Five dancers, three shakuhachi (bamboo flute) players, two projectors, one singer, one actor and one 7x7x7 cube converged onstage at the Japan Society on May 17^th for a cocktail of a performance project, "A Page Out of Order: M to M (POOM²)." Presiding over it all is Yoshiko Chuma, choreographer, performance artist, and director of the School of Hard Knocks, a New York-based dance troupe. She also dances in the performance. The “M to M” refers to Macedonia and Manipur. The piece is sometimes disorienting with all the different media – screen projections, live musicians and dancers – vying for your attention. Periods of frenetic activity alternate with moments of quiet. Dancers move in and out of the frame of the cube and there are intervals of dialogue. The piece, an ongoing performance series till 2010, doesn’t quite succeed in transporting you, but you come away with the sense of ambition, the scope of the project which covers politics, warfare, culture, nationality and the changing allegiances and boundaries these topics entail.

The School of Hard Knocks had its debut performance at the 1980 Venice Biennale and has gone on to win numerous Bessie Awards. Chuma is the recipient of numerous grants, including those from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She met Allen Ginsberg and collaborated with many other artistic luminaries. But enough of that. Suffice it to say that Chuma’s achievements are exhaustive. Chuma insists that there was no master plan, “You cannot make big decisions, but there is a natural formation. It’s almost improvisation… I’m pretty good in an emergency. If I plan, there is too much thinking, too much waiting, and then too much fear and I have never done well.”

A constant traveler, Chuma has visited over 35 countries. She has an inquisitive mind and says that whenever she visits a new place, she puzzles over certain questions. When she visited Jordan in February, she asked a driver en route to a brief visit to Petra, “Looking at Jordan – one side of the border is Iraq, one side of the border is Saudi Arabia, one side Palestine, one side Israel and one side Syria. What kind of mental condition does a person have living in so intense a situation?” The places she chose to discuss, Macedonia and Manipur, are also subject to territorial disputes and the question is no less pertinent to her own life. Although she came to the US in 1976, the term “Asian American” does not apply – cosmopolitan is far more apt. Chuma spends up to one third of the year outside the states, visiting other countries. She is better equipped than most to say what life is like at a cultural crossroads.

Chuma grew up in post WWII Japan in the midst of a great deal of educational reform, which accounts for her exposure to theater by a drama teacher in elementary school. Simply put, Japan was trying to inch away from the emperor based system and democratize. Chuma was a politically active student in Kanazawa during a time when the country was awash in Western ideas, and her early experiences in New York proved formative: “In the 1970s East Village, there were under 50, maybe under 20 Japanese people. I didn’t come with a reason. To be a student? No. To be an artist? No. For opportunity? No. I think I came for nothing. I didn’t have any relatives or any friends I knew. Curiosity? Yes, you can say that. Coming to New York was not comfortable, but there were lots of interesting things going on. It was not a safe place, part ghetto, part paradise…The first two or three years in Manhattan were an absolutely unbelievable time in my life…I don’t think I had any ambition to be an artist or a dancer; just surviving day by day was so incredible.” Among her early adventures were going to the Apollo Theater in Harlem with a friend where they were the only two Asians in an African American audience – “I went into the ladies room where there were nice perfumes, and everyone was so colorful and much bigger. [We were] just two Asians in the Apollo Theater, and they went like this,” Chuma mimics being looked over – and her first excursion into the graffiti-covered New York trains – “I asked a friend, ‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ She just said, ‘Everybody uses it.’”

Immigrants often accept moments when they are struggling with learning a language as a humdrum part of transitioning into a new culture. Chuma, however, is unique: What most people consider to be the usual challenges of balancing different cultures and values, she has turned into a job that has spanned over three decades. Looking at her life, you could infer that Chuma doesn’t think language barriers and cultural gaps are challenges to be dealt with; they’re the stuff of art. Whoever is practicing their English at this very moment, trying not to botch their words, is performing. The whirligig spectacle of SoHo in the 70s and 80s reinforced Chuma’s feeling of being in a show, “It’s almost like you are making a movie 24 hours a day; you are a director and you are a performer. Some small nip of the voice was directing me, I am going to post office and I have to buy a stamp, so I would have to repeat that sentence. I would rehearse it ten times before my turn in a long line, and I would become nervous and feel my heartbeat. It’s almost like theater, you’re going on stage.”

If Chuma’s post office experience is any example, she thinks the line between life and art is permeable. Even silence is an opportunity to communicate. Chuma is loquacious, and she punctuates her stream of commentary with bursts of laughter. It’s hard to imagine her stranded at the margins of conversation, but back when she was still picking up the language she would quietly concoct schemes of disruption. “Sometimes when I was at a dinner table, everybody would talk, but I didn’t know what they were talking about. At first, I thought they were talking about something very important, but then I started to understand what they were saying, and they weren’t talking about anything important. Sometimes I was very quiet, but I thought what if I overturned this dinner table? Many times I thought, I don’t know what you’re saying but if I start kicking or take the table cloth like that,” she makes a yanking motion, “there may be some reaction.” Once a provocateur, always a provocateur.

The question is this: if you’re a vagabond, does any place feel like home? The answer lies in nostalgia, where the past is your hearth. “I think living in Manhattan used to be more conducive to the single life, a very individual life, but now Manhattan has become more family-oriented. Having homes or real estate is more important. Manhattan has become less interesting for me than the past. I think a certain utopian vision of Manhattan was that you could be single – a single mind, a single responsibility, a single freedom. If you have a single mind, it’s sometimes incredibly dangerous, sometimes incredibly dreamy. It’s almost as though there was a big pill that you could swallow called Manhattan, which worked for me during the 1970s, but I started to notice that the pill stopped working in the middle of the 1980s.” Chuma assuaged her growing restlessness with travels (most recently to Eastern European countries), but returning was difficult, “Coming back to New York was hard. I could not adjust for a long time, but I started to get used to that gap. Sometimes it takes months to get used to it here. That is ordinary life now.” Chuma is comfortable with discomfort. She is often acclimating to a new environment and some internal weathervane is turning according to the social, cultural, and political winds.

Nowadays, Chuma is especially excited to meet young Asian Americans. She is not so much interested in mentoring them, so much as she wants to be influenced by them. Chuma said she would like to meet people who are “gap plus,” meaning the greater the distance between two people, the more they have to stretch themselves to come to an understanding. Individual and cultural gaps that frustrate others inspire Chuma and are the basis for a lifetime of creative output. Referring to the leap people make in order to bridge a divide, she said, “It’s almost an agreement.”