Nami Yamamoto’s performances carry storied movement, born out of deep observation and expression. In this conversation she reflects on her journey discovering improvisation and the process of creating an emotional landscape through her ensemble, dancers, musicians, puppeteers, and puppets alike.

Shalini Joseph: Could you tell us about your journey, going from the dance forms you were surrounded by in Matsuyama to the more experiential and contemporary forms you perform now?

Nami Yamamoto: It's interesting because my bio makes it seem like such a big jump from my hometown Matsuyama, a local city in southern Japan on Shikoku Island, to New York. But my professor at Ehime University was very active about introducing new forms of dance to us. She went to bigger cities to get more information about different styles of dance, and she also brought me to New York around my sophomore year spring break to come and take a class. So she exposed me to a bigger dance world. She had such an impact on me, encouraging me to explore. 

But the beginning was much more conservatory, modern dance styles, because that's what I knew. When I came to New York, one of the big exposures for me was when I went to NYU, and my teachers Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig taught an improvisation class. If we missed a class for some reason, we had to go and take a class outside the school. They listed options from Movement Research or Open Jams at PS 122, (now known as Performance Space New York) etc. I think I went to both, and it just opened up my mind so much about, “What is improvisation? What is contemporary dance? What does it mean to create movement?” I had really good mentors with me to guide me, not really telling me what to do, but more like, "Look over there, just try this and see what you feel." That really made me open doors, find my curiosity, and go from there. 

When I was an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, I wanted to find something about the essence of my work. I wanted to find out what I was interested in, and how I create. So I made a three-minute piece every month for a different performer. I ended up making ten of them, and then put it all together to make a full evening length show. At that point, the first person I worked with was a Japanese dancer, Ryutaro Mishima.

Until then, I had never really worked with a dancer from Japan. My thought process was, "Oh, I have tons of friends back there. I'm here. I'm here to study at this time, to be exposed to this different culture. Why do I have to work with Japanese people?" I wanted to study English, and when I’m talking in Japanese and English, it's a different kind of brain I have to use. My headspace was, as much as I was away from Japanese people, I felt like I could get more from my experience here.

When I started working with Ryutaro, he asked me all kinds of questions about what I wanted. And I would say this and this, and go, "Hmm." And he would ask, "What does 'hmm' mean?" He was pushing me to push him. At that point, I realized that I was actually giving up before making my point because I assumed that no one really understood me. I had been living in the USA for fifteen years. I was misheard and misunderstood by others a lot. Even though I understood internally that I was speaking a second language and it had nothing to do with my intelligence, my experiences pushed me down. I was giving up before I even tried. 

It was really eye-opening for me to think about oppression, about a thought pushing you down, making you smaller and smaller, without realizing. From then on, I had at least one Japanese dancer in my group, so I could balance myself, and I would talk to them in Japanese. Even if people listening didn’t understand, when it came to creating, this became very important to me, because I felt safer and able to make mistakes. That was actually a really big shift for my process. 

Shalini: What inspired you to incorporate puppetry with your dance practice? 

Nami: It's funny because I'm not sure when I started thinking about puppetry. I use a lot of elements from the dancers I work with, and even when I do commission work with students, I don't really choreograph for them. I ask them to create movement from prompts and pick it up from there. Incorporating puppetry related to this process of finding an element from each performer. I would meticulously curate details about the timing of the body or where they should hold their weight. 

Puppetry was introduced to me when I worked with my dear friend Dan Hurlin, who is a puppeteer and theater creator/director. He was doing a project called Hiroshima Maiden, which was based on the true story of twenty-five women who were disfigured by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and later brought in to the US to receive reconstructive surgery. He had three Japanese performers in it, but the group was a mix of puppeteers, set designers, and dancers. We used a Bunraku-style puppet: one puppet manipulated by three puppeteers. It was so interesting how Dan directed the puppet and the puppeteers. He would say "Oh, okay, Michiko, the puppet, is going to cry now.” Then the puppeteers put her hands on her cheek. Dan would ask them to move her hands slightly down and her head slightly tilted forward… he started giving small details to adjust… then Michiko started to cry. When I first saw her crying, I was like, "Oh my God." For me, I was interested not only in those adjustments, but also how your imagination can fill this figure. It's not alive, but depending on how you manipulate or how you adjust small details, things dramatically change! 

The quick formation of it, and the performers disappearing and appearing triggers people’s imagination, and, interested me. There was a lot of stuff there to explore. That was just the beginning.

Shalini: You’ve mentioned looking at other people and having them be the basis for some of your work. I'd love to hear more about how you work in this way.

Nami: I guess it depends on the project, but for example, the project I'm doing right now is called Future Memory. One performer said that when she lost her brother, she lost a future memory. For example, she said if her brother was alive they would have had Thanksgiving dinner this year. Her saying "I lost my future memory,” was so interesting to me because memory is something I always felt is in the past. We all carry the past in the body. Like we bring the past onto the stage when we're creating, can we also go to the future? Can we do something like that?

