Aine Nakamura is an artist whose work transcends the realms of voice, body, and presence via mise en scène, site specificity, multimedia and collaboration. With a practice deeply rooted in the nuanced potentialities of sound, movement, and transnational identity, Aine is an embodiment of transformation. Aine channels voice through extreme movement. Shaped by life in both the United States and Japan, her art explores themes of belonging, gender, and the interconnections between personal and universal experiences. Her performances are a tapestry of vocal expression and physical embodiment, ranging from the joyous and gentle to the stressed, strained, and even grotesque. Aine weaves narratives that transcend cultural, temporal, and spatial limits. From embodying a cicada to an old man, an infant to water, her work breaks traditional power structures and reference points, creating spaces for new ways of feeling and being. Her collaborations with international ensembles and appearances at renowned institutions, from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, to the Berlin University of the Arts, the 50th International Theatre Festival at the Venice Biennale to Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele demonstrate a practice that is versatile and profound. Each of Her works engages deeply with site-specificity, healing, and the complex interrelation between memory, time, and voice. Through a seamless blend of sound, movement, and visual artistry, she challenges definitions of identity and invites us into a borderless state of being, where undefined selves are honored and new stories are born.
Sofy: Tell me how your performances tie into causes and ideas that are important to you personally? What are they?
Aine: The core of the ideas and causes that allow me to create a work or perform seems to be the same but the ideas and causes are always in fluid states, I feel. I try not to bring them to an answer or a resolution, artistically and in life. The core is maybe about love or spirit or soul that transcends across time and space.
Looking at my recent important causes and ideas, there are several.
I am interested in pauses, quietness and silence when people talk about hidden stories and intergenerational or other stories engraved in bodies. Are they waiting for recovery? As a storyteller (through my art), can I listen to the quietness of them, or to the truth that may exist somewhere other than the graspable?
I am also interested in buildings since they started to become my compositional and creative approach. I also use masks. I try to focus on or attune to energy-body, a building being a costume for the energy, and I would try to be the medium of the energy as a performer, instead of surfaces. I am more and more interested in listening to depth of selves and not surfaces of ego, which are mentioned by philosopher Toshihiko Izutsu. The depths seems to be connected beneath or in between surface boundaries. I try to be honest with my self and body, and yet try not to center a performance on myself but to depth and in-betweenness. I think these ideas are with me because of my personal transnational background, identifying myself not as someone in a group or nation, but in an undefined transborder space. In one of collaborative works with a visual artist, Shades of Edge, presented at The Lab in SF in 2024, we started seeing a wall as our membrane, a boundary surface between two worlds. The show was premiered right before the new moon. The shape of a circle and its line may sway, or become folds. The folds overlap with the folds in life, experiences including challenges, greed, violence, and then, wisdom and value. We learn to choose out of many. The folds overlap with wrinkles that would be engraved as we age. The folds overlap with folds in heart, folds in nature such as flower petals, leaves, tree rings. These constant changes represent the swaying of the boundary surface. A change that is not on the surface level. And then, I thought about words, because even if we are using words knowing that they cannot represent the whole or unspoken, we choose them for them to come out from our cheek, as if we seek a truth from deep down the surface. I think my life experience and journey have guided me to create this work and be confident about embodying these stories.
Sofy: What are your thoughts on feminist visibility? How do you express it in your work?
Aine: I feel, coalition is important, either explicitly or implicitly. I wish feminists to be visible more and more in this globe and in each community. It is because I realize how difficult it is to shed a light on gendered violence and gender politics if you are all alone. if you fight by yourself for justice, you could experience solitude in front of power and people’s negotiation over power against their true feelings about justice. Unfortunately, many people choose their career over justice. You could be isolated if you raise your voice by yourself solitarily, and eventually can lose your health and voice and even spirit. This was my experience. And so, I truly believe that it is important that feminist visibility and voice are highlighted, and that we all unite, so that, instead of solitary action, people can participate in the thinking, questioning, and nurturing, safely and continuously. And, it is important not to isolate any feminist and give hands to her/them/him.
In my work, it is my body and voice that manifest my feminist stance. Performance is where I deconstruct cultural and familial grammar or stereotype about my skin color and nurture a free language and weave stories to transcend them to an inclusive space where multiple delicate feelings and beings can be together.
In my daily life though, I must say that how to defy grammar engraved in my body is my everyday politics and question as well.
I admire my late great grandmother for her owning of her spirit and posture and stability. But, she endured all throughout her life without complaining in the grammar condemned on her.
In my recent life, I went through events that weakened my confidence, and my free speech and free existence, and I thought about my great grandmother a lot, how she endured and survived and still owned her self and spirit. And, I ultimately realize I need to find my own way to survive and to gain confidence to be a strong being each day. My own way that I am finding gradually is, first going back to my spirituality and artistic focus, and then second listening.
I am more attentive and thoughtful to listening to pauses, silence, hesitation, multiple, aching, unspoken, and subtleness.
To be able to embrace them through my listening and to offer a space of release and acceptance and recovery as a community is my feminist approach right now.
Sofy: Can you describe your spirituality (or thoughts you have on spirituality) and how you express it/perform it in your work?
Aine: It is when I feel I perform for something way bigger and transcending than me while connecting with the core of my spirit that I succeed in serving for spirituality. Spirituality is something that is in each of us. With it, each of us can go back to one’s space safely. With it, one might be continuing conversations quietly with someone one has lost. With it, one might look at the moon and the sea, and weave stories together with them. With it, one might rest to wake up after a good rest. With it, one might feel whole.
