DANMite,Thesis Performance Information
Dedokoro
(n,vs) (1) release (discharge) from prison; exit; point of departure; time to take action
Title: Dedokoro
Date: Sunday, June 3rd
Time: 6:30 pre-show photo exhibit in the Experimental Theater
7:00 performance (there will be no late seating.)
Location:UC Santa Cruz’s Theater Arts Department’s Experimental Theater
Cost: Free (seating limited)
Contact: Alan Tollefson: ABTOLLEF@UCSC.EDU
Press Release:
05/21/07 Santa Cruz, California.
New Media Artist Alan Tollefson is presenting his masters thesis performance that uses, as its text, haiku poetry written behind barbed wire during WWII. The unlawful detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans was a grave injustice. Is history repeating itself?
On Sunday, June 3rd at 7:00 p.m., in the Experimental Theater of UC Santa Cruz, Theater Arts Department performers will interact with twelve feet square mobile projection screens displaying photographs taken by Tollefson over the last three years at four internment camp sites. Blended with the contemporary images will be contentious footage of propaganda films released during the war as well as clips from the interviews Tollefson conducted with former internees. The original music of Simon Hutchinson will be played live during the performance. The music Hutchinson composed for the performance will be in the style of Japanese folk music played on American folk instruments: percussion, banjo, and the musical saw.
The inspiration for Dedokoro, Tollefson says, comes from the poets themselves. “I was amazed by the Japanese American haiku poets bearing witness to the injustice of their incarceration. If waiting is the lot of the poor and powerless, then haiku vitalizes the present moment as a symbol of hope and an antidote for dehumanizing rhetoric.”
The performance employs four video projectors to display images on four different screens that are made of a material that allows the actors to be seen through them. The screens function as a piece of architecture that confines and determines the performer's freedom to move through the performance space. It is also a comment on how media surrounds us and creates points of view. The imagery is a fast paced photomontage of the images Tollefson collected in his research. By creating shifting
frames, this style of presentation intends to show how the photograph is inadequate in recording history. The performer's program consists mainly of gesture to convey meaning and communicate different modes of verbal and nonverbal language. Costumes are worn as another sort of gesture that suggest the performative roles we play in society.
Bio: Alan Tollefson is a graduate student in the Digital Art and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz. He received his bachelors degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he focused on performance. In the last ten years he has written several short plays and produced a short two-act play entitled Mk Ultra. He has also worked as a carpenter, properties master and scenic designer in theaters in Sacramento and has been the master carpenter for the Theater Arts Department at UCSC. As a graduate student, Tollefson has focused on performance research and digital technologies on stage. Specific areas of research include Japanese American internment camp haiku, rhetoric and intersubjectivity. Research trips in the course of his graduate studies consisted of traveling to the historic internment camp locations of Heart Mountain, Tule Lake, Rohwer, and Jerome. In the last three years while conducting research, he has taken over 5000 digital images and conducted over ten hours of videotaped interviews.