Maho Ogawa

Artist Statement

My multicultural background as a choreographer in NY who grew up in Japan led me to assess movements from the West and East to find my Japaneseness in movement. Currently, I’m researching Japanese Tea Rituals and Zen philosophy through writing (https://www.culturepush.org/push-pull-issue-20) and performance. The Japanese Tea Ritual aims to listen deeply to your own mind and those of your guests, finding relationships of care and paying attention to our environment (including sound, body, and space) through the act of making tea. For my work, I use the body, video, text, and an audience-participatory approach to build new methods of thinking about 'silence,' providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. At the residency, I'll research the relationship between Zen meditation and body movement. Referring to Zen philosophy, I’ll create a method for experiencing several ways of listening to 'silence' through movement scores.

Maho Ogawa_"s-silence"_performance_2023_premiered at the Mix Festival at Abrons Art Center, NY_

Bio

Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NY. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, "Minimum Movement Catalog" (https://minimum-movement-demo.web.app/movements). Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture. She crafts public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about "silence." Her aim is to empower erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as choreography, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways. Maho's works have been shown in Asia at Korea & Japan Dance Festival (Seoul), Za Koenji( Tokyo), Whenever Wherever Festival (Tokyo), and in the U.S. including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, New York University Grey Gallery, and Emily Harvey Foundation, to name a few. Ogawa received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and creation support at Culture Push, Emily Harvey Foundation, LEIMAY, and New Dance Alliance. She is a 2024-2026 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.

https://www.suisoco.com