Summer 2007 has been a whirlwind of local and national activity for Mu Performing Arts, starting with the national Theater Communications Group conference at the new Guthrie Theater in early June. It was hectic and exhilarating to mix it up with artists and administrators from around the country, and to see Randy Reyes present a reading of an excerpt from a Japanese play, which earned, as usual, many compliments.

Then it was off to the First National Asian American Theater Festival from June 11-24 in New York City! I attended the full two weeks and saw many performances, which fascinated me and gave me a strong sense of how well Mu stands in that landscape. The cast and crew for our show, Happy Valley, arrived in the second week, and the experience was a great measure of how well we have all come to work together. We had a one day tech and while I was busy running to the hardware store or spraying set pieces on the streets, director Jen Weir, stage manager Stephanie Lein Walseth, and the cast (Maria Kelly, Katie Leo, Sara Ochs, and Sherwin Resurreccion) were madly but efficiently making all the artistic decisions in preparing for the opening night -- that same night! We had a packed house, and the audience response was wonderful. Cheryl Ikemiya, the program officer from the Doris Duke Foundation, one of the major festival funders, attended the opening and spoke of how impressive the production was. So it was kudos all around!

Then we zipped back home for Passing the Beat, the annual Mu Daiko Student Recital, and our fourth annual Gala Fundraiser at the Southern Theater. They were both energetic successes, and we nearly doubled our net fundraising for the Gala. So thanks to everyone: staff, board, volunteers, artists, friends and countrymen!

But we still couldn't stop the whirlwind. So Mu produced a workshop production of Dipped in Love by Sarah Moore at the Mixed Blood Theater. The audience response was immensely positive, with people asking when we will produce it on the main stage. During the same weekend, members of Mu Daiko performed the world premiere of "Unity in Diversity" at the Dragon Festival. Supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, this collaboration with Mr. Ying Zhang, the Indonesian Performance Arts Association of Minnesota under Joko Sustrino, Thoeun Moen of the Light From Heaven Cambodian music group, and Brooke Newmaster of Chang Mi Dance and Drum Group, drew such a positive response from the artists and audiences that it now appears "Unity in Diversity" will live on for more performances in the future!

Even after all this activity, we presented the second half of our Jerome New Performance Program with readings of works by Juliana Pegues and May Lee.  And finally in August, Mu Daiko members attended the North American Taiko Conference in Seattle, continuing our participation in that international feast of taiko groups and players.

As the dust settles, this summer will fondly be remembered as another great step forward when Mu emerged as a major presence on the local, regional, and national theater and taiko scene.

-Rick

by Jaime Kleiman

Rick Shiomi is sitting straight-backed in a metal chair in the basement of a Northeast Minneapolis office building. The fifty-nine-year-old speaks softly and purposefully, as if his mind’s velocity is programmed for peak performance: even-keeled, focused, and pragmatic. When excited, he does not raise his voice. He is self-confident, serene, welcoming. Shiomi is the artistic director of Mu Performing Arts, one of the country’s premier Asian-American theater companies. He is, in other words, a very busy man.

In 1990, Shiomi, who is a third-generation Japanese Canadian, visited Minneapolis to speak to colleges about Asian-American theater. It was then that he met his future wife, Martha Johnson, a theater professor at Augsburg College and an authority on Japanese Noh theater. After traveling between Minneapolis and Canada for almost two years, Shiomi settled here, drawn by the vital theater scene and the love of his life.

In 1992, Johnson and Shiomi, along with Korea-born University of Minnesota student Dong-Il Lee, founded Theater Mu, an organization devoted to Asian-American theater. The word mu (pronounced “moo”) has multiple meanings. The company uses the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese ideogram for the shaman/ artist/warrior who connects the heavens to the earth through the tree of life.

Starting an Asian-American theater company in the Midwest was a risky venture. Five years earlier, the Asian-American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda received a McKnight fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center, but left after completing the first half of his fellowship, pointing out that there were no Asian-American actors in town to do his plays or other Asian- American theater artists with whom to share ideas.

