In Reaching Out, Binding Together three presentations explore how we connect to each other and the world, and how and when we hold on and let go. A note about the venue: Masks must be worn at all times by audiences for public events and performances at CPR.
The Japanese Tea and Ritual Room is a presentation by Maho Ogawa that takes the form of an interactive performance installation which connects Japanese Tea Ceremony, Zen meditation, and personal ritual and aims to help people find peace through the custom and philosophy of Tea Rituals. Periodic activations performed by Ogawa with Annie Wang.
The layering of personal ritual is made through collaboration with the general public through a survey about personal rituals conducted at different times of day.
Members of the public are invited to join in person and to participate by filling out the Japanese Tea and Ritual Room Questionnaire.
Performances at 5:00 and 7:30 PM, installation on view 5-8 PM
A smiling person with straight chin-length hair wearing a white long-sleeved shirt with black stripes. She is looking down to the right.
About the Artist:
Maho Ogawa is a Japanese born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NYC since 2011. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated movements of the body that she has built a database, “Minimum Movement Catalog”. She uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.
Her recent works are in part decontextualizing and researching minimum movement found in Japanese tea ceremony rituals as well as cinema. She's currently working on public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new methods of thinking about “silence,” providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. The aim is to empower the erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as an archive and audience-participating event, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways.