Multi-media performance, 2026
40 minutes running time

Mejiro! Mejiro! Mejiro! is a performance work  based on a graphic novel and artist book by the same title. Drawing from a selection of short stories, actors bring to life a multi-verse world through voice, sound and animated projections. The narrative follows a young girl with clairvoyant abilities as she journeys through time, tracing the lives of four generations of Japanese Canadian children growing up across shifting geographies. Fragmented memories intertwine from pre-war Kyushu, Japan, to the islands of Hawai‘i, and finally to the west coast of British Columbia.

The stories are infused with creatures, folklore, ghost tales and the enduring presence of ancestors—whose influence looms large in the recollection of histories.

The performance experiments with the aesthetic and conceptual elements of film telling, a style rooted in early Japanese silent cinema (1896–1939), where benshi, or film narrators, stood beside the screen to voice characters and provide context, adding emotional depth to silent images.

Performance: Yoshie Bancroft, Yayoi Hirano, Hiro Kanagawa, Yuki Kedoin
Projection Design: Candelario Andrade
Animation Assistance and Compositing: Cherry Wen Wen Lu
Sound Design: Antoine Bédard
Harp: Éveline Grégoire-Rousseau
Sound Engineering & Technical Support: Alex Penney
Lighting Design: James Proudfoot
Production Coordination: Cherry Wen Wen Lu
Artistic Consultation: Stafford Arima
Japanese Translation: Yukari Peerless, Yuki Kedoin, Yayoi Hirano

This workshop presentation was launched at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Courtroom as an initiative of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Centre for Global Asias. Special thanks to Lynn Chen and the Vancouver Art Gallery tech team. 

A graphic novel of this work is forthcoming. 

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.