Alumnus Taka Yamamoto's New Performances and Commissions
September 27, 2019
Coming off a September lecture at LeRoy Neiman Center at School of Art Institute of Chicago, Takahiro Yamamoto, MFA Visual Studies alumnus, will present the performance, Property of Opaqueness, at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle on Sunday October 6. Performers include Roland Dahwen, Rana San, and Yamamoto.
The day before, Saturday October 5, Seattle's Henry Art Gallery present Property of Visibility, an artist-led discussion by Takahiro Yamamoto
Recently, the Portland Art Museum was awarded an Oregon Community Foundation Creative Heights grant in the amount of $75,000 to produce Yamamoto's Opacity of Performance, a new collaborative performance that investigates the questions: what are the social consequences of looking at the dancing body today; how do visibility and invisibility validate or negate the performance and the dancer?
Yamamoto's practice takes shape in group or solo performance, installation, photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and writing. Recent performances include Direct Path to Detour (2017) and Hanging River (2019), and Say When was a collaborative performance festival by Physical Education and Pidzn Club: an art project centered around Asian diasporic future.
Originally from Shizuoka Japan, Yamamoto is an artist and choreographer based in Portland, Oregon. His approach to choreography is interpersonal and observational. He starts conceptual investigations with a question -currently about ontology of performance, mutability of identity, and social implication of gaze- as he invites collaborators to bring their own perspectives into the creation. Yamamoto has received support from National Performance Network, Japan Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and danceWEB Scholarship Program, among others. Both his performance productions and visual art works have been presented at Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), PICA (Portland), Diverseworks (Houston), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), GoDown Arts Centre (Nairobi), and others. Yamamoto holds an MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He co-directs the performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.