As we head into our final 48 hours we’re thrilled to announce

ADDITIONAL REWARDS

All pledges of $100 and over will receive a copy of the rare CD Clocks and Clouds by Terumi Narushima and Kraig Grady. Read a review here:

Also, a very special reward awaits those who donate $600 and more. Mayu Kanamori will cook you an authentic Japanese meal at home (Sydney) and Annette Shun Wah will be your waitress. Strictly limited to 8 places at the table. Hurry!


MURAKAMI
A new theatre work by Mayu Kanamori
Produced by Performance 4A

THE STORY...

Yasukichi Murakami arrived in Australia from Japan in 1897 and became a photographer, entrepreneur and inventor in Broome, Western Australia. After moving to Darwin in 1934 with his Australian-born wife and nine children, he opened a photographic portrait studio in the Stone Houses on Cavenagh Street. He lived the high life with Darwin’s elite, and photographed everyone and anything in town until the war. The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Murakami was arrested, suspected of being a spy, and his photographs impounded and subsequently lost. Murakami himself died whilst interned in Victoria.

Photographer and contemporary performance maker Mayu Kanamori went in search of Yasukichi Murakami’s lost photographs, uncovering a fascinating story of unlikely friendships, thwarted ambition and love. As a Japanese-Australian photographer she made a profound personal connection, and in it recognised a way to address the national collective amnesia about the history of the Japanese in Australia. It forms the basis of her new work, a meditation on love, truth and – in a digital age where cameras proliferate - the nature of photography.


Photo by Yasukichi Murakami, Courtesy, Murakami Family Archives

Murakami is a multidisciplinary performance work, utilising photographic projections, video, narration, dramatic action, original music and soundscape. Actors embody the ghosts of Yasukichi Murakami, and the women who loved him. In short recorded interludes, Murakami’s descendants in Japan recall the kindness and brilliance of their ancestor, so poorly appreciated by his fellow Australians. Then of course, there are the photographs – some thought lost for all time – that come to life in a conversation between a photographer from the past, and one from the present. In the digital age, can photographs still be trusted as documents of truth as they once were? Has the meaning of photography itself changed forever?
If photographs are moments frozen in time, then Murakami unlocks those moments with the warmth of memory, family, humour and truth. What begins as a search for the past, becomes a quest for immortality.

Murakami is developed with the assistance of the Federal Government through its arts funding and advisory body, the Australia Council; the Dept of Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University; the Heritage Branch of the NT Government; and Playwriting Australia.


Photo by Yasukichi Murakami, Courtesy, Murakami Family Archives

WHO WE ARE...

Performance 4a is a leading producer of contemporary Asian Australian performance. We create original, compelling, multi-artform productions that engage audiences and artists in the important conversation about Australia’s culturally diverse society, and its place in the Asian century.

We are equally dedicated to promoting and providing professional opportunities for artists of Asian background, and our website is home to the Asian Australian Performance Directory, the largest online database of Asian Australian talent.

Australia’s culturally diverse population is a rich source of stories, experiences and talent that could - and should - be part of our mainstream culture. We produce and support professional performance that reflects this diversity in profound and inventive ways, and seek to provide a voice for contemporary artists exploring what it means to be both Asian and Australian.

As you’ll see, we’re a small organisation with big ideas, and we’re looking for partners who will support us to realise our vision.

THE CREATIVE TEAM...



MAYU KANAMORI - CREATOR (Photo by Maylei Hunt)
Mayu Kanamori is a photographer, storyteller and animateur, exploring cross cultural, migrational and Japanese diasporic themes. Working collaboratively with artists, academics and communities from a wide range of disciplines, her works have received the NAIDOC Non-Indigenous Reconciliation Award, a commendation by UN Media Peace Awards, a finalist for the Walkley Awards, Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, Julie Milowick Photography Prize and Harries National Digital Art Awards. Her theatre works include The Heart of the Journey (Post Mainstream Performance Festival, Tokyo, Christchurch Arts Festival, Darwin Festival etc), CHIKA: A Documentary Performance (CUB Malthouse; Performance Space@Carriageworks; OzAsia Festival; Salihara Festival, Jakarta) and In Repose (OzAsia Festival; on site at Broome, Thursday Island, Townsville Japanese Cemeteries).
The Northern Territory Government, through the Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport is pleased to sponsor Mayu Kanamori. This publication may not represent the views of the Northern Territory Government.



