Spring Child | 2024-ongoing

Spring Child is an abstract, process-based performance based on my paternal Japanese grandmother, whose name, Haruko, means child of the spring. The performance utilises my grandmother’s archival material from her calligraphy practice that spanned over 80 years of her life, before her passing in 2017. Working with her archival calligraphic scrolls, I examine how one’s identity is assembled through the collection of inherited cultural material that holds its own ambiguous truths and cannot be wholly understood. Through developing the work as a visual-performance-installation, using contemporary dance, improvisatory sound scores and elements of Japanese folk dance, ‘Spring Child’ seeks to answer how the body and its archive can be a form of intangible cultural heritage. 

By intertwining improvisatory video recordings of movement phrases from my personal archive with the tangible material of my paternal grandma, I wish to unpack the ways we have both held on to our own material practices, hers through a lengthy calligraphic legacy; and mine through a transient physical practice. More than simply looking at her work, I explore the experience of carrying material or immaterial objects with us, cultural responsibility, the conflict between holding on and letting go, and how this tension haunts us. These tensions are inextricable to a diasporic existence and the desire to maintain and archive generational knowledge as intangible cultural heritage, when living outside one’s traditional homeland. 

Above footage: Documentation of development of Spring Child

Spring Child development residency supported by the Leg Room Residency program at Legs on the Wall.

Reina Takeuchi - dance artist/concept & direction
Samuel Beazley - dance artist/collaborator
Yutaro Okuda - music artist/collaborator
Celine Cheung - visual artist
Tom Kentta - documentation/outside eye
Olivia Hadley - outside eye

Spring Child considers ways to work within and around concepts of family, asking the question: how can the body become a living vessel of culture, an embodied and breathing site of intangible cultural heritage? Specifically, through this development, we focussed on Zen Buddhist practices, through the spiritual and meditative significance of calligraphic gestures.

Over this time, we physically researched the oeuvre of my grandmother (Obāchan) through the remnants of her calligraphic practice – Japanese calligraphic scrolls that were stored away in my parents’ garage since 2017. Post my Obāchan’s death, my interest lies in the in-between spaces, between ceremonial practices and objects, as well as the gaps in knowledge that have passed through maternal lineage – through her hands to mine. In Japanese, the term for the in-between is known as ‘ma’ – the space between all things.