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 with curator Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin) worked together 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 establish its role facilitating AAPI Dancers from Chicago will present their own new experimental pieces, exploring the expression of 'self'.

From left to right: Chih-hsien Lin, Ray Nakazawa, and Ayako Kato

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

• Chih-Hsien Lin

  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.

• Ray Nakazawa

  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.

• Ayako Kato

  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