PS alum Fusako Innami
PS alum, Fusako Innami (M.A. '08), has been awarded the 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar Award to conduct her book-length research, Gestural Writing: Performance, Topography, Trace at UC Berkeley (Dep of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies).
Fusako's Fulbright project, Gestural Writing: Performance, Topography, Trace, concerns performance which by its very nature disappears. How do we recollect live performances that are not available in recordings, but only remain in the form of reviews, scores, pictures, or digitized archives? Her project gathers traces of dancers' transcultural movements, contacts, and memoirs. Based in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she will explore new methods of reconstructing past performances.
Dr. Fusako Innami is an Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies at Durham University, and author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (Michigan, 2021). She lives according to an ethos of intercultural understanding, knowledge exchange, and community building through arts and cultures with her embodied experience in Japan, Italy, the US, and the UK. Since her childhood study of classical ballet and music, she has reflected on what it means to integrate gestures, movements,and rhythms migrating from different continents to enter her body.
As an academic, dance reviewer, and practitioner, Fusako conducts dance workshops in Japan, "Touch," to translate touch in literature back to moving bodies; and an ongoing international symposium, "Translating Embodiedness," to develop new metodologies for translating embodied practices across media.