I do not necessarily express it recent days, as I found out it is something that I attune to. I try to attune to audience members’ inner and depth, while knowing that it is a sacred place for each. And, if only I am lucky, I can perform from, in, and with it. if I explain further, it is when the surface of me serves for the depth of me that I can use my vessel well for the whole of spirituality. And, it is just my everyday living and sincerity about it that prepares me for such a moment.
Sofy: Can you describe traditional music that speaks to you (or you thoughts on it) and how you express it/perform it in your work?
Aine: I had studied Okinawan traditional music under Isamu Goya and ritualistic songs in the Yaeyama region, Spirituals under Richard Harper, and Butoh dance under Yoshito Ohno. I also am greatly influenced by Amami music.
I do not express or perform Okinawan traditional music or Amami music, or sing Spirituals in my work.
But, it is the spirit or soul and the role to perform about soul and heart that I learned from these traditions. From Spirituals, I learned about my role as a singer, which is to tell stories and to be able to have the depth to tell stories, and I continue to learn from what was given to me through lessons.
As for dance also, I continue to learn from it, sometimes communicating with the Ohno family or working with Butoh dancers, as a lifelong process as an artist.
Sofy: Tell me about your electronic techniques, hardware or software configurations or objects you have made to create your unique sound. Basically I am curious about the tools of your trade as, on the technical side. You can speak about a particular piece or your practice at large.
Aine: I often use a microphone, which allows me to own silence and delicate voice. Recently, a mask, without any usage of microphone, is also allowing me to use silence as a part of seeing and sounding and sensing. It is as if the site/building sings, both from the viewpoint of the audience side and from my side.
Three of the pieces in which technology was the huge part of storytelling were these.
In a collaborative project of machine learning with sound technologist Luke Dzwonczyk at CNMAT, we used RAVE, a software developed by IRCAM. We used a model trained on the Voice Cloning Toolkit (VCTK) created by The University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Speech Technology Research. In the piece, my performing voice was translated in real time into voices of VCTK, created from speech data of “109 native speakers of English” and, through the performance, I challenged the backgrounds and nuances behind this dataset. My transnational background and my change of main language and silence led the work to a search for a language, or feelings that do not form words, with the navigation of the sounds following my voice itself, as the voice produces the sounds. VCTK eventually follows my citation from a scholarly work about crib talk and language learning, Japanese intimate and personal spoken words, and singing. looking at my collaborator’s manipulating sounds through a game controller, I felt it was like a scenery of child playing. And then, our finding of VCTK led to this child language learning theme.
In another collaborative project called Cicada, an audiovisual performance, with Luke and visual artist Olivia Ting, we explored what listening, seeing, touching can become, and how stories of respective experiences apart from able bodies may transform into a myth site-specifically in an outdoor courtyard. During my recovery process from a surgery I had in 2020, I was listening to cicadas’ chorus, of which singing sounds and timing would change daily. This experience gave me a focused time for me to be in body and for me to connect with inner. The cicada sound overlapped for us with Ting’s experience of two different types of hearing aids, sometimes a specific noise or sound being amplified too much like a chorus. Cicada also represented for us a renewal and acceptance of change. Luke and I used technicality and real-time processing tools including RAVE, and I structured the sections of these methods in the flow of the work. My body would transform into an insect with my voice gradually transforming into the sound of cicada. Conflicted body and mind would be represented through the use of a pico projector close to the audience and specific vocal features.
Translating my voice into the sound of water would blur the boundaries amongst humans, nature, bodies, technology, different time flows, and visuals. The site’s garden shape and my layering of voice with my spiral movement from center to outer under a fabric would represent the shape of cochlea, which was a clear thematic image for us. Finally, the ending section of untying the fabric, making shapes with and acoustic sounds of the fabric with the visuals of stars, and folding the fabric together with the audience would give time for the sounds and Images remaining in audience minds to be felt in an intimate and personal way.
I occasionally create fixed media pieces. For the fixed media portion of a mixed music, mystery in itself, for Bassist Richard Worn, I interviewed him and learned how his mother has impacted him in his private and professional life. Through two interviews with Richard, he shared his relationship with the bass, the body of the bass and his body, postures, everyday practice and stretches, and about his mother, memories and her words. I learned how physicality is involved in the instrument and the playing body, “imaginary” and invisible “marks” being engraved in arms and body. Then, Richard’s gardening because of his mother’s passion for garden landscape made me think of Images and shapes. I wished to create a work that is centered on stories told through the interviews and that also hints at imaginary soundscape/landscape punctuated by “gridmarks” as shape and marks are parts of the performer’s performance of excellence. I approached this visual/story structure in a poetic way so that the stories unfold gradually with the most special part being hidden so that Richard and the audience can engage in the unfolding. The media-making was my delicate approach to the secret of the stories.
Bio (provided by the artist):
Aine Nakamura creates transborder art of voice and body. Based on concepts, site-specificity, time-transcending stories, personal ethnography and research, and through her time- and site-specific presence, she creates and folds shapes and tells stories. She is also an improviser. Her recent performances include Under an Unnamed Flower, the winning work for Site-Specific Performance at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which focused on war, weaving, silk, mourning and mending, gestures and objects connecting the multiple; her performance project Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains at Berliner Festspiele’s 2022 Theatertreffen, focused on time-transcending healing and nature in the rhythm of season change and time change; and collaborative audiovisual performance Shades of Edge with Olivia Ting at The Lab in SF in 2024, transcending between two worlds across the wall and out from folds and words. Nakamura is an Awardee of the Fulbright Fellowship (Berlin 2021-2022), The Leo Bronstein Homage Award from NYU, and The Honorable Mention Award for the 2020 Pauline Oliveros New Genre Prize. www.evaaine.com
Fig. 294. Nakamura, Aine. Aine Profile Pic 2025, From the Collection of the Artist