Nevertheless, Mu got off to an auspicious start, debuting at the Southern Theater with scenes from David Henry Hwang’s FOB. (Hwang is now considered the preeminent Asian-American dramatist in the United States.) Also in that first season, Lee wrote and directed scenes from his work-in-progress Mask Dance: Journey Within. Community reaction was positive, so the threesome continued to nurture their fledgling company.

Ten years is a great time to look back to the origins and forward to the future, and Mu Daiko is at that point in time. We have come from the world of kumi daiko, the ensemble drumming style that has become hugely popular in Japan and is growing rapidly here in North America. In July 2005, Mu Daiko was one of four groups invited to perform at the mainstage production of the National Taiko Conference in Los Angeles where over 700 participants attended. It was a great honor and our work was truly well received. It was a high point for all of us but we are already moving forward.

As I look at the new compositions being created for our concert, I can feel in Iris Shiraishi's new song Soaring, a classic sense of the rootedness in her work on the Hachijo style of odaiko playing and her innovative musicality where she has players playing our shime taiko, small drums, by hand. In Tawamure by Jen Weir, I see her playfulness mixed with her high energy and creative configurations of the drums. Jen is all about trying new things based upon her solid foundations in taiko. And finally we will have a new short piece for our new odaiko, our largest drum that will make you feel the thunder in your heart. Wrapped around these new works with be some of our favorite songs that reflect the breadth and depth of our taiko.

Our guest artist this year will be Tiffany Tamarabuchi and her touring group, Jodaiko.
I saw this group perform in Vancouver, Canada recently and was deeply impressed by the power and intensity of the group. Some of our members performed with the group then and they will again for our concert, so we are all excited about that. Tiffany is one of the premiere taiko players in North America and has won the prestigious National Odaiko Contest in Tokyo. We are all excited to have her perform for and with us. Ten years of intense work and great times, and we are just beginning.
-Rick Shiomi

I recently read an article about how being an artistic director is like surfing, where the great skill is in being flexible and able to respond to changing conditions, catching the right waves as they build to a crest. With our vision solidly in place, we realize that change is the constant, and that our ability to respond to the waves coming from that great ocean of artistic substance is one of our most important tasks. I feel like we are now riding two great waves that will have a memorable impact upon our company in the next few years.

The first is our successful grant application to the Theater Communications Group to have me mentor Randy Reyes in the field of artistic directorship. Randy is an extraordinarily talented theater artist (actor, director, educator) who came to Mu wanting to contribute to the development of the company. With his high level study at Julliard and high quality work at the Guthrie, both on stage in the education department, Randy is truly poised to take on even broader responsibilities. And I personally feel excited to have an artist of his caliber to mentor in the wide range of theater work at Mu. I plan to have Randy deeply involved in our development programs like the New Eyes and New Directions Festivals, in our mainstage work by directing our remount of Circle Around The Island by Marcus Quiniones in March 2007 at the Guthrie, and in our behind the scenes administrative and artistic decision making process. The grant will cover the costs to have Randy on our staff for two years starting August 1st. So get ready for a whole new wave of artistic and organizational action!

The second great event was the Next Big Bang - the first Asian American Theater Conference held June 18th to 20th. In three tremendous and historic days, almost two hundred Asian American theater artists, representing over forty companies and themselves as individual artists, came together and shared stories and strategies. Such notable figures as Roberta Uno (of the Ford Foundation), Philip Kan Gotanda, and Jessica Hagedorn gave keynote addresses, and the topics of breakout sessions ranged from the unique challenges facing Asian American theater companies to visioning for the twenty-first century. And as great and informative as these experiences were, it was the personal encounters among artists, both as individuals and as representatives of companies, that made this conference a major event, a happening where plans and ideas, hopes and dreams, critiques and analyses came surging to the surface. This conference was a joyful realization of where this new wave of Asian American Theater came from and how huge it can be if we can take advantage of the contacts and communications we made there.

Big things are happening, and once again we find ourselves catching these waves to get the best ride possible. We are excited to see where they’ll take us next!

In the process of directing, one always starts with a great idea (or at least an idea that one thinks is great at the time). For me with Midsummer, it was setting the Theseus and Hippolyta story in 19th century Japan, and the fairy world of Titania and Oberon in some kind of Korean folktale world.

