YOSHIKO CHUMA SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

Since 1980, Yoshiko Chuma’s work has been presented under the moniker The School of Hard
Knocks, a container for a wide array of collaborators which is as variegated as its audience. In
Kinetic Mirrors Portraits and Beyond Vol. III, Chuma and company use movement, text, sound,
film, and props to respond to the current horrors of the war in Gaza, offering no solutions, but
orchestrating provocations towards action.

Over the course of the evening, Chuma directed the work in real time, cueing like a conductor,
even going so far as to enter into performers’ spaces to pull out desired qualities. The resulting
structure was a cyclical assemblage in two acts, punctuated by Nicky Paraiso crooning in the
dark. His selections, including “Stormy Weather” and “Que Sera, Sera” fashioned a cushion of
nostalgia that equally delivered pangs of helplessness in the midst of global turmoil.

Chuma’s dancers functioned as ghostly stewards of Theaterlab, each operating within idiomatic
motifs. Miriam Parker was broad and statuesque, Kathryn Ray stretched in hopeful curiosity,
Wendy Perron swatted at herself, Jeremy Nelson took precarious stances that toppled into new
configurations, and Yang Sun and Rosa Wolff folded and crumpled in capricious dynamic shifts.
Periodically, Tim Clifford stepped in, reading messages written to Chuma from Palestinian
dancer Noora Baker, providing first-hand accounts of life in the Middle East since October 7.

Clifford, a white man, did his best with the text, but was palpably uncomfortable reading the
increasingly devastating account. The awkwardness was counterintuitively satisfying as a
microcosm of facing harsh realities intimately, removed from the filters of media frenzies.
The experience was enhanced by visual elements – projections of Godzilla and a film on the
nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, putting Gaza in conversation with Nagasaki and Hiroshima with the
aid of relentless soundbites of blasts woven between Jason Hwang’s effect laden fiddling.

Clifford contributed a collection of wooden milk bottles and taped balls strewn about the floor.
As Chuma promenaded a safety mirror to implicate us into the conversation, she never
disturbed the props, even as she channeled Godzilla in traversing the space with heavy, boot-
clad footfalls.

Kinetic Mirrors is an exercise in constructive fragmentation – decontextualizing source material
to expose a constancy of violence through history. A message from Baker states that art is how
the soul achieves freedom against oppression. Chuma stirs our souls in pitting art as activism
against war as entertainment.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY–Jonathan Matthews-Guzman