But then we start improvising the idea of future memories. And some people would say something like, "Oh, my future memory was more about going back and forth. I don't know where." Or some people would say, "Oh, somehow I feel like grieving." I don't know why, but these things came up. So we just started improvising and gathering material. Then I started looking at it and putting things together, asking myself what is speaking to me, resonating with me… and why. I search for a relation between me, my collaborators, their movements, and their creation. I respect their creation and try to figure out where I can meet them in my piece. I would ask, "Okay, can you just do that one more time for me?" And only that person can do it because it’s not my movement, it’s their movement, and they have some kind of meaning tied to it.

Shalini: I had noticed that in earlier performances, you worked with traditional puppets, and then moved to paper. What informs your material choice for your puppets? 

Nami: A lot of things for me are coincidence. Even my performers. It's usually people I’ve encountered. I've been friends with them for a long time, or I saw their band playing for the last five years and then asked, "Okay, can you play that song for me?" I really value the time you’ve known someone and the ways you just happen to meet people. How many people do you meet in your life? Anna, one of the performers in Trooper's Brother, was in my piece when she was in high school. That was my first project with her and we somehow kept in touch. So the kind of meeting place with people is very important for me.

During a piece called Howling Flower I actually asked my puppeteer friend Matt Acheson, who I met through Dan’s Hiroshima Maiden, to create a puppet for me. That was the first one. And I said, "Can you make something like a baby, but it’s old too?” He created the puppet from found objects. He often said to me that the puppet carried memory and history from found objects and eventually that informs who the puppet is. And that puppet was called Tony. Tony was in Howling Flower, and then I brought him and Matt to my commissioned piece at the Wooden Floor, a youth organization in Santa Ana, CA. After that, I needed to slow down as I had a baby and my dad became sick. So, my next piece, Headless Wolf, took eight years to create. I began going to the studio by myself, then one day 2–3 years later, I imagined Matt’s other puppet, Idol, joining the piece. I had seen Idol at his house. So I invited him and Idol to join my solo. 

Trooper's Brother was after my breast surgery. I was talking to my friend Anna and she said, "How's it going?" And I responded, "Well, you know I just finished my surgeries." And she was like, "Okay, so now you have to make some boob dance or something." I was surprised and shocked to hear this — it’s not a typical response to someone experiencing breast cancer — but because of her personality and our friendship, I thought, “Yeah, you’re right.” So I started from there. 

I knew for Trooper's Brother I could not go to the movement first because I was going to get so emotional about what happened to my body. I needed to change the process, so instead of a dance workshop, I went to a puppetry workshop. St. Ann’s Warehouse had something called Puppet Lab, where puppet creators came together every Monday and talked about their projects. Matt was one of the co-directors there. I wasn’t able to ask him to be in my work; I needed to do something by myself first. At that point the only puppets I knew how to make were paper puppets that Matt had shown me how to make. I hand made paper puppets of all kinds of different shapes informed by breast-shaped objects I collected. 

Then after we finished the first half, I was like, "Okay, now I have to face what really happened to my body." So that became all this chaos toward the end of the whole piece. The old, used, dissected puppet remains flew and scattered around the space. But paper felt like it healed me. You could rip the paper and it wouldn't affect my body, but also it kind of represents something. So that came into it. This paper is in my new piece, too. I don't know when it's going to end, but I think it's instinctual. I will move on when I feel like it.

Shalini: In your practice are you drawn more to the cathartic process of creating or do you have desires for how people experience the end result?

Nami: It doesn't really matter who I'm reaching to, but if I reach even one person, it's fulfilling to me.

I found out some people came to see my show who had the same doctor as me. Or some people say, "Oh, I didn't tell you, but I went through a very similar thing." And someone actually sent me a video. She was a high school teacher in the New York public schools; she made a speech at their graduation and she was talking about my piece. Something like that is just huge to me.

Maybe it's little things, but I think that's something I'm looking for because it's the same for me. When I see something that really impacts me, it always stays in my head. It doesn't go anywhere. I always feel it in my body. It's like, "Oh, that was incredibly touching and I'm so inspired by that." I don't really look for it, but it feels like relating to people in a different way than them reading my diary or something like that. It's more visceral, something on a bodily level, so people actually feel it rather than just try to understand it.

I think it's really circling back to my teacher. My professor in Japan, with the way she moved or danced, was not a technically great dancer. She didn't have this particular training, but everybody remembers her because she danced like her arms or legs were going to rip off. It was just so full of something coming out through it. At the end of her dance I felt like asking, "Oh my God, you okay? Your legs are good?" It felt like so much of the body was saying something. I think I’ll always remember that. It's not the shape. The body is just there as a vessel for us to see a soul dancing. I learned that from her and I always go back to it.