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A Remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By August 10, 2019August 12th, 2019No Comments

In this piece, artist Irene Hsiao walks us through her ensemble’s recent dance performance at the Annual August 6th Remembrance of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—a gathering of activists from environmental, nuclear nonproliferation, and anti-war organizations. Her dance, as well as the songs and poems also reflecting on nuclear catastrophe, demonstrates how artistic expression can illuminate, activate, validate, and interrogate our feelings about global crises that are often overwhelming without the aid of art. The Futures Design Challenge encourages teams to think about how such performances and displays can move people to action, and it welcomes out-of-the-box solutions to the issue of climate change. Songs, poems, and dances are just as necessary as technological innovations to confront the future of our planet.

 

People gather to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki

We live in a world where information is not only readily available but constantly clamoring for an ever more fractured consciousness. Therefore perhaps the focus of activism today has shifted from disseminating information to driving its audience to receive, experience, understand, and act upon that information in an overwhelming churn of numbers and words.
The aim of the performance, “A Remembrance,” was to enact, to embody, and to activate; that is, to coordinate attention and intention, to inhabit our bodies in space together, to practice collaboration and responsibility. Performance is a time we agree to be in the same space and in the same time, consciously conspiring to create an alternate reality (Sarah Ruhl has written, “The theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake” (100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2014, p. 103) — while theater gives us an infrastructure for this practice, performance itself can create this imagined space of mutual consent). Guided by Henry Moore’s sculpture Nuclear Energy, installed in 1967 on the site where the first sustained nuclear chain reaction occurred 25 years before, we consider it as a work of art and as a reference to events of discovery and destruction that continue to evolve to the present day. Participants were invited to explore their personal responses to the work of art and to the event (the event contained by our performance, the hour-long event of the annual August 6 remembrance, the August 6 remembrance as a series, the dropping of the bomb in 1945, the discovery of the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942, the event of being today), as well as join coordinated actions to create a series of lived moments referring to time, encounter, chain reaction, discovery, emotional processing, witness, and commentary in their own bodies and as an organized body of disparate humans in the particular space designed by Moore’s sculpture and the work that preceded it.
One thing that draws me to dance as an expression is the undeniable authenticity of the act: the dancing body is your body, the danced time is the exact time of your being, your actual heartbeats, your breath. You give your life to this moment, but the moment is also a part of your life — these actions really occurred. Thus it is possible for a single action to be true on several registers at once — as in this moment in the video ( 2:05 in the 3:43 video), literally a chain reaction, literally also individual bodies making contact to form a single body that breathes and exists, however temporarily, as a single being.