Performance and residency project
Co-presented with The Five College Dance Department
Yasuko Yokoshi’s art-making explores the complex interconnectedness of culture and history that frames our perspective of contemporary life. Her inspiration for Tyler Tyler comes from The Tale of the Heike, a classic 12th-century Japanese epic of warring clans that documents the intense desire for domination and the inevitable fall from power. The central theme of the stories – the Buddhist law of impermanence – has special resonance for Yokoshi; born and raised in Hiroshima, she was often reminded as a child of the ephemeral nature of human life. These stories continue to resonate in our own times as ambition and pride continue to spawn war and greed.
“The sound of the Gion Shoja bells echoes the impermanence of all things;
the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline.
The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night;
the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.”
– From the opening of The Tale of the Heike (translated by Helen Craig McCullough)
Housing for the artists in Tyler Tyler is supported in part by the UMass Hotel at the Campus Center.
