Nanako Nakajima
Fellow
A scholar and dramaturg of dance and teacher of traditional Japanese dance Kannae Fujima, Nanako Nakajima was a Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival Research Fellow (2006) and a visiting scholar at Tisch School, NYU (2006). She was awarded a DAAD research fellowship in 2007 to complete her dissertation, Aging Body in Dance, at the Freie Universitaet Berlin. She was a postdoc research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Saitama University from 2011 to 2014. She has worked as a dance dramaturg in experimental art projects such as koosil-ja’s mech [a]OUTPUT (New York Japan Society 2007) and Luciana Achugar’s Bessie award-winning Exhausting Love at Danspace Project (St. Mark’s Church, New York, 2006). With Osamu Jareo, Nanako launched the Japanese-German co-production, Thikwa plus Junkan Projekt in Berlin, which was invited to the International Performing Arts Festival KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2012. In 2012, she co-organized an international dance symposium Aging Body in Dance with Professor Gabriele Brandstetter at Uferstudio in Berlin.
THIS AUTHOR WROTE
April 23, 2015
In this interview, the dramaturge and dance scholar Nanako Nakajima, a fellow at the center since 2013, discusses her research project on the aging body in dance. The project developed out of her experiences of training and teaching traditional dance in Japan for more the 20 years as well as out of her work as a dramaturge for independent dance productions in the U.S. Describing the ways in which age is performed and perceived differently in dance communities in Japan, in the U.S., and in Europe, Nakajima emphasizes that during the creative production process of dance pieces, interweaving practices can open up various perspectives and thus prevent offending stereotypical representations of ‘other’ cultures in performance.
