Simply Haiku: An E-Journal of Haiku and Related Forms
November-December 2004, Volume 2, Number 6
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Kaleidoscopic Mandala - Participating Artists

Arawana Hayashi (dance) is Artistic Director of the Jo Ha Kyu Performance Group in Cambridge, MA, which performs contemporary dance and bugaku, Japanese Imperial Court dance. She is a student of Suenobu Togi, formerly a member of the Japanese Imperial Household Music Department. She was co-director of the Dance Program at Naropa Institute, Boulder. Co from 1976-80. While there she was involved in a nationally acclaimed Arts and Education Program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. She taught modern dance and improvisation at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, the Institute of Contemporary Dance, and Massachusetts College of Art in Boston from 1972-76; and founded and directed Cit Dance Theater, an improvisational dance company, from 1972-76. She worked in community based dance programs for Summerthing, Boston’s neighborhood arts program from 1976-83 and has presented programs for children in the schools since 1976, partially under the auspices of Young Audiences in Boston and Denver. She has trained in ballet with Nina Fonarof and in modern dance at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York. She was a member of James Cunningham and Dancers from 1969-70. She is the recipient of the MA Cultural Council’s 1994 Choreography Fellowship, and has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Cambridge Arts Council, the WBZ Fund for the Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Goldfarb Foundation.

Thomas Allen LeVines (piano) began his studies in composition at Stetson University with Paul Langston, completed his graduate studies with George Crumb and George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania and concluded his formal studies at Tanglewood with George Perle. Over the course of his career, he has received many prestigious awards for his composition work. Subsequent to the prize winning performances of his Piano Trio No.1 in 1984, many other works have received considerable attention, including Pavanne and Sauterelle, premiered by Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra (1987), Travel Journal for String Quartet, performed by the Portland Quartet in America and Japan in the early 90's and Risshakuji for String Quartet, commissioned by Yamagata Prefectural Government and premiered in Japan by the Tomada Quartet (1994).

Yumiko Matsuoka (vocal), originally from Tokyo, Japan, is an accomplished arranger/composer/performer as well as a seasoned educator/clinician. She was the founder of Boston-based a cappella quintet Vox One whose albums Vox One (1993), Out There (1995) and Chameleon (1997) won multiple awards from the Contemporary A Cappella Society of America (CASA). Yumiko’s arrangements can also be heard on another Vox One album Say You Love Me (1995) released by a Japanese label, Vap, as well as on recordings by other a cappella groups around the nation. Some of her arrangements are available from the University of Northern Colorado Jazz Press. She is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, teaching ear training and vocal writing. She has been a guest facilitator at the Western Wind Ensemble Singing Workshop, and has coached collegiate and semi-professional groups in and out of New England. Her current group is In the Mix, a mixed quartet pursuing a rich and exciting sound with their own compositions and arrangements.

Kiyoko Morita (incense burning) teaches Japanese at Tufts University. She taught
Japanese at Harvard from 1985-90. She also is the author of The Book of Incense
(Professor Cranston kindly wrote the forward). She is the founder of the Boston Study
Group of Shino School of Incense. She has given multiple presentations on incense at
various institutions.

William Tipton Thrasher (incense, flower, and tea) is an independent curator specializing in Japanese craft. While his previous exhibitions have concentrated on traditional regional craft, he is now working on an exhibition focusing on Japanese craft in the 21st century - which looks at the work of younger artists and emerging masters in the fields of ceramics, textiles/fibers, lacquer, wood, metal and glass. He frequently teaches a course in Japanese art at Massachusetts College of Art (Boston). He has had two years of training in Koh-Do in Kyoto, within the Shino School of Incense; has studied traditional ikebana for many years, in the Ikenobo School (Kyoto); and has studied chanoyu for over 20 years, and has a teaching certificate. He has lived (and traveled extensively) in Japan on 2 occasions, first as a Fulbright Fellow, and then as a Japan Foundation Fellow, both times doing research for exhibitions.

Susannah Sayler (slides) is an artist and curator who recently moved to the Boston area from NY. She has been making slide shows for three years. When she isn't making temporal pieces, she is a installation artist and photographer. Her slide work has been shown in NY at the Downtown Arts Festival, The Fringe Festival and at several clubs. For the past two years she has curated Projected Narratives, an evening of slide pieces. She hopes to bring Projected Narratives to the Boston area next summer.

Wilfred Croteau (painter: program cover) was born in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1930. After studying art in Boston, he went to Paris in 1954 and studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. During this period he associated with many American and European artists such as Sam Francis, Karel Appel, John Hultburg, Kumi Sugai, Atsuko Tanaka, and Antoni Tapies. While in Paris his own style of Abstract Expressionism evolved. He was involved in many group shows, and in 1957 had his first one-man show at the Galerie Crueze, in Paris. He has had many shows in the United States, and now lives in Northbridge, Massachusetts.

Raffael de Gruttola (poet: program cover design) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1935. He has two books of poetry published, Where Ashes Float in 1980 and Flarnenco Song in 1983. His first book of haiku Recycle was published in 1989. He is past president of the Haiku Society of America, and is its present Treasurer. He is a founding member of the Boston Haiku Society. He has known Wilfred Croteau for more than twenty-five years and their collaboration with haiga, which has produced Echoes in Sand started in 1994. He now resides in Natick, Massachusetts.

Shokan Tadashi Kondo is an international renku poet. His study of haiku and renku began when he lived in Rakushisha from 1969-72 with Master Shiranshi Kudo. Rakushisha is a well known historical cottage where Basho stayed several times and wrote his masterpiece diary Saga Nikki. In 1975 in New York City he met John Cage when John was composing an orchestra piece called Renga. He organized an English renku group in Tokyo from 1980-82. He joined the Japanese Renku Association in 1986. He has been studying renga with Kiyoshi Hamachiyo and renku with Meiga Higashi since 1995. He has been in charge of selecting and translating English haiku for the Basho Festival of Ueno City, Basho's home town, since 1989. He founded the Association for International Renku (AIR) in 1989. He founded Isehara Renku Group in 1995. Isehara is located between Tokyo and Mt Fuji, where a medieval renga poet Shinkei died in 1475. He teaches at Seikei University in Tokyo. He studied at Columbia University, Southern Illinois University. and is presently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.


 
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