Undercurrents: The Tashme Project – Living archives from Tashme Productions (Ottawa/Montreal)
If you shake your head in dismay at the universally dismal experience of Japanese Canadians consigned to internment camps during World War Two, you’re making the same mistake as those who consigned them to the camps in the first place.
To wit: painting individuals with a collective brush.
That’s one of the messages of this subtle and affecting piece of verbatim theatre by two performers whose families were interned.
Seeking to unlock that part of their heritage, Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa interviewed dozens of Nisei or second-generation Japanese Canadians who, now in their 70s and 80s, were children when interned at Tashme, the largest camp in British Columbia. They then used the Nisei’s own words to fashion a picture of life in the camps and afterward.
That picture is as diverse as human nature itself.
Taking on the voices and gestures of those interviewed, Miwa and Manning – both of them robust actors – show us children delightedly playing marbles, living in freezing shacks with no running water, marvelling at the gorgeous mountain setting, losing parents and siblings to death……..(read more)
Published in the Ottawa Citizen by Patrick Langston