Autumn Strawberry Dance Film, 2021
11 minutes, 14 seconds 

Choreography: Lisa Mariko Gelley
Cinematography and Editing: Milena Salazar
Sound Design & Foley: Nancy Tam assisted by Cindy Kao
Lighting Design: James Proudfoot
Animation Editing: Candelario Andrade
Studio Assistance: Cherry Wen Wen Lu
Taiko: E. Kage
Shakuhachi: Takeo Yamashiro
Violin: Molly Mackinnon
Accordion: Mishelle Cuttler
Narration: Cindy Mochizuki
Voices: James Long and Tamiko Noda
Documentation: Malumi Photography
Performance: Leslie Komori, Claire Cardoso, Raymond Nakamura, Naomi Shikaze, Jacob Willcott Noda, Patrick Noda, and Alana Noda. 

Autumn Strawberry was created with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Descendants of the Autumn Strawberry project participants (grandchildren, sons, and daughters of the nisei elders) worked with Cindy Mochizuki and her collaborator Lisa Mariko Gelley to create a dance film. Gelley choreographed gestures and movements from the animations pertaining to stories connected to the participant’s family lineage. The participants witnessed and watched segments of familial stories, but also repeated and looped gestures unraveling threads connected to their own histories. These dance gestures were performed in the installation and documented as a dance film.  

Gelley characterized her involvement with this project as a deeply moving and impactful experience. In the coinciding Autumn Strawberry publication, she shares that “by having audiences witness Japanese Canadian seniors and younger family members embodying movements of their childhoods or movements of their ancestors while they were on these farms, and reclaiming those gestures into their bodies, untold or forgotten stories would come back to life and become real and important again for both performers and witnesses.”