Yoshiko Chuma

Yoshiko Chuma (中馬 芳子, Chūma Yoshiko^?, born in Osaka, Japan) is a dancer, a choreographer and the director of the Bessie Award winning performance art group The School of Hard Knocks. Described in 2007 by Bloomberg as "a fixture on New York's downtown scene for over a quarter- century", her work spans from early "absurdist gaiety" to more recent serious reflection, which nevertheless represents the "maverick imagination and crazy-quilt multimedia work" for which the artist is known. Dance commentators have found her work difficult to classify; in a 2006 profile, Dance Magazine speculated that "One might call her a postmodern choreographer, a movement designer, or a visual artist whose primary medium is human beings--dancers, musicians, pedestrians". Chuma favors abstract art and discourages efforts to interpret her work, telling Bloomberg that "What I do is ambiguous. I don't have a statement. If I had a statement, I'd be a writer". In 2007, Chuma received a Bessie Award honoring her sustained achievements as a choreographer.

Chuma arrived in the United States from her native Japan in 1977, settling in Manhattan and subsequently becoming a leader in modern American dance. In 2007, The New York Times remarked on her involvement "in one of the great populist moments in New York dance" when, in 1988, she staged an audience-participatory performance art swim-dance in the Astoria pools in Queens. Her avant-garde pieces have included the seven-hour-long "Sundown", an exploration of cubism mounted at Issue Project Space in 2006.

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