Ayako Kato image by William Frederking
Bridge Dance Festival 2024 @ Links Hall, 3111 N Western Ave.
Ticket Links: Friday, November 8, 2025, 7 pm & Saturday, November 9, 2025, 7 pm
Law of attraction?! Ayako and charismatic dancer Ray Nakazawa met right after Ayako graduated from the University of Michigan MFA program and went back to Japan in 1998. Since then, their paths have been crossing on and off. Both as dance artist moms, they meet and share space again after 26 years. Their duo “Persona” will be presented in reflection of synergetic and synchronic force pushing them forward. The duo will collaborate with Selina Trepp who create expansive live animations reflected on a sculptural mirror ball, Videolah.
Ray, formaly based in Paris and Tokyo, currently based in Mie, Japan, will also invite you to a documentary dance, Respawn, that stages her daily life as a single mother raising a son with a serious illness.
Chih-Hsien Lin who is specialized in somatic-based approaches presents her solo as an embodied thinker, a clinical counselor, and an immigrant artist originally from Taiwan.
The Bridge Dance Festival began in 2018 as the culmination of four years of Japanese-focused programming at Links Hall, including the National Performance Network Asian Exchange, Beyond the Box, and Links to Japan.
Curated by Rika Lin/Yoshinojo Fujima
Presented by Asian Improv aRts Midwest & Links Hall
Collaborator Bio for “Persona”
Dancer, director, and producer Ray Nakazawa started ballet and modern dance from an early age. She started presenting her works in her late teens at the Contemporary Dance Association of Japan. She organizes Orbitallink, an improvisational collective with musicians and other genres, and holds 20 raffle ‘improvisational battles’ around the world, including Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo, Paris, and Berlin, which is held throughout the year.
In the 2000s, she moved her base to Paris, France, and presented dance works that collaborate with video and technology. After returning to Japan in 2007, she moved to Mie Prefecture due to her child's illness. While conducting dance and yoga classes for people with mental and developmental disabilities, she began to question the imbalance and over-concentration of dance in Tokyo, and began performing dance in the context of social activities, architecture, welfare, and education, mainly in the Mie Prefecture.
Selina Trepp (Swiss/American, b. 1973) is an artist researching economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is a goal. “If in doubt be radical” is the best advice she ever got.
She works across media, combining performance, installation, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups that result in photos, drawings and animations.
In addition to the studio-based work, Selina is active in the music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer combined with her video exploder to create projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina, her long running audiovisual collaboration with Dan Bitney.