Affective Experience Lab collaborator Dr. Fusako Innami has recently been awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to work on her new project at University of California Berkeley.
The project, Gestural Writing: Performance, Topography, Trace, concerns performance which by its very nature disappears. How do we recollect live performances that are not available in recordings, but only remain in the form of reviews, scores, pictures, or digitized archives? It gathers traces of dancers’ transcultural movements, contacts, and memoirs. Based in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she will explore new methods of reconstructing past performances.
Dr. Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies at Durham University, and author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (Michigan, 2021). She lives according to an ethos of intercultural understanding, knowledge exchange, and community building through arts and cultures with her embodied experience in Japan, Italy, the US, and the UK. Since her childhood study of classical ballet and music, she has reflected on what it means to integrate gestures, movements, and rhythms migrating from different continents to enter her body.
As an academic, dance reviewer, and practitioner, Fusako conducts dance workshops in Japan – Touch – that work to translate touch in literature back to moving bodies. She also convenes an ongoing international symposium, ‘Translating Embodiedness’ to develop new methodologies for translating embodied practices across media.
The Affective Experience Lab has supported a number of events focussed on movement, embodiment and the senses, including ‘Rhythm and the Body’ (May 2024) and ‘Sensing Through Description’ (June 2024), which included Dr Innami’s paper on ‘Writing through the Tactile: Sensations, Accumulations, Membranes’.
