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BY: So how did all of that experience with political community activism and the arts lead to your current position? What is your current position and how did it come to be?

CH: So my current position is as Creative Director of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. And I think this started in... after I worked five years in the school, I'm like, "Can I really do this?" [Laughs] "Can I really make this work?" "Who am I in all this work? What is my work about?" And so I took a year off. I took a year of leave, non paid leave. I found out I could go back and my job would still be there after a year. And I just studied that whole year. I got very deeply involved in expressive arts training, went to meet Anna Halprin in Kent Fields, really trying to understand what expressive arts was about. So the nature of teaching the quality of arts without necessarily focusing on just technique or vocabulary. That process that we all have to learn if you studied any art form. And so it was kind of like finding out the importance of healing personal expression, helping people to guide them into that knowledge with children as well. So it was really through the expressive arts, and the different kinds of people I met and places I went and programs that I trained in, from Urban Bush Women 's summer institute, and then I got involved with the program in Washington, D.C., called the Dance Exchange, which I've been a partnering artist there since 2013.

BY: Ten years there. No, twenty years.

CH: And that was all going on, then, too. By the time I retired, I never used the word "retired." I made everybody not use the word. They'd go, "Oh, I hear you're moving on." [Laughs] I'm like, "I'm moving on." So they had a "moving on" party for me, and that summer, I was working with the dance exchange in North Carolina almost the entire summer, that was the summer of the solar eclipse. I got to perform with them in the Smoky Mountains during the solar eclipse with NASA. I just had some amazing, you know, performing at the Kennedy Center with them, at the 16th Avenue Church in Washington, D.C. around Hiroshima. I think that working with the Dance Exchange and bringing kind of my artistic interests in social change work and expressive arts, it really found a place there at the Dance Exchange. So by that time, I was pretty much spending half of my time in Portland and half of my time in D.C., Takoma Park, Maryland, which is right outside of D.C. So it really became a place of nurturing my artistic voice, too.

BY: So how did that lead to JAMO and your current position?

CH: Well, when I moved on from my job and I worked with the Dance Exchange and I was continuing to do workshops and involved with Minoru Yasui, and "Vision and Vigilance" was a program that I really went back in again, like, "What is important for me to do with this last part?" "What integrates all the things that I care about?" and, "Where could that land?" I've done my own programs, I've had my own studio, I've been in an institution. And I got more and more involved through the Yasui work. Then I thought, you know, maybe the Japanese American Museum, at that time it was the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, would be a good place, could I develop some programming, and what would I offer and how could it help? And where could I land kind of this integration of the importance of the arts to me, but I think the importance of what it should be in our world. And so at the time, the executive director, Lynn Fuchigami Parks and I have gotten to know each other pretty well. And I was just talking to her about what I would like to do and kind of my different ideas. And she said, "Yeah, you should do it." I was like, I mean, I thought about the program and I thought about the title. So it wasn't something that I was approached, "Will you do this?"

BY: You created it.

CH: I created it.

BY: Great.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.