The Museum is pleased to announce that a collaborative dance performance project by Takahiro Yamamoto, Opacity of Performance, has been awarded a 2019 Creative Heights grant from the Oregon Community Foundation. The Creative Heights program provides opportunities for artists and cultural organizations to stretch their creative capacity, share new works and test new ideas.
Originally from Shizuoka, Japan, Takahiro Yamamoto is an artist and choreographer based in Portland. Opacity of Performance, an original dance piece, will investigate important questions about the nature of performance. What are the social consequences of looking at the dancing body today? How do visibility and invisibility validate or negate the performance and the dancer? Yamamoto investigates the physical and emotional effects that both dancers and viewers undergo when visibility, activity, and attention vary over an extended duration. The work will occupy the Museum’s Schnitzer Sculpture Court for six hours each day for six days.
This work represents a creative stretch for both Yamamoto and the Museum as an institution, with the artist challenging dance’s core principles of skilled movement and virtuosic visibility. The Museum is also taking creative risks by commissioning its first site-specific, live art work, and investing in contemporary performance in a way it never has before. The performance is scheduled for October 2020.
The Museum is grateful for the Oregon Community Foundation’s investment in this important collaboration.