KEEPING TRADITIONS ALIVE
Festival celebrates Japanese culture
A great way to keep an ancient tradition alive and well is make it appeal to a modern audience. One way to do that is to get it into a blockbuster comic-book movie and another is to show it off at a popular public event.
Japanese calligraphy artist Kisyuu has both of those tactics covered. Living in Vancouver since 2007, the Japanese native saw her calligraphy art appear on a wall during the Yakuza scene in the Ryan Reynolds’ film Deadpool 2.
“That was really cool to see. I love the movie,” said Kisyuu, who took International Studies at the University of B.C. and currently works as a student-information support person at UBC.
While the Deadpool 2 nod is pretty great, the art in the film is static and Kisyuu’s artistic passion is not. For her calligraphy is performance art.
Kisyuu will be showing off her skills during the 42nd annual Powell Street Festival on Aug. 4-5 in Vancouver. A celebration of all things Japanese the festival is a Downtown Eastside tradition that this year boasts over 50 acts, including international guests from Japan, Taiwan and New Mexico.
At the mainstage area in Oppenheimer Park, there will be 24 food vendors and 34 craft vendors.
Kisyuu’s creative road began as a seven-year-old. She learned calligraphy from a “grandma,” but once she hit high school a thinkoutside-of-the-box teacher helped her to expand her vision of the ancient art form.
“I discovered it wasn’t just a showcase of the abstract beauty of lines, but a way of self-expressing, so I thought maybe performance (art) would be perfect to showcase to people how I’m feeling and share this self-expression,” said Kisyuu, who often creates collaborations with other artists, dancers and musicians.
For her performance Kisyuu cranks the music and brings out the big canvases and big brushes.
“People are like, ‘Oh, wow. That is quite different than what I expected,’ ” said Kisyuu, who this time will be working to pre-recorded music.
In the past, she has been a vendor at that festival selling her work and doing on-the-spot commissions.
“I think for me it is so important to be there and expose people, all kinds of people, to calligraphy because calligraphy is very old and a very important Japanese cultural art,” said Kisyuu, adding that it was fading from view in Japan as people started to type more.
Enter her high-energy art, and an old dog has some much-needed new tricks.
“It’s good to have tradition to preserve and keep, but also it is good to have change,” said Kisyuu, who has done a bunch of corporate workshops for big names like Microsoft, Shiseido, Toyota and Netflix. “Even if people can’t understand what I am writing it is OK. That is one of the things the performance does. Even if you are not familiar with the Japanese language, I want people to still feel the excitement. Look at the brush movement and how it is dancing.”
For four-plus decades the Powell Street Festival has celebrated Japanese culture and more importantly exposed it to others. Last year, 17,000 people showed up for the two-day, annual event and organizers expect even more folks out this year.
“People are recognizing the need to celebrate identity and culture, and our festival does work hard to be inclusive,” said Powell Street Festival artistic director Leanne Dunic. “All the programming is free, so there shouldn’t be barriers to attendance.”
For a festival to last as long as this one has is quite an accomplishment. It takes clever curating and people, all kinds of people, to maintain this level of success.
To say fish played an important role in the lives of the First Nations of the Northwest Coast is gross understatement. No other food source was as vital to community survival as what came out of the ocean.
Over millennia, a complex and highly specialized technology was developed to achieve greater success in fishing, and the late Hilary Stewart documented this in detail in this book, originally published in 1977.
Forty years later, the material that she compiled about hooks, lures, sinkers and so forth makes for fascinating reading. Consulting with elders, workers at fish camps and with museum staff, the explanations of how to make such things as large bentwood hooks could provide no end of home projects to try. The book also digs deeper into the experience of fishing to coastal peoples, focusing on ceremony, art and other cultural practices.
From the Tlingit myth recounted by the late Billy Wilson Senior of Hoonah, Alaska, that opens the text to its assorted historical images, this is fascinating material. But the heart of the book is certainly the meticulous hand-drawn illustrations of everything from the Northern halibut hook to the complex reef nets used during salmon spawning season.
In the days before easy computer graphics, everything from cookbooks to construction manuals used to be illustrated this way, and there is a folksiness to it that just adds for the appreciation of this book. Stewart also mined archives for some excellent photos.
Images such as whole salmon drying in the warm winds of the Fraser Canyon is something you can also experience right now. Such is the case with many of the methods described in Indian Fishing. A great deal of modern commercial fishing gear is designed using traditional technological knowledge for just this reason: when something works as well as these techniques did, you don’t mess with a good thing.
As for messing with traditions, it’s well documented how so much of the ceremony around opening different fishing seasons and harvest was impacted by government policies.
Thankfully, the prayers and practices which Stewart touches upon in the final sections of the book have survived and are honoured now.