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BY: So this was around 2015 or so that all of this was happening? So at that point, how had you... what was your thinking about how to integrate the arts into community activism?

CH: Well, let's see. I guess from 1995, 1993 'til 2017, I actually... so I did a studio for about a decade, private studio, and then I went back to school to get a dance certificate. And they closed the dance department down. So I could never finish that, but the head of the department said, "There is a job, and there's only job like this in the city, and it should be yours." And so it was to help an art school, and they knew about the work that I'd been doing with children, because I had a hundred and twenty-five students at that point and we looked like crazy people. We'd do like twenty performances a year, all original work, all with the students, dance students in modern and contemporary. So I went to talk to the principal, and they had a dance teacher that had started at that school. And she just said, "Well, we want what you do. We want you know how to do," and I was being encouraged from the dance department to do this job. Because I'd never considered working in a school, in a public school. I mean, it was the only, there was Jefferson High School, so there was the dance program at Jefferson, but as far as an elementary school, there was no, this was the only dance program in Portland. And this was a school, K through 5, designed as an art school.

BY: Where was that?

CH: Buckman.

BY: Buckman, okay.

CH: Elementary art school in...

BY: Right across the street from my alma mater.

CH: Yeah, in Southeast Portland.

BY: Okay. So you did that, and then so how did that lead into your work in the arts and the community activism?

CH: So when I left, I said I can't... it's going to be really difficult for me to do creative work all the time when I'm either running a studio or now I've gone back and gotten a job full time. But I kept creating original work around Hiroshima Day, because I felt very passionate my anti-nuclear work which started in, about that time, 1988, I think. And so I had a former relationship with the Women's International Week for Peace and Freedom and also with the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. So every summer, I would create a piece for Hiroshima Day, an original dance, theater, poetry piece. So that was kind of where I kept my artistic expression going. But then with the kids, I took what I had done in my studio creating original work and brought it into the school, and then created levels of training so that they could become more and more proficient if they were interested in doing so. So I had a program during the school and after school for quite a few years, but it was that original work, the original work that I did with children all those years in my own original work is what I did, I guess.

BY: So it sounds like you were able to integrate your political activism with your dance and theater, and was that a struggle for you or did that just come naturally to integrate those two things?

CH: I wouldn't call it a struggle for me personally to get it out and to think of the ideas. But within public education, sometimes it was. Because I felt children should learn, not only have their imagination protected because they come out so creative and ready to do who they are, who they come into the world to be. So I really felt like I wanted to protect that, but also I wanted to teach them. So there was never a separation from me, Chisao the dance teacher and Chisao Japanese American and activist, and it all kind of came together. And it came together in my teaching. I wasn't... I felt it important that children should know, whether they're kindergarten, I taught K through 5, so they were making dances about war and peace, they were making dances about and creating original performances about the Japanese American experience. Sometimes I got some pushback from parents who thought their children should not be learning these things or teachers who thought this is a bad history. Can we just wait until later, until they're older, to teach the bad history? Usually not administrators so much because they didn't know how I did what I did. [Laughs] They were just like, "Whatever you do, do that again." But they didn't kind of watch me on what is my curriculum. I didn't have the same... I had my standards, but I didn't have the same standards as a classroom teacher, but I had to really work with finding out who my allies were within the school, classroom teachers and other people outside of the school and bringing them in. So I think that was a really rich period of work. I never thought it as separate, I guess.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.