About Artist Maiko Yamamoto
Maiko is a Vancouver-based artist who creates new, experimental and intercultural works of performance. Many of these works are built through a career-long practice of collaboration and include many theatre projects, public art works, and performance installations.
Maiko is the Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Theatre Replacement, which she co-founded in 2003 with fellow artist James Long. A leader in the Vancouver and national arts scenes, and well known internationally for her work, Maiko’s practice draws upon her love of formal inventiveness and exploration, conceptual play, creative research, artist-centred processes and experimental and multidisciplinary practice. A natural mentor, Yamamoto often collaborates with intergenerational artists, individuals and family members in making work that searches for playful, immediate and authentic ways of bringing audiences and performances together.
For TR she has created over 25 new works, many of which have toured to festivals and venues around the world, such as the Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), Magnetic North Theatre Festival (Ottawa, Whitehorse), Everybody’s Spectacular (Reykjavik), PAZZ Performing Arts Festival (Oldenburg, Germany), Dublin Fringe Festival (Dublin) and artsdepot (London). Works include: BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience, Yu-Fo, Train, Sexual Practices of the Japanese, Dress me up in your love, Town Choir, MINE and Best Life. She also curates the PushOFF platform, an annual festival that amplifies diverse artists creating cutting-edge, experimental work as part of a global conversation of art making. In 2018, Maiko started a new project-based artist residency called COLLIDER, which has had significant impact for Vancouver artists— to date the residency has fostered the creation of 5 bold new performance works which have gone on to make connections nationally and internationally.
In addition, Maiko teaches performance and mentors artists for a range of different companies, organizations and individuals, both in Canada and abroad. She has helped artists to develop new work through programs like MAKE, a residency initiative spearheaded by 4 arts organizations in Ireland; the National Theatre School of Canada’s Acting and Directing Programs; Bristol-based Action Hero’s You Can Be My Wingman residency; Arctic Arts Festival’s Open Call mentoring program, and why not theatre’s ThisGen Fellowship. She also occasionally works as a curator for other institutions and organizations, and writes and speaks about performance regularly, centred around devised theatre making and its capacity to transform systems and structures within the contemporary art field.
She holds a BFA in Theatre from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and a Masters of Applied Arts in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Maiko was the co-recipient of the 2019 Siminovitch Prize in Directing, with James Long.
Photos by Jessica Jacobson + Stephen Drover
Artist Statement
I’m interested in art that is made through the intersection of forms, perspectives, and lived experience. My artistic practice has grown up around the core idea of collaboration, to provoke questions of individual and collective identity.
My performances challenge the ways we relate to each other physically, emotionally, and conceptually inside performance spaces, whether in theatres, galleries, or public space, in order to create moments of tangible co-existence with each other.
The artworks serve as a means to open up personal histories, everyday experience, and socio-cultural and socio-political perspectives with a live audience. I seek to examine how this exchange shifts our interaction with the world and offers new ways of seeing and identification.
Mentorship
Increasingly, my practice has turned to opportunities to work with artists in developing new ideas into performance. Whether acting as a mentor, facilitator of new creation processes, teacher, or critical friend, mentorship has become a focused part of my artistic practice.
Working with emerging and established artists of different histories, backgrounds, disciplines and lived experience, I have been lucky to develop mentorship relationships in both formal and informal scenarios. These opportunities help to rejuvenate and challenge my own creative practice and art making, and connect me to artists all around the world.
Opportunities for artists to continue learning and growing their practice at any time in their career is hugely important to me. Recent artists/projects I have been mentoring include:
Katarina Skår Lisa / Čázevulošnieida – The Underwater Girl
Hazel Venzon / U N I Together (UNIT) Productions
Hanan Sheedy / Two Steps Forward
Sue MacLaine + Hannah Ringham / The Untethered Joke
Contact
maiko@theatrereplacement.org
Many of the drawings on this site were made by my son, HokutoMac. thelocalbubble.org was designed by Kali Malinka.