On March 11, 2011 the country of Japan was hit with a 9.0 earthquake, causing a subsequent tsunami and triggering the second largest nuclear accident in history, killing nearly 19,000 people. The moment after news hit the United States was particularly significant to the company and, specifically, to the project’s lead artist Makoto Hirano, an American of Japanese descent. For Hirano, that moment, which existed between postdisaster and pre-understanding, threw into focus questions of what is consequential and inconsequential in our daily, American lives and the difficulties of empathizing with something that feels so big and yet, as we move through the world, so small.

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JapanAmerica Wonderwave captures two friends, one of Japanese heritage and one not, attempting to understand and process tragedy in our world today.

Toying with theatrical presentation, the two performers create for an audience a first-person comedic/funerary collage, placing themselves inside and outside of tragic situations, delicately enacting images of natural disasters, heroically voyaging to a post-tsunami Japan, and wildly dancing to the music that they listen to in times of desperation. The piece employs a playlist of American and Asian pop music and an ever-shifting zoom-in/zoom-out visual design as the piece’s performers grapple with the discomfiting sensation of powerlessness in a time of distant crisis. Team Sunshine’s JapanAmerica Wonderwave has been seen as a work-in-progress at the Asian Arts Initiative’s mini-Festival “Home: Far and Near” and at the Commotion Festival, a project of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. The evening will feature an “opening act” by musician Christopher Sean Powell and choreographer Kate Watson-Wallace. He will be providing preshow ambient music and performing a set of rhythms and electronics backed up by dancing by Watson-Wallace and another dancer for your entertainment pleasure.