Roles: Interview, Teaching, Dance Research, Performance
Worked with sharing the stories of mental health patients through butoh dance and performance, as an artist-in-community with KultuuriKaupila, partnering with the Lähde! social services program in Ii, Finland.
Inner Mirror represents the ethereal and subliminal landscapes of how an individual reflects on their self-identity, with the intermeshing factors that make up their identity beyond what meets the eye.
After a series of workshops for patient groups, one individual patient was invited into deeper explorations of self-identity through interviews, reflections, and embodied methods inspired by butoh dance, authentic movement, and gestalt therapy. These explorations opened up the patient’s story of creative self-expression after recovering from addiction to alcohol with the public, as well as vulnerable and interesting points of relational collaboration between this patient (as subject) and myself (as artist).
At the final performance co-created with the individual of focus, the public audience was challenged to reconsider and broaden how they see an individual’s identity based on the unique perspectives of how an individual views their own identity. For the respective individual, being able to see and experience an artwork inspired by their perspective and self-identity hopefully served as forms of reflection, validation, and celebration of the unique confluences making up their identity.
In researching and creating metaphors with how we move within our environment, we can pay attention to actions in a new light and experiment with more primitive ways of interacting, and even coping. Butoh dance and embodied methodologies of research allow for organic bodily reactions and a joining of the subconscious and physical spaces to emerge. With this opening, we can embrace and gently confront the difficult and less socially desirable sides of life, people, and socio-political connections, unearthed through finding the dance created in light and darkness searching for one another. A powerful release comes from deeply tasting the truths that we hold inside of our bodies, shedding past layers that prevent us from learning and moving forward.
We each have a unique phantasmagoria of identities from history, experiences, ideals, accidents ... It flickers in and out of time, stories, memories, emotions ...
Min Yoon KKAiC 2/2019
* Previous iteration included inner-viewing a radical, Sufi woman of color on how she views her identity, in reflection of how we get to know each other in our politically divided and modernly fragmented times. Working in collaboration with the Living Room Collective: Aaron Wynn, Albert Kong, Crystal Titus, Justin Tang, Mike Katsevman, Min Yoon
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