ANNETTE SHUN WAH - PRODUCER
Annette Shun Wah is a freelance actor, writer and broadcaster, and is Exectuive Producer of Performance 4a.
Nominated for an AFI Award for her performance in Australia's first foreign language feature film, Floating Life, directed by Clara Law; she has also appeared in guest roles on Always Greener, The Young Lions, Packed to the Rafters, Crowniesand the feature filmHome Song Stories.

She is the writer and director of the mobile phone app and website, China Heart, combining drama, oral history and game playing. For Performance 4a she co-directed (with William Yang) the storytelling shows Stories East & West and Stories Then & Now. In 2011 Annette produced Performance 4a's Asian-Australian performance season, Coolie. Annette also co-devised Performance 4a's food/performance event The Serpent's Table, a sold out critical hit of Sydney Festival 2014.




MALCOLM BLAYLOCK - DIRECTOR
Malcolm has over fifteen years experience in the theatre both as a freelance director and as Artistic Director of La Boite, Junction and Circle Theatre Companies. He is Director for CHIKA: A Documentary Performance and Executive Producer of The Heart of the Journey . He was Artistic Director of Darwin Festival and has also been the director of the St Kilda Festival, the St Kilda Film Festival, the Australian International Workshop Festival and the Adelaide Fringe Festival. He has produced and directed large-scale events, notably the Melbourne River Spectaculars and the opening event of the Melbourne Festival in 1998.


TERUMI NARUSHIMA – COMPOSER
Terumi is a composer, performer and sound designer whose work has been presented at numerous festivals in Australia and internationally. She composes both acoustic and electronic music with a particular focus on alternative tuning systems. Her microtonal projects include: Tritriadic Chimes, a sound installation for LA MicroFest; Metris, a computer game for performing virtual bells in just intonation; and Hidden Sidetracks, a composition for custom-built instruments commissioned and premiered by Ensemble Offspring at the Sydney Opera House (2011). Terumi was a guest composer for New Music Works in Santa Cruz, USA (2007). She has worked as a musician and sound designer for various film and theatre collaborations, and has recently completed a PhD on musical interfaces for microtonal composition.



OUR ASK...

We are thrilled that Darwin Festival have confirmed they would like to premiere Murakami in their 2014 Festival program, giving the Murakami story a chance to be brought to life, back in the very town where it all happened!

Darwin Festival will be covering all the costs once we are there, but we still need to raise funds for a three week rehearsal period, in order to prepare the show.

This is where we are asking for your help...
We are aiming to raise $13500 to be able to take this unique Australian story to Darwin and bring it to life - all the funds will go towards covering actors fees, at professional industry rates, for the three week rehearsal period, to get Murakami ready for Darwin Festival.

Macquarie University have already kindly donated rehearsal space for us at their Sydney campus, and we have locked in a fabulous development cast, director and creative team who are ready to get started. If, with your generous assistance, we can raise the $13500 by the end of February, we can officially confirm Murakami for the 2014 Darwin Festival!

If we do raise more than our target amount, the remainder will go towards our budget for set design for the Darwin production, and other associated production costs.

All funds raised from this campaign will go directly towards paying actors wages, at professional industry rates, to cover them for the 3 week rehearsal period, so that we can get this show to Darwin Festival!

If we do raise more than our target amount, the remainder will go towards the budget for set design for the Darwin production.

Photo by Yasukichi Murakami, Courtesy, Murakami Family Archives

If we cannot raise sufficient funds for the rehearsals in July, we will not be programmed in this year’s Darwin Festival. It won’t spell the end of the project – because we are determined to make it – but it would lead to a major delay in getting this story to audiences, and perhaps lose a golden opportunity to premiere the work in the place Murakami spent much of his life – in Darwin.