Reimagining Japanese and Western artistic practices that blur and reinvent tradition
Acclaimed novelist Mieko Kawakami and visionary theatermaker Jennifer Jancuska collaborate across languages, disciplines, and continents to craft a new story for the theatrical stage. Told through the eyes of three fictional Japanese friends navigating the liminal space between memory, hope and mourning, this new project brings Kawakami’s singular voice to life through physical storytelling and instrumentation that reimagines Japanese and Western artistic practices in ways that blur and reinvent tradition. Currently, in the earliest stages of development, the work is already emerging as an arresting piece of theatre bringing together cultures and generations in a shared investigation of the possibilities between life and death, sleep and consciousness.
Performance details: TBA
Artist
Jennifer Jancuska
As a director, choreographer and conceiver of new works, Jancuska brings Broadway tenure to an experimental approach of driving the creative process of theatrical narrative with pedestrian and surreal physicality. She collaborates across artistic genres, languages, and geographical locations, creating unexpected collaborations with artists who are typically siloed from creative dance making.
Jancuska is the recipient of the Japan-US Creative Fellowship (2024/25), Jerome Robbins “Stories That Move” Residency (2024), CUNY Dance Initiative Fellowship (2024/25), and has been named to the “Women to Watch on Broadway” (2024) by The Broadway Women’s Fund. Her work has been commissioned and presented by The Old Globe Theater, Berkeley Rep, The Public Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Goodspeed, Ars Nova, Little Island, Madison Square Garden, New York Musical Festival, The Drama League, The Skirball Center, Trinity Rep, and Universal Theatrical Group, among others.
As Artistic Director of BringAbout for ten consecutive years, Jancuska has collaborated with more than 100 award-winning writers, composers, musicians, creatives and performing artists including Benjamin Velez, Joel Perez, Adam Gwon, Zoe Sarnak, Pig Pen Theatre Company, Taylor Iman Jones, Hannah Cruz, and Scott Wasserman. In this role, she continues to pioneer new methods of integrating dance as a fundamental narrative tool in the development of new musicals and plays. During this time, she also created BC Beat, an acclaimed semi-annual event recognized by The New York Times as “the place to reimagine the possibilities for dance in musical theater.”
Alongside a career of creating new work, Jancuska has held full-time positions with Broadway shows, including seven years as Resident Choreographer and Dance Supervisor of HAMILTON on Broadway.
Jancuska is a graduate of Cornell University. She has spent time studying, teaching and creating in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, London, Rio, Paris, and Shanghai. She loves live music, languages, jungles, rock climbing, collaboration, and living in Brooklyn as a family of four.
jenniferjancuska.com
@jencuska
Collaborator
Mieko Kawakami
Mieko Kawakami is the acclaimed author of the international bestseller Breasts and Eggs. Born in Osaka, Japan, Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet and published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007. Her books, translated into over 20 languages, are known for their poetic qualities, insights into the female body, and preoccupation with ethics and modern society. Kawakami’s literary awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. Heaven, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is on the shortlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize. Her most recent novel that has been translated into English is All the Lovers in the Night and it has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards in 2023. She lives in Tokyo.
photographer: Reiko Toyama
