by maintaining a facility and providing flexible programming for the research, development, and presentation of new work in the performing arts. Founded in 1978 by experimental choreographers, Bob Eisen, Carol Bobrow, and Charlie Vernon, Links became a National Performance Network partner in 1998 and received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2016. Links Hall supports multidisciplinary artists through residencies, festivals, subsidized rentals, and other resources for performers at every stage of their career.

Links Hall programming is made possible by artists, audiences, and support from: Arts Midwest GIG Fund, Association of Performing Arts Professionals, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, Exelon, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Heather B. Henson Fund/Puppet Slam Network, Illinois Arts Council Agency, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, National Performance Network, The Charlie Vernon Performance Fund at the Evanston Community Foundation, The Jentes Family Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Fund for Culture, Equity, and the Arts at Prince, The Martha Struthers Farley & Donald C. Farley, Jr. Family Foundation, The Prince Charitable Trust, Robert R. McCormick Foundation, and The Weasel Fund.

STAFF

Aaliyah Christina, Artist Programs Manager & Associate Curator

SK Kerastas, Executive Director

Mario LaMothe, General Manager

Dana Pepowski, Programs Associate

Giau Truong, Production Manager & Associate Curator

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Amy Chavasse - Artistic Director of Chavasse Dance & Performance; Professor at University of Michigan

Jane Beachy - Artistic Director of Illinois Humanities

Kim Davis - ALJP Consulting; former Senior Director of Education at Old Town School of Folk Music

J’Sun Howard - U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Fellow; Professor at Northwestern University

Ross Stanton Jordan - Curatorial Manager of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

Susan Manning - Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University

Trevor Martin -  Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at SAIC

Dan Nichols - Former Associate Dean for Finance in Social Sciences & Associate Dean for Operations in Humanities at the University of Chicago

Jon Pagac - Executive Director at J.P.Morgan

Tina Post - Assistant Professor of English and Theater and Performance Studies & affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago

Doreen Sayegh - Producer & General Manager with Pemberley Productions

Michael Tokoph - Associate Director of Product Strategy at Huge

Patrick Zakem - Creative Producer at Steppenwolf Theatre Company

ADVISORY BOARD

Cheryl Lynn Bruce - Actor, Playwright, Director, and Ensemble Member of Teatro Vista

Bob Eisen - Co-Founder of Links Hall

E. Aaron Greven - Owner of AG Design Works

Tracie D. Hall - Former Executive Director of the American Libraries Association

Maggie Kast - Author and Founder of Chicago Contemporary Dance Theatre

Meida McNeal - Director of Honey Pot Performance and Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Grants and Resources at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events

Eva Silverman - Project Director at Art Design Chicago

Claire Sutton - Former Director of Special Events at Links Hall

Blair Thomas - Founder and Artistic Director of Chicago International Puppetry Festival

Michael Zerang - Musician and Former Links Hall Director