Fun with Cancer Patients Kanazawa
A major collaboration with 21st Century Museum for Contemporary Art and Hanaume Cancer Support Centre, this 3-day installation featured over 30 cancer patients, medical professionals, support workers and bereaved family members creating one-to-one performances with galleries. Developed over nearly two years with a team of over 50 participants, the work was our attempt to respond to the silence around illness and the difficulty of having challenging conversations, employing methodologies from both intimate and one-to-one performances and patient focus groups. After a short introduction by Brian (in Japanese, in which he is not nearly fluent), audience members were paired with a Member and taken into the theatre or around the Museum and taken through a benri (a tool of convenience) for conversations about cancer. This 36 page book will be available for publication next year. We are currently evaluating all responses (of over 300 audience members), but... it was great.
Fun with Cancer Patients: Kanazawa was presented as a Keynote Performance and Presentation at the Japanese Psychosocial Oncology Conference in September 2018.
Fun with Cancer Patients Kanazawa was made for Kanazawa Fringe! and produced/directed by Yuko Kuroda with Yuna Yoshida and Haruka Okuda. Miyo Kimura led the project on behalf of Hanaume Cancer Support Centre. The project was produced by Jo Allan with set and design by Mamoru Iriguchi. All photos by Christa Holka.
Below is the English translation of the full benri.
Programme / Final Report of Kanazawa Fringe (of which Fun with Cancer Patients was a part). Please find full translation of report below, translated by Jo Allan.
Fun with Cancer Patients: Kanazawa was featured as the Keynote Speech and Performance at the Japanese Psychosocial Oncology Conference (National Conference) in September 2018.