Opening last night, May 8, Mayumi Lashbrook’s Enemy Lines brings down the curtain on Firehall Arts Centre’s season with just three more performances, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night at 7:30pm
The performance mixes dance and multi-media, with a biographical look back at the trials and trauma of her Japanese immigrant great-grandmother Tsuyako Sumioka’s early life in Canada. From being a young widow caring for her three Canadian-born children, to the forced internment of Japanese-Canadians and environment of fear following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and resulting hardships, then finding further discrimination after the family’s voluntary repatriation to Japan and struggle to return to Canada.
Mayumi narrates, and embodies Tsuyako to explore her secure life that is thrown into chaos when a squadron of dancers disrupt the peace. Aided by the ensemble of Michael Mortley, Lucy Rupert, Denise Solleza, and Gerry Trentham choreographed vignettes take the audience through the ups and downs of the decades of prejudice and fighting to belong. Examining these trials, Mayumi forms a picture of where, why and how the generational trauma experienced as a Yonsei – fourth generation Japanese immigrant family member continues to rears its head in the ongoing cycle of fear, bias and intolerance that works its way into the world.
photo: Marlowe Porter Photography
While presented as intimate family portrait, Enemy Lines leaves the audience to take note of how generation after generation not only experience the trauma but inflict the trauma upon each other.
Don’t miss your chance to see Enemy Lines by Mayumi Lashbrook only until May 9 for just three more performances at the Firehall Arts Centre, 280 East Cordova Street, Visit firehallartscentre.ca for more details and tickets.