Kimiko
Created by Kaylie Hatashita
Performed by Kaylie Hatashita
Ottawa, Ont. | 70 mins
After a sold-out run at the Ottawa Fringe Festival this summer, Kimiko returns to the stage at the Arts Court Theatre to dazzle and delight audiences as part of the undercurrents festival. Written and performed by the multi-talented Kaylie Hatashita, Kimiko is an entertaining and thought-provoking show that blends personal storytelling with flow arts, contact juggling, prop balance, and her personal brand of Edo-Daikagura—the Japanese art of dance and object manipulation.
This is Hatashita’s first major theatrical work, and she has entered this new medium with force and confidence. The show opens with a hypnotizing display of her skills with the s-staffs, or buugeng, a type of performance prop which, when spinning, creates a mesmerizing optical illusion. She masterfully handles four staffs at a time in a captivating dance.
Kimiko photo by Catherine Tetreault – Kaylie Kreatrix
In addition to being packed with impressive circus acts, this work also explores Hatashita’s personal journey of discovering and reclaiming her cultural heritage as a Japanese-Canadian woman. She draws on stories from her grandparents about the internment and forced relocation of Japanese-Canadians during and after WWII and how this impacted her family. She explores several different forms of traditional Japanese art in her performance.
Her storytelling is personal, vulnerable, and insightful, but the emotion of the show is best reflected in her physical talents. Her circus acts punctuate the emotion of her story well, and Hatashita is able to speak poetry with her body as she moves gracefully through her impressive repertoire of skills. The fan dance she performs after speaking about her grandparents’ experiences in internment camps was particularly poignant as the images projected on the fan appeared and disappeared with her movements in a beautifully timed and emotionally stirring choreography.
Kimiko Photo by Pixzabelle – Kaylie Kreatrix.
Overall, Hatashita’s stage presence is serene and relaxed, allowing the audience to experience the overlap of diverging emotions. Connecting to one’s roots, particularly when there has been a wound in the family’s cultural lineage, can be challenging, painful, and at times awkward. Sometimes your culture can feel like clothes made for someone else which don’t seem to fit the way they should (or in the case of a kimono and obi, are just too complicated to put on). Hatashita’s work embraces all parts of this journey. She unpacks the intergenerational trauma in her family in a way that allows for simultaneous appreciation of beauty and heartache, of humour and grief—all while balancing things on her head and performing some truly surprising feats of sideshow art!
Bringing you both the thrill of the circus and the heartfelt emotion of a self-discovery journey, Kimiko is sure to delight audiences of all stripes.
Kimiko is playing at undercurrents until Feb. 10. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, ranging from $10 to $75. For more information and to purchase tickets, see the undercurrents schedule here.
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