- Vancouver based dance artist

About

About

 

BIO

Erika Mitsuhashi is an interdisciplinary artist and performer living and working on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples, known as Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied at Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts receiving a BFA (hons) in dance.

She has had the pleasure of interpreting the work of dance artists including Justine A. Chambers, Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance), Sasha Kleinplatz (Wants&Needs Danse), Rob Kitsos, Vanessa Goodman (Action at a Distance) and Judith Garay (Dancers Dancing) in festivals and platforms such as Vancouver International Dance Festival, Dancing on the Edge Festival, Re-FUSE presented by the Vancouver Art Gallery and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival 2020.

Erika’s work has taken the form of performance for stage, installation, experimental film, site specific/responsive performance, scenography and projection design. Most recently she has been experimenting with live-stream video and digital spaces as sites for intimacy and choreography of attention.

Her work and collaborative projects have been presented locally and internationally by PAUL Studios Berlin, Powell Street Festival, Toronto Love-In’s PS:We are All Here series, Surrey Art Gallery’s InFlux, Kinetic Studio’s Open Studio Series, Shooting Gallery Performance Series, Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival and La Serre's OFFTA festival of live art. She has been supported by organizations including New Works, SummerWorks, VIVO Media Arts, plastic orchid factory, Dance West Network, Boca De Lupo, Theatre Replacement and Company 605 in the creation and development of her works to date.

Locally she engages with two diverse collaborative groups:
Mardon + Mitsuhashi and Erika Mitsuhashi & Francesca Frewer. 

 ARTIST STATEMENT

As a maker, my practice is based in dance and performance but spans visual art, theatre and new media. I use the body as a site for conceptual thematics including in-betweenness, intimacy, pseudo-science and personal histories, often utilizing DIY performance tactics and observing the materiality of bodies/space. I am committed to process, collaboration and my collaborators both living and non-human.

In process, I invite my collaborators to meet my curiosities with their curiosities and adopt a non-hierarchical lens to determine who or what can be a performer. I attempt to unravel new layers to understand what and where meaning making is happening. I work to unpack expertise and non-expertise and how to draw from both in creation and performance. I often work with structured improvisational scores and value real-time choice making. I think I am working on live-ness and presence by working with the gaze — drawing attention to the material present which encompasses bodies, the space, found objects, props, clothing, anything that is present and material. I work to reveal movement in unexpected places, by living and non-human performers.

I often implore philosophical and practical aims for shifting an environment into the space that one wants to be present and/or performing in. I hope to create a kind of respite space for performers and audiences to inhabit. I am thinking about respite in a broad sense, to have physical, psychic or emotional space and time to be with your body, with the materiality of a space, the emergent themes of a work and ultimately with the ever-shifting present.


 

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