Internment camps at heart of ‘Life Interrupted’
Seventy-five years ago, after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor and led America into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a decree that many Americans may have deemed necessary to national security.
With Executive Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast — 62 percent of whom were U.S. citizens — were forcibly relocated to 10 detention camps across the country in 1942. They lived in barracks with minimal rations and curfews, some performing hard labor until the last camp was closed four years later.
That chilling chapter of history, a flagrant violation of civil liberties, inspired Core Dance’s “Life Interrupted,” an hourlong show coming to the Asia Society Texas Center’s theater Friday and Saturday.
Artistic director Sue Schroeder said she and her dancers were initially concerned with “how not to appropriate” from a culture other than their own — none of them are Japanese or even lived during the World War II era. The idea surfaced nearly a decade ago during a break from another project at the University of Central Arkansas, where Core frequently collaborates. On their way to see the Crystal Bridges museum, Schroeder and professor Gayle Seymour passed near one of the former camps.
“Life Interrupted” premiered in Arkansas in 2015 as “Gaman” — drawing its title from a Japanese word for accepting what happens to you with grace and dignity.
It might have ended there, but the dance company was at the Little Rock airport that November when news broke that terrorists had attacked a concert hall, stadium and restaurants in Paris, adding fuel to their own era’s wave of Islamaphobia. They realized all the ways their show, which incorporates visual art and a commissioned score, would resonate.
“It has a broader message than the Japanese internment camps,” Schroeder said. “And it’s escalated. The urgency has changed.”
With visual art by Nancy Chikaraishi, an architecture professor at Drury University, a set by Scott Silvey, sound by German composer Christian Meyer, lighting by Gregory Catellier, and costumes and projections by D. Patton White, the show is also deeply researched. Schroeder hired dramaturg Erin Weller Dalton to mine archives for oral histories that would provide culturally sensitive anecdotes and suggest movement possibilities.
Ultimately, “Life Interrupted” shares multiple points of view, through multiple artistic disciplines, to open a dialogue about how we define and treat the “other” in our society,” Schroeder said.
Core, founded in Houston in 1980, has free rehearsal space in Atlanta but still performs frequently at “home” and tours internationally. They head next to France to present their meditative outdoor show “walk,” originally created for the Freedman’s Town Labyrinth with Houston artist Reginald Adams and storyteller Jay Stailey.
During the process of building that piece, the dancers created movement inspired by a text exercise involving the Pledge of Allegiance. The show “walk” invites participation from viewers, and it, too, now seems more overtly political.
In the southern French city of St. Antonin Noble Val, Core will employ “walk” to help show other artists ways to work with refugees. Then, in Toulouse, Syrian refugees will participate.
“We don’t create in bubbles,” Schroeder said. “Art has the possibility of igniting empathy.
“We’ve finally hit a place where we don’t have time to waste. We’ve been doing socially activated work a long time, and now it’s like we have to do it.”