Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Kitchen Theatre Company's KITCHEN COUNTER CULTURE series, featuring cutting-edge, outside-the-box work by guest artists from around the country, continues this month with a piece by Los Angeles performance artist Denise Uyehara. Uyehara will perform BIG HEAD for three performances only: February 29, March 1, and March 2. All performances will be followed by a talkback with the artist.

BIG HEAD revisits the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and considers current-day treatment of those perceived as "the enemy" now, including Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and South Asian Americans. A work that has been in the making since early 2001, this poetic, interdisciplinary performance offers up letters from Rohwer Internment Camp in Arkansas, responds to recent hate crimes and imprisonments, and considers the coalition-building between these various communities during times of crisis. A non-linear montage of images, clay animation, movement, and text, Big Head evokes the mysteriously winding path of collective memory and how we interpret our past to provide hope for the future.

BIG HEAD has been performed to excellent reviews in Los Angeles and New York City. The LA Times describes Uyehara as "a virtual conflation of Laurie Anderson and Myoshi Umeki" who "addresses imperiled democracy in the present war-shrouded landscape... [with] her signature fusion of impish humor, sober recollection and kinetic self-commentary." The LA Weekly called the piece "powerful, compelling, potent and deeply chilling." BIG HEAD was selected for performance at the National Asian American Theater Festival in New York City in June 2007.

Denise Uyehara is an interdisciplinary performance artist/writer/playwright whose work has been presented across the United States (the Walker Art Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space), and internationally (the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Dokkyo Performance Studies Conference and the Morishita Studio in Tokyo, the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, Women in View Festival in Vancouver). She was a founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, an all female, multi-ethnic, experimental performance collective that made waves, beginning with their first, all-nude, performance piece in 1994.

The recipient of numerous awards, Uyehara recently received a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council, a California Civil Liberties Public Education Program grant, and was a Poets & Writers 'Writer on Site' at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Beyond Baroque Literary Center. Uyehara teaches workshops in the community and has taught performance for the Dept. of World Arts & Cultures at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and for the Depts. of Asian American Studies and Studio Arts at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

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