We’re  coming off a busy winter season where we spent much of this time in the cozy and intense bubble of teaching and creating, with our performers, in the schools, and in the community.

Our new professional ensemble has been busy working behind the scenes to develop new artistic ideas to explore the theme of life milestones, transitions and goodbyes. Stay tuned for more on this, and save the date, August 30th for a work-in-progress showing with both our Unit Souzou community and professional ensembles.

Michelle finished a year long project in Minneapolis this past weekend creating a newly commissioned original taiko piece, Looking Beyond, for Minnesota taiko ensemble, Mu Daiko. The debut of this piece commemorated an era of 20 years as Mu Daiko, and launched their new future identity as TaikoArts Midwest. Both Michelle and Toru performed within the weekend’s festivities and witnessed this profound organizational transition – a time for endings and beginnings.

As spring blossoms, we are starting to turn outward, look ahead.

May is always an exciting month for us at Unit Souzou. Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is an opportunity to build community and lift up our voices for justice and empowerment. During this time of celebration and reflection, we draw on the themes we set at the beginning of this year: braving, listening, and galvanizing.

Here’s where you can see us in action around the community during Heritage Month:

• We are honored to be a part of a very special event with our colleagues at Portland JACL and Oregon Nikkei Endowment, Return & Remembrance: A Pilgrimage to the Portland Assembly Center. The event commemorates the 75th anniversary of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Portland Assembly Center, what we now know as the Portland Expo Center on Saturday May 6, 2-4pm.
• Hood River’s Columbia Center for the Arts has been celebrating their 10th anniversary year with their poTENtial program series. We will be there all day on Saturday, May 21 as part of their “Art & Culture of Japan” series of visual and performing arts events. Our performance is at 3pm. For those who want to try their hand at taiko, we will host a hands-on workshop earlier in the day at 12:30pm.
• 

  Lan Su Chinese Garden

  Throughout the month of May Lan Su Garden will host cultural performances for their annual celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. We are excited to be part of Lan Su’s diverse lineup of artists representing different ethnicities, traditions, and artistic visions. Join us on Saturday, May 27 at 1pm.

We hope you can join us for one or more of these celebrations during the month of May.

After an extensive national audition process, we are thrilled to introduce our brand new Unit Souzou Professional Ensemble.

Four talented professional taiko artists, Ian Berve, Yuta Kato, David Wells, and Vicky Zhang, will join Co-Directors Michelle Fujii and Toru Watanabe as ensemble players, collaborating to push the art of taiko towards new traditions and innovations.The founding of our Professional Ensemble is a momentous milestone for Unit Souzou. Along with our Community Performance Group and Korekara Taiko education programs, Unit Souzou is excited to continue to build and empower community, through the power of the drum and through our unique, authentic artistic voice.

We have exciting plans brewing for 2017! Learn about David, Ian, Vicky and Yuta’s amazing taiko backgrounds on our website.

Unit Souzou is launching its first round of auditions!  A small ensemble eagerly looking toward new beginnings, we’re looking for several talented, dedicated taiko artists to join our professional performing company.  If you consider yourself an experienced and driven performer that would be excited by a challenging and fast-paced creative environment, Unit Souzou might be for you!

Applicants should be highly self-motivated, effective communicators, and should love the creative process.  This is a paid position, so U.S. citizenship or U.S. resident status is appreciated.  Unit Souzou is based in Portland, OR, but does not require its professional ensemble members to live locally.  For the most part, communication and the learning of repertoire takes place remotely, with short, intense in-person rehearsals before major engagements.

The due date for the first round of the auditions process is July 1, 2016, so if you’re interested, why not get started now?

At Unit Souzou, we celebrate our heritage, both traditional and evolving, all throughout the year in all the work we do. The most public way we do this is through our community work. We love to perform and teach, but another core part of our joy and our values is to be embedded in our community. Being civically engaged gives our work purpose and ensures that we are part of a community conversation.

We are excited to be part of the Resident Artist Collaborative at APANO for the Jade-Midway Placemaking Projects. We’ll be doing free family workshops to explore pedestrian safety, transit, and displacement through taiko, theater, and discussion and then developing a short piece inspired by the work.

This past February, we worked with Buckman Elementary 2nd grade teachers and Chisao Hata, Dance Specialist, to create an original play, “Gambatte…Be Strong.” Through music, dance, visual art and theatre the 2nd graders studied and performed the history of the Japanese American Internment experience, which included personal stories of Japanese-American Oregonians.
In another effort to deepen civic engagement, our Co-Director Michelle Fujii has been participating in the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute which empowers API women to become strong leaders. As part of the program, Michelle will lead a community walk this June inviting friends and supporters to walk through a loop trail pausing at 3 points to hear personal stories from 3 guest speakers sharing about what “community” is to them. More details and dates will be sent soon!