These settings seemed to me to provide an opportunity to explore ideas in the play on many levels -- from character and cultural change to costuming and movement. It was a somewhat vague and intuitive choice that I worked on and thought about in the process of rehearsal, and I found that these early notions began to take on an even more interesting shape and impact than I had imagined.

Coming off the high of Cowboy Versus Samurai, I realize that the Mu roller coaster never stops. We must constantly return to the beginning, and to the rehearsal studio where the magic is first sparked. And so just as Cowboy pulls back into the station at the end of its run, we move on to our New Directions Festival where our emerging directors get the chance to work with our actors in basic (read - minimal tech) and exciting productions. This year we’ll feature the work of Randy Reyes, Jen Weir, Brian Balcom and Eric Sumangil, four young talents who have become woven into the fabric of Mu. They all come to directing from acting (“Where are all of the playwright directors?” you may ask...) and they have been and will continue to be key players in the future of our work. The plays they have selected are as eclectic as their individual visions, from the relatively new contemporary comedy FOP by Sean Lim of San Francisco, to the family drama A Shadow of the Moon by the playwright who brought us Cowboy Versus Samurai, Michael Golamco. As ever, the twists and turns of the coaster are both thrilling and enlightening, and I hope you will hop on board for the next ride in this season of successes.

As I sat watching the opening night performance of Cowboy Versus Samurai, I was warmed by the laughter that resounded throughout the theater. I was warmed because although the heating had mysteriously shut down for the evening, the audience was deeply into the play in spite of the cold.

Our "Cowboy" play is a hilarious comedy, but it's also deeply romantic and unexpectedly political. It's a play that in a wink of the eye flows from uproarious laughter to intense silence to warm romance. The early survey comments are 95% super positive and 5% cautious. Cautious because some people wonder about the commentary inherent in the play after the laughter has faded away.

PS - Long-time Mu supporters, or movers and shakers in the Asian American Community here in the Twin Cities know that the idea of an Asian Pacific Cultural Center has long been in the making. Please see the link below for more information:
APCC (Asian Pacific Cultural Center) Letter Writing Campaign

When I think of our New Eyes Festival, I always think of surprises. It never turns out as I anticipated. Two years ago, none of us ever thought Cowboy Versus Samurai would hit us somewhere between our funny bone and our social conscience. And now it’s been a hit in New York and is coming to our main stage this February. Last year it was hard to get someone to direct Bahala Na by Clarence Coo, but his lyrical writing impressed all of us at the festival. Something magical definitely happens at the festival, and all we have to do is show up and listen.

The Inside Scoop on Mu
I like to describe the process of rehearsal as one of crystallization—that which was murky and unclear gradually forms into a beautifully crystalline performance—under some stress and pressure, of course. For TenChi Taiko, I see this crystallization in the way the shape of each song becomes clearer as we near the performance. “Hooves II” grows faster and more powerful with every variation in rhythm, “Kiyomizu Cascade” blends into “Kumano Ki,” which builds to “Zenryoku,” and suddenly the drummers start to listen to thesongs as if for the first time. With each annual concert there's theexcitement and anxiety of premiering new compositions, like this year’s“Odori,” “Kanazawa Blue” and “Asobi” – songs that challenge us to druming new ways, to imagine taiko with a new perspective, to clarify new creations through the old process. What I like the most, is witnessingthe magic that happens when our group commits our creativity, time andenergy to one taiko goal – the concert performance. It is at oncepowerful and moving.

The inside scoop on Mu - The World Premiere of Happy Valley
Now playing at Intermedia Arts through Oct. 2nd - Reservations: 612-871-4444

As I sat watching the opening night performance of Happy Valley by Aurorae Khoo this past weekend, I felt like a fortune teller. In front of me was this beautiful play being performed by a wonderful cast under the direction of our own Jennifer Weir. It was like looking into a crystal ball and seeing a great future for all of them — the playwright, actors, and director.

Aurorae has created a comically touching and painfully poignant play about the relationship of a young girl and her uncle in Hong Kong in the 1990's, just when the British were handing over control to China. In Aurorae’s writing, I can see her becoming one of the wonderful new wave of nationally-recognized young Asian American playwrights. She has talent, insight, and something to say, and I know when she is world famous one day, we will be proud that we were among the first to produce her work.