Topsham couple’s Bates Dance Festival performance draws inspiration from kabuki, punk rock and their 7-year-old child

Aretha Aoki, 44, is a choreographer, performer, and educator from Vancouver, British Columbia. She is an associate professor of dance at Bowdoin College. Ryan MacDonald, 47, is a multimedia artist and writer from Kansas City, Missouri. They are partners and collaborators and now live in Topsham.

This summer, they’ll be performing “IzumonookunI” at the Bates Dance Festival. The dance is inspired by the founder of kabuki, a 17th-century form of Japanese dance theater, and reimagined in a contemporary post-punk landscape. They took a few minutes out of their prep to answer five questions about their work. This interview has been edited for length.

What do you think is the most inspiring, but also the most stimulating, aspect of teamwork?

OK: Creating is very isolating. It can feel really lonely. For me, having a built-in partner to bounce ideas off of is so wonderful. It brings us closer together in so many ways. We’re trying to create something we’ve never done before. There’s something about having someone else alongside you that, beyond challenging your own habits and the way you perceive things, can actually destroy the work you’re doing and create something new from it. It’s so wonderful.

MacDonald: Yeah, it really helps with creativity. If you ever start to feel stuck as an artist, you have the other person to, you know, stir up the creative process, then it really starts to blossom. I think we get along maybe better when we’re working together, which is most of the time, honestly. We’re always working on something.

Can you tell me a little about the piece you will be performing at the festival this year?

OK: We are showing a work called “IzumonookunI.” That’s the name of the founder of kabuki. Her name was Izumo no Okuni. It’s interesting to think that the genesis of our work has several origins, and it’s not always true that there’s just one, but a special moment for us was watching a BBC documentary about kabuki, which focused on this current kabuki superstar, a man. In passing, they mention the founder of kabuki. That’s when we looked at each other and thought, “How come we didn’t know that kabuki was a woman who founded this form that is primarily and almost exclusively male?”…

One of Ryan’s early influences is punk rock and music from different genres. We thought about how kabuki started with a group of women – most of them potentially prostitutes and social outcasts – there was something countercultural about that genre. It was very different from the high art of Noh theater at the time. We don’t know much about kabuki. We mostly looked at a fiction book called “Kabuki Dancer” by Sawako Ariyoshi. It’s a fictional account of kabuki written by a Japanese author in the 60s. Potentially, “kabuki” is what people called the dance, and one definition of that is “strange and indecent.” So it was labeled as weird and strange, and that was very much in keeping with the ethos of punk rock.

How did you decide to include your 7-year-old daughter, Frankie, in the work? How do you experience this as parents and as artists?

OK: We made it work—I don’t know if we were in lockdown, but we were at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic and isolation. We got this show through a platform of New England Dance Now and the ICA in Boston, and Frankie hadn’t had a babysitter in a very long time, and to be honest, we didn’t use a lot of babysitters. … We asked her, “Should we try to find someone, or would you like to be in the show?” She said she would like to be in the show.

MacDonald: Back then, she would just sit at my feet on this big soft cushion, and that was it.

OK: And a lot of people noticed her. Everyone was like, “Wow, she has this really insightful, amazing way of looking at the audience.” But the most important thing for us was that she loved doing it. She was really excited to do it. When the opportunity to show her work came up again, she was really excited to do the same thing.

MacDonald: There was this rehearsal where she rode Aretha on stage like a horse, like a child and her mother would. And we both thought, oh, that’s such a cool image. And she just stayed put.

OK: It’s hard being a parent and an artist and having a job and all these other things, and I feel really lucky to have a space where all of that can come together. … And she’s part Japanese. I’m from Vancouver, which has a very large Asian population, and I’m far away from my birth family. So we can bring a little bit of that to her, and she can be a part of it, which is really huge.

You’re bringing in members of Sawagi Taiko, Canada’s first all-female taiko drumming group, from Vancouver. How did this collaboration begin and what does their presence add to the performance and story?

OK: I miss home and my family and the communities that live there. I think there was this question: How do we connect to Vancouver? And there’s a festival that I was very involved in, the Powell Street Festival, both as an organizer, programmer and artist from the beginning. It’s a Japanese-Canadian arts and culture festival that was created with money from the reparations paid by the interned Japanese. I grew up going to that festival and watching Sawagi was a part of it. I’m very close to them as members of that original community. I reached out to see if there was an opportunity – I felt like we needed to broaden the scope a little bit. I felt like we couldn’t just have two women, that we really wanted to have other Asian women on stage.

MacDonald: And sonically it was about balancing that contemporary sound with a more traditional sound, and they really bring that.

Why did you feel it was important to tell this story in 2024?

OK: For me, there’s this hunger to disrupt the way we generally perceive Asian women, who are still passive, submissive or certainly not enterprising, and who are at the origin of a cultural form that UNESCO now considers to be a form of global importance. I’ve never heard of it, and there’s always something about erasure, which bothers me to hear about people being erased or not getting the recognition they deserve.

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