Cindy Mochizuki: Autumn Strawberry (Dance Film)

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Cindy Mochuzki, "Autumn Strawberry," 2022

still (1), dance film. Photo by Malumi Photography.

The culmination of a project first initiated at Surrey Art Gallery in 2019, Autumn Strawberry (Dance Film) is a hybrid multilayered artwork. In the summer of that year, Mochizuki participated in a two-month residency at the Gallery where she researched local archives and interviewed members of Japanese Canadians living in the Lower Mainland. A year later, in the summer of 2021, Surrey Art Gallery presented Mochizuki’s large scale multimedia installation Autumn Strawberry. 

During the 2019 exhibition, Mochizuki worked with community members and a team of artist-collaborators to realize a “dance film.” This film combines performances with scenes from the artist’s handmade animations and the installation’s whimsical sculptural elements. Mochizuki, along with choreographer Lisa Mariko Gelley, worked with descendants of Japanese Canadian families who owned farms in the Lower Mainland—including North Surrey (Strawberry Hill), Langley, Haney/Maple Ridge and Mission—before their properties were taken away and family members were displaced to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia and Alberta. Under the direction of Mariko Gelley, these participants enacted gestures derived from Mochizuki’s animations. These recorded sessions of movement draw upon intergenerational memory and embodied storytelling as the performers learned, improvised, and connected once again to the lost stories.

“Mochizuki not only reflects on the former diaspora community in the Surrey area but actively rebuilds the community by bringing together multiple generations: elders who share their stories, third- and fourth-generation people who listen and recall the impact of internment on their lives, and fifth-generation Japanese Canadians who have the opportunity to explore their heritage and identity,” writes Namiko Kunimoto in the exhibition publication. “As they dance and perform together in the imaginative installation of Autumn Strawberry, the site becomes nearly sacred. Through their bodily engagement with space, performers can express their own emotions about the past, their concerns about the future, and rebuild a community for the present.”

An artist’s book publication based on the Autumn Strawberry project will be published in spring 2023 with essays by Namiko Kunimoto and Cindy Mochizuki and interviews with choreographer Lisa Mariko Gelley and composer Nancy Tam.