Mending Circle: epic creation for an intimate journey
Alongside creating The New Canadians, a journey I started in 2017 and am still in the midst of, there’s been a very special spinoff project that wrapped in 2022. It’s been such a huge journey to create this intimate show that only a few people got to see, so I’m writing something here to explain how Laura Fukumoto and I ended up creating not one, not two, but three unique little shows together.
2019: Nisei Mending Circle
It started when Boca del Lupo put out a call for culturally diverse women in the performing arts to showcase 10 minutes of their works in progress. I was working on a fairly rough draft of The New Canadians at the time, and I still didn’t have a composer or music, but I pitched it to Boca’s Artistic Director, Sherry Yoon, anyway. Sherry looked at what I had so far and asked, “why don’t you just do the scenes with you and Laura?”
The New Canadians is a play about a group of people, and most of the action happens in large group scenes. But an important component of the play is an ongoing dialogue between characters named for me and for my friend, Laura Fukumoto, a fellow Japanese Canadian theatre artist, about what the history of Japanese Canadians means for us today.
Laura already knew that I was writing about her and about me, but I expected to cast actors to play both roles. For this presentation, I felt it would make more sense if we played ourselves. I asked Laura if she was interested. To my surprise, she was, so we decided to give it a try.
To introduce the historical context of the full play, we borrowed the double-casting I had set up in The New Canadians to each play two characters: I would play myself and the writer Muriel Kitagawa, and Laura would be herself and Muriel’s best friend and fellow writer Eiko Henmi. Muriel and Eiko don’t have any scenes without other characters present in The New Canadians, so we made a new one. It very quickly became an entirely new play.
It was an exciting chance to explore an aspect of my research that hadn’t made it into The New Canadians: how Muriel, Eiko, and other Japanese Canadian women formed their own Japanese Canadian chapter of the Red Cross to knit socks for Canadian soldiers. It also fit well with Laura’s background as a costume designer and seamstress. We called it Nisei Mending Circle, using literal mending of clothing as a metaphor for the work of exploring our shared heritage including historical trauma.
Devising the show was a challenging process. It was Laura’s and my first time creating together closely. We were working from a still barely-coherent draft of a much larger work. We were integrating the voice of real-life Laura Fukumoto instead of the fictionalized version who, in the rough draft form, was often more of a mouthpiece for my own thoughts. For similar reasons, I also fought very hard for a live Zoom call that would include other real-life people I had written into my play (this was in 2019, before Zoom was widely used or known). It was a challenging thing to include on our basic tech setup and extremely strict performance time limit – but we pulled it off.
Nisei Mending Circle (Envision showcase 2019). Performance photos by Kayla Isomura; backstage photos by Carolyn Nakagawa. Photo 2 shows some of Laura’s devising work.
In addition to the heart and soul that Laura brought to the piece (including a beautiful living-room set), the Zoom callers were a truly special part of the show. They joined from Vancouver but also from Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Toronto. That was what inspired me to ask Laura if she would be interested in developing a longer version of the show that could travel to those places in 2020. To my surprise, she said yes.
2020: Mending Circle
We planned to premiere an expanded, 30-minute Vancouver show at Powell Street Festival, then road trip to the former internment site of Kaslo in September, and finally a three-week tour to Winnipeg, Toronto, and Ottawa (including some time built in for community-building and family visits) in November 2020. With the addition of Kaslo, we’d include all the locations that The New Canadian had published from, giving me opportunities to build community support for the bigger show.
Laura posing with our big ideas for the Mending Circle expansion, March 9, 2020.
We had two devising sessions in February and March before the COVID-19 pandemic became real for us and everything shut down, especially travelling and live theatre. Powell Street Festival was cancelled; but Laura and I were invited to present our piece on their live telethon-style broadcast instead.
