Seven Kabuki Plays Project, Joel Sanderson; Roger Shimomura

A one-act excerpt of Seven Kabuki Plays first premiered at the Crafton-
Preyer Theatre at the University of Kansas in 1985. The work brings to
the stage the remarkable story of Toku Machida Shimomura (1888–
1968), the artist’s grandmother and a trained nurse and midwife who
served as an important member of Seattle’s Japanese American
community. After immigrating to the United States as a young bride in
1912, Toku kept a diary of her thoughts and experiences, a practice she
continued for 56 years until her death in 1968.
As with Shimomura’s other performances, Seven Kabuki Plays blends
Japanese forms and traditions with American pop culture. Here,
Shimomura utilized the centuries-old tradition of Japanese Kabuki
theater, a highly stylized dance-drama characterized by elaborate
makeup and costumes. While each of the seven acts is connected to a
painting in his Diary series, Shimomura expressed his reservations at
relegating his grandmother’s story solely to two-dimensional canvas.
He states:
Later on, as I started to uncover my grandmother’s autograph books and
other books where she wrote poetry and songs and lyrics to songs and
short stories and all that, my mind would just be flooded with how to use
these things, and the only way I could do it was in performance. You can’t
hear music and you can’t recite haiku with paint.
Each act, except for the concluding Montage, is framed by a specific
diary entry read in Japanese, and incorporates poetry, choreography
by Marsha Paludan, who at the time was pursuing a PhD in theater
at KU, and original music by local musician Jim Stringer. Throughout
his performances, Shimomura continued to use the collaborative
working style developed in this production as an intentional strategy
to challenge traditional hierarchies in theater and performance in
which decisions are typically made by the director. Seven Kabuki Plays
also incorporated a vast visual and audio lexicon of Japanese and
American popular culture that would come to characterize Shimomura’s
performances.
In Seven Kabuki Plays, the bleak landscape and howling winds of the
Idaho prairie come to life to tell a story of everyday survival, resistance,
and joy that Toku Shimomura lived through at Minidoka, an internment
camp in Idaho where Shimomura’s family was forced to relocate during
WWII.