We are especially excited to be celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Originally a week long celebration proclaimed by the U.S. Congress in 1978, May became the official commemorative month for Asian Pacific American Heritage in the 1990s. May holds relevant historical significance. It was the month when the first Japanese immigrated to the U.S. in 1843. And then in May 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, by mostly Chinese workers.

We welcome you to embrace the power and heart we bring to every Unit Souzou engagement, this month during APA Heritage Month and throughout this spring and summer. Hope to see you soon!

UNIT SOUZOU performs INSATIABLE
March 29, 2016 at 7:00 PM
Washington State University Vancouver
Firstenburg Student Commons
Free admission, RSVP required (limited tickets available)

Last November, President Barack Obama posthumously gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Hood River-born Minoru “Min” Yasui. In his remarks, President Obama described what happened on March 28, 1942:
On a Saturday night in March of 1942, Minoru Yasui left his law office to walk around Portland, Oregon.  It was a seemingly ordinary act that defied the discriminatory military curfew imposed on Japanese Americans during World War II. Min took his case to the Supreme Court and lost, a decision he fought for the rest of his life.  Yet despite what Japanese Americans endured — suspicion, hostility, forced removal, internment — Min never stopped believing in the promise of his country.  He never stopped fighting for equality and justice for all.

Min had challenged Executive Order 9066, the forced incarceration of Japanese born Americans into concentrations camps during World War II. As a result of his action — intentionally breaking military imposed curfew to test its constitutionality – Min was jailed, fined and stripped of his citizenship. He took his fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction. Eventually, the conviction was overturned. Min spent the rest of his life in Denver, continuing to fight for his own rights and for other social justice causes.

Min Yasui is the only Oregonian to ever receive the Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor. And to further honor Min’s significant contributions, the Oregon legislature unanimously passed House Bill 4009 designating March 28 each year Minoru Yasui Day.

This Tuesday, March 29th, WSU will be honoring the life and legacy of Minoru Yasui. UNIT SOUZOU is proud to perform INSATIABLE that evening to honor Japanese American historical roots, as well as bring a contemporary perspective on the experience.

As a 4th generation Japanese-American, UNIT SOUZOU founder Michelle Fujii’s family was greatly impacted by the history of EO 9066. All four of her grandparents were sent to the internment camps during WWII. And when Michelle began playing taiko, it sparked a desire to understand more about the internment history. Although she did not literally reference the internment experience within INSATIABLE, the tone of the work focuses on the overcoming of challenges. Michelle said, “In this work, I was not trying to recreate the Japanese aesthetic, but offer a new perspective that is grounded in my identity growing up in the United States, which is deeply informed and influenced by the internment of my grandparents during the war.”

A driving force in the INSATIABLE show is the endless repeating cycles. For Japanese Americans and contemporary immigrant social justice activists, there is palpable anxiety that the history of interment might yet be repeated.  Though it can feel inescapable, Michelle hopes that Unit Souzou’s performance can offer hope. She says, “Although INSATIABLE acknowledges the overwhelming feeling, ultimately through awareness and a conscious effort, we can break the chains of repetition.”

At UNIT SOUZOU, we have been reflecting on our work, and looking forward to an exciting year ahead as an emerging new artistic taiko ensemble.

Last fall, we did some deep soul searching on the “Camino de Santiago,” where we walked 400 kilometers from Leon, Spain to Finisterre, a place known as “the end of the world.” At times challenging, breathtaking, silent and adventurous, the journey was an opportunity to reflect, not only the tangible manifestation of our work, but also our artistic vision and practice, and how we want to be – with each other, with our community. Those ruminations have lead to some themes that we will focus on in 2016.

Deepening. As a new artistic force, we have developed our core of teaching and creating innovative expressions for the art form of taiko. We are thinking about how others experience our work and how we can become more accessible, more authentic, more connected. Through our education program within schools and taiko classes, and the performances we produce, we hope to deepen our mission to artistically push boundaries and to share taiko with our community.

Expanding. Portland is our center and our home. But as we look forward, we are beginning to expand our notion of what local means. We will explore more of our home state of Oregon, and further afield in our home region here in the Northwest. We’ll even reach beyond, heading east, heading south. We want to use our drums, our dance and our voice to find community across the US, in this our home country.

Contributing. We can’t do our work in a vacuum. We are part of a community. We will find ways to thoughtfully engage with our community and be intentional about where we can provide opportunities for new audiences to engage with taiko.

As these themes help us find inspiration in our own work, we hope we can inspire your adventure in this new year.