So the second iteration of Nisei Mending Circle, now called Mending Circle, was written primarily over video call and Google Docs. It was very much shaped by that early-pandemic period where everything had been so promptly upended; we moved the Muriel/Eiko part of the story from a knitting night in Muriel’s living room, to the moment of Japanese Canadians’ forced departure from the west coast in 1942. We delved into their friendship, and how it might survive distance and uncertainty. While writing, Laura asked me what was a wish I had for the future, and then did her best to script the look of existential dread I gave her in response.
In 2019, I had been the primary writer, although Laura made many contributions as I transcribed things she said to me in rehearsals. In 2020, this became a technique that we both used on each other, asking each other questions and then transcribing the responses.
It was still a 10-minute show, but an entirely different one. The Zoom call that was so magical in 2019 had already lost its novelty, so we replaced it with a Japanese-inspired wishing tree.
Telethon day, August 1, 2020. In our “green room” (Vancouver Japanese Language School patio) with production manager Samantha Marsh; live-captioned broadcast; and after the show with our wishing tree. Photos: Samantha Marsh, Laura Fukumoto, Erica Isomura.
Before things had shut down, I’d managed to get funding from the BC Arts Council for the Kaslo leg of our tour. Unsurprisingly, our venue, the Langham Cultural Centre, postponed our performance date to 2021, and then to 2022. I deposited the cheque for our travel expenses and watched the world around us continue to change. And then, to my surprise, we got the go-ahead that we’d proceed in 2022.
2022: Yonsei Mending Circle
In a way, what we ended up writing was a trilogy, though we knew that most of our audiences would only see one version of the show. In the final version, Yonsei Mending Circle, we brought Muriel and Eiko forward in time again, this time after the great event of the forced uprooting: an awkward reunion in Toronto much like the awkward reunions we were having with friends as restrictions on social gatherings were loosening. And we finally had enough stage time to ask each other harder questions about our shared heritage.
We drove eleven hours to perform the show to a tiny, packed theatre at the Langham Cultural Centre, sharing the evening with two other fabulous acts by Snake in the Grass Moving Theatre and the Tasai Collective. The audience felt everything along with us; it was exactly what you wish theatre to be.
Performing at the Langham (sean arthur joyce photo) and other shots from our road trip across BC by Laura and me. Sept-Oct 2022.
We’re not going to travel it any further – the two years’ delay has shifted so many things in both of our lives. I have a musical to get made, and Laura has some exciting projects of her own she wants to focus on (check them out on her website). But creating this show with Laura, three times over, has been an unforgettable experience.
It’s helped me share the stories I’ve been feeling so deeply – with Laura, with our Zoom callers, with our tiny, intimate audiences – not just by telling those stories, but by creating room for other voices to help me tell them too. It’s taught me a lot about how to write Laura as a character, even if my version in The New Canadians will always be different from the version that Laura herself wrote with my collaboration; and more importantly, it’s helped me to understand how that difference works. It’s been an honour to have Laura take a larger creative role in each version of a show that started off as something in service of my work alone.
Creating all the Mending Circle shows has helped me grow as an artist, and it has helped The New Canadians to grow its thematic heart. I can only hope that it does as much for Laura and her writing, and that the intimate, vulnerable feeling created in Kaslo can form a kernel at the heart of The New Canadians one day on a much larger stage.
Thank you to those who were outside eyes at various phases: Joanna Garfinkel, Tanya Mathivanan, and Chris Lam. Thank you to the Zoom callers who helped build the original world of the show: Ren Ito, Haruho Kubota, Caitlin Morishita-Miki, Kayla Isomura, Alex Miki, Alex Okuda-Rayfuse, Matt Miwa, Lisa Uyeda, Jun Cura-Bungolan, Reiko Pleau, Bryan Tomlinson, Kendall Yamagishi. Thank you to Sherry Yoon, Boca del Lupo, and the 3.7% Initiative; to Powell Street Festival Telethon’s staff and crew, especially Samantha Marsh; to the Langham Cultural Centre, to BC Arts Council. And most of all, thank you to Laura Fukumoto.