Credit: Lula-Belle Jedynak at MORROW/Dumb Instrument Dance
Shion Skye Carter, Mayumi Lashrbook, Hitoko Okada
Threading Echoes
Continued performance creation: Shion Skye Carter, Mayumi Lashbrook
Film creation/performance: Shion Skye Carter, Mayumi Lashbrook, Hitoko Okada
Videography: Henry Mak
Music: Stefan Nazarevich
Past collaborators: Katie Cassady, Hina Nishioka, Wakana Shimamura, Prince Shima, and Sabrina Sachiko Niebler
Credit: Henry Mak
Shion Skye Carter, Mayumi Lashrbook, Hitoko Okada
Threading Echoes is a performance and movement film begun by Shion Skye Carter, Mayumi Lashbrook, and Hitoko Okada: three Japanese Canadian artists coming together from Vancouver, Toronto, and Hamilton.
The artists' movement and visual storytelling reach back in time to the Japanese cultural heritage craft of shifu (紙布) - a cloth woven from kami-ito (紙糸) which is made from washi paper (和紙). Community, belonging, and connecting to ancestral knowledge is what is woven into the cloth of this collaboration.
In the fast-paced, consumption-driven system that we are embedded in, taking time to communally produce cloth and sharing the embodied archive of these practices in a performative space becomes a work of resistance. With gentle gestures derived from the task-based movements involved in making kami-ito and shifu, and exploring elements of choreographic repetition and shadows, Threading Echoes is a reminder to release our hyper-stimulated nervous systems, and drop into embodied communal relationship.
We created the Threading Echoes film as guests in Tkaronto, on land that is Michi Saagig Nishnawbe territory, colonially known as Toronto. Tkaronto is covered by Treaty 13 between the Mississaugas of the Credit and the British Crown, and has also been occupied by other Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Wendat confederacies. We are grateful to be reconnecting to cultural heritage craft, and recognize the history of Indigenous peoples being denied their culture for centuries.
This project was created through the AGO x RBC Emerging Artists Program at the Art Gallery of Ontario, with support from Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and NEXT: New Dance in Development residency.
Oct 24-Nov 19, 2023
Artists-in-Residence at Kashiki-Seishi, Ino town, Kochi, Japan
with Mayumi Lashbrook and outside eye from Ayumi Hamada (Washi+ Dance Theater)
July 18-Oct 25, 2022
Artists-in-Residence at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON
Oct 8, 2022: Live performance at Walker Court in the Art Gallery of Ontario
Nov 29-Dec 15, 2021
Choreographer-in-Residence at NEXT: New Dance in Development, Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, Vancouver BC
Credit: Lula-Belle Jedynak at MORROW/Dumb Instrument Dance
Shion Skye Carter, Mayumi Lashrbook, Hitoko Okada
Credit: Lula-Belle Jedynak
Space: MORROW/Dumb Instrument Dance