We plant seeds in the spring of mountains
July 16 – August 13, 2021
Performances on Friday, July 16 @ 2pm; Monday, July 19 @ 5:30pm (including an Introductory Talk); Wednesday, July 21 @ 1:15pm*; Friday, July 23 @ 2pm; Monday, July 26 @ 5:30pm (Main Performance); & Wednesday, July 28 @ 1:15pm
*Because it rained on the 21st, the artist will present the performance from the 21st at 1pm on July 28 before her final performance at 1:15pm.
The performances can be viewed from the sidewalk of the Gallatin Galleries.
“Let’s plant seeds in the spring of mountains.” That is what my friend said from a hospital which she was about to leave for a mountainside area where she grew up, to start her new chapter in life. She has connected activists and professors in Tokyo as an editor and president of a publishing company she created. She is now taking care of her body while doing her small-scale home side agriculture and visiting a hospital for a therapy.
Several years ago, another friend of mine and I had a special meal at a place surrounded by thick green summer mountains. Each dish was cooked with care. The meal was a gift from my friend before my travel. We went to the sea until the hour of my bus’s arrival. She prepared a small tent on a beach. We meditated in it. When our meditation was about to finish, a white mist approached us, a rare mist from the mountains. Out from the tent, we were in the clouds of mist. It was a gift from the sky to us.
In 2020, I had a complex surgery and went through a several-month long recovery process. I had difficulties, for example, turning my body to the left, going to a rest room, or walking. In my recovery, of which speed, progression or recession changed every day, I would focus on one or two things each day. I would look outside the window, and hear and feel how voices of cicadas and the season change hourly. I was separated from the virtual world but connected to my idea of nature, and moreover to myself. There is the sky, a tree, and me. I would just be in the moment and my body, one with the wider cosmos through a smaller focus, until I myself fly up to the crescent moon and become the moon.
My idea of nature, i.e., that I am a part of the wider cosmology, natural phenomena, and beings has helped me in New York. I was living with symptoms and created my art from and with the body. I wished to talk about stories of nature through art. I would walk by a river every morning and saw a squirrel. The squirrel was eating a nut; next time I saw the squirrel, it had passed away and was lying with its body at full length. I would see how the squirrel’s body being wrapped in soil and leaves as time passed. The scenery I saw became a part of my stories of my everyday lives of maintaining my health.
These are stories of one woman who is in front; these are not “oriental” foreign stories. Would I be able to overcome orientalism and judgment based on how I may be looked or how I use two languages, and offer my art, this art by one being of this earth? The answer would not be yes. However, I myself would be able to overcome them—I nurture my transnational complexity and ambiguity, and the multiple stories I have held and will live with.
In March 2020, in the midst of uncertainty and the beginning of the rapid growth of the pandemic, I documented my work Circle hasu, which is about nature, my view of animism, peace, and my embodiment of my woman’s body, twice back of Gallatin Galleries in front of videographer Jeffrey Yoon. I was holding a fear; I was verbally attacked in the subway right before the documentation as I have had many times but this time in a different level. My voice as my body was full of fear. In the second take however, I chose kindness.
By myself choosing kindness instead of the then physical sensation, my body was healed. It was a life-saving choice, I now feel.
I have experienced the contexts of my body being changed every time I cross the border. I was called a “Jap” and “shrimp” in the Pacific Northwest where I was born and spent my first childhood, however supported by my babysitter Ellen who was also a Japanese American waiting for the apology from the government for the incarceration of her family; and then, I was called someone from America, the enemy country, from the elderly and teachers at my elementary school in Japan. I am, in fact, not only because I have been a quasi person anywhere in the world, but because of my own evolvement, a Being who holds artistic and intellectual space, and who cannot be defined in any one disciplinary or cultural frame. I create my art in my hope to care for and connect with inner selves and to find more for our new grammar that can embrace delicate multiple stories. It is this decision that I make through my art.
My inner-ness, kindness, mystery, and self cannot be touched by any one, and I know—through my body in hospital and recovery, and through my self-healing against hatreds meaning being hated through unjustified discrimination but loved by myself—that I am the only one who can protect and nurture them, and so as everybody else. Resilience. A space to listen to the inner, and to recover each day, each hour, listening to our bodies and hearts, for our beings, in this circle of the whole cosmos.
for Circle hasu: We plant seeds in the spring of mountains
What formal details do I choose or not choose? What grammar do I create or not create? What cultural context do I evoke or not evoke? I pursue sensibility and spirituality as my aesthetics through a focus on the nuanced possibilities of my voice. My voice is of and with my body. I am a singer, and I am song itself.
Aine E. Nakamura (MA ’20) is a singer, composer and performer. Through the interactive approach toward space, time, nature, and humanity, she aims to connect herself and audience with inner self, with a hope to see ways of life in beings, and relations. Her transborder works drawing upon sensibility and spirituality are practices that show resilience against violence.
Her appearances for her solo performances and installations include the New York Public Library for Performing Arts, A Concert of Electronic Music in honor of Mario Davidovsky, and Dias de Música Electroacústica in Lisbon. Premieres and collaborative performance of her compositions include NYCEMF with cellist Madeleine Shapiro, the October New Music Festival in Finland for and with MikroEnsemblen, and The Unseen World for and with ICE at the Abrons Arts Center. Her other appearances include The Two directed by Dmitry Krymov (project for New York Theater. Workshop). She has produced collaborative projects, Listening to Nature, and Exploration in Sound and Body. Artist-in-Residence at The Watermill Center for OPERA Ensemble. Winner of the APNM 2019 Electronic Music Competition, and awardee of the Leo Bronstein Homage Award (NYU) and The Honorable Mention Award for the 2020 Pauline Oliveros New Genre Prize.
Composer pioneer Annea Lockwood commented on Nakamura’s work: Circle hasu,
“Its intense vulnerability and the beautiful layering of voices—distant, close, together with [her] movements, flowing
was very moving.”
Visit her website here.
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