Co-MISSIONS Fellowship Showcase

This year’s Co- MISSIONS Fellowship Artists are: J’Sun Howard and Ayako Kato / Art Union Humanscape.
J’Sun’s Co-MISSION Fellowship will work towards the premiere of “Working On Better Versions of Prayers” which creates charismatic space for black boy joy. A poetic testimony that miracles erupt at any moment. A portrait in blue looking an intimacy between men of color, acts of practicing freedom, and radical hope, that is hope directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is, an imaginative excellence.

Kato’s Co-MISSION Fellowship work focuses on a new dance/movement piece inspired by the score, called “stück 1998,” written by Swiss composer Manfred Werder. Kato’s initial investigation into “Stück 1998,” yeilded “What is Movement?” an exhibition of movement Ayako created and opened in 2016. For this iteration of the project, she strategically combines sound artists and movers to work together while also focusing more on the score itself, actualizing it through movement in order to persevere the more radical aspects of what actually movement can convey, what movement means, and what movement is. She plans to investigate movement as an independent as well as inter-dependent entity in relation to music/sound and everything else. www.artunionhumanscape.net

Made possible in part through the support of the Links Hall Commissioning Collective.

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J’Sun Howard

J’Sun Howard is a Chattanooga native and a Chicago-based dancemaker and poet. J’Sun has recently received the Sybil Shearer Fellowship and residency at Ragdale Foundation, a nomination to participate in an emerging artist laboratory at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), and a 2017 3Arts Award nomination. A 2014 Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artist awardee, his choreography has appeared at multiple venues such as Links Hall, Northwestern University, Sonotheque, Lincoln Square Theatre, Insight Arts/Center for New Possibilities, Epiphany Church, Rumble Arts, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Patrick’s Cabaret (MN), and​ ​Poets Theater Festival(CA).
J’Sun has performed for many choreographers including Malcolm Jason Low, Asimina Chremos, Sara Wookey, Paige Cunningham, Selene Carter, but most extensively with collaborators Darrell Jones and Damon Green.

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Ayako Kato
http://www.artunionhumanscape.net/

Ayako Kato is an award-winning Japanese native and Chicago-based dancer, choreographer, improviser, teacher, and curator. Influenced by a Japanese view of nature and the philosophy of Tao, Ayako’s dance movement encourages to perceive the intangible, the beauty of being as it is, which affirms and nurtures the ephemeral nature and dignity of life. In 2016, she received a 3Arts Award in Dance. She performed her works recently at venues/festivals such as 3Klang Tage, Switzerland; DOEK, Amsterdam, Holland; the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, CT; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; SpinOff Festival, Chicago Cultural Center. In Summer 2016, Ayako participated in the Regional Dance Development Initiative (RDDI) of its National Dance Project (NDP) funded by the New England Foundation for the Arts with the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF), and also performed blue fish -reveal- in Tabito Arts Meeting Festival in Fukushima, Japan. Her recent group work The Incidents was selected for the Best of Dance 2014 in Chicago Tribune. Since 2010, Ayako has been an artist in residence at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater under Chicago Moving Company’s Dance Shelter Program.
www.artunionhumanscape.net

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Tags: Ayako Kato, Chicago, Co-MISSIONS Fellowship Showcase, Illinois, J'Sun Howard, Links Hall, West Town