Rika Lin bridges centuries of tradition

The choreographer uses classical Japanese forms to examine gender and identity.

By IRENE HSIAO

Black hair. A jilted woman. A sacrifice. Snow. “She’s a geisha who falls in love with a samurai. They have their one secret night together, but she realizes the future of the clan depends on his marrying this other woman, so she says, ‘Go.’ It’s their wedding night. She’s alone and undoing her hair. It’s black hair—a symbol of youth, the strength of a woman, resilience, beauty,” says choreographer Rika Lin on Kurokami (“Black Hair”), an excerpt from the now-lost 18th-century kabuki play Oakinai hirugakojima. “If you listen to the lyrics, it sounds like she was this innocent girl, and he went, ‘We’ll be together forever, baby!’ But if you know the play, she’s in anguish and bitter because she chose this sacrifice.”

Now Lin, in collaboration with musicians Matsuya Nozawa and Tatsu Aoki, calligrapher Hekiun Oda, director Subhash Maskara, user interface designer Derrick Fields, and software engineer Michael Flood, is developing Kurokami e{murge} , a contemporary rendition of this classical work for virtual reality presentation—the latest project in a body of work that examines gender and tradition through the lens of Japanese classical dance.

Born in Chicago to first-generation immigrants from Japan, Lin began dancing after her younger sister, Rina, got a taste of Japanese classical dance one summer in Japan.

Upon her return, Rina continued at Shubukai, the Chicago school of Japanese classical dance founded by grandmaster Fujima Shunojo in 1976—and their mother took Rika, a self-described “tomboy” who practiced martial arts, along. “Japanese classical dance in the conventional older ways was one more line in your ‘I’m going to be a good wife’ resume,” says Lin. “Can you do the tea ceremony? Do you do flower arrangement? Do you dance? I’m sure my mom was thinking, ‘Here’s my butch daughter who likes karate; I better get her something so she’s presentable.’ So I went and had my lesson, and it was this rare thing, a male dance teacher. [Japan is] a male-dom-

Yet Lin was drawn to dance in spite of herself. “The characters and the dances had a complete story. You knew your character. It was comforting to know. You are dancing a woman, and you’re selling your flowers, and this is how a woman moves, this is her class, this is what she’s wearing. It’s a comforting security that there’s this path, this is what you do, and you try to do it as best you can. I always figured, growing up, you have this track to follow. This expectation, you’re supposed to have ‘osmified’ into you by your family: you get good grades, undergrad, med school. It was planned. It was secure. So dance was a way to not worry about the real world. It was an escape,” she says. (An escape that looks just like the trap, I suggest. I never thought about it that way, she laughs.)

Dance was also a connection to Japanese culture as Lin grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Warrenville. “My first language was Japanese, but in the burbs, there were no other Japanese people at all. My father [a radiology physicist] would moonlight at checking MRI machines in hospitals. We would go to Iowa—a big family vacation!—and