The opening scene in Robyn Mineko Williams’ Hisako’s House opens from a second-story window onto a verdant backyard streaked in afternoon light that filters through hedges and trees. From the garden, the light spills over the window creating a scrim-like effect to evoke a memory—a gentle idyll reminiscent of a Tarkovsky film where past and present dissolve into a single moment. Yet, just like a Tarkovsky scene, there is an underlying sense of unease. Below the window, two bodies clad in white sway in a slow, intimate rhythm atop a white blanket spread across a verdant lawn, evoking the warmth of a family picnic.

As the bodies begin to stir, a moment of disquiet ripples through them, revealing a child who has been sitting at the mother’s feet the entire time. In this finely choreographed segment, the woman suddenly looks off to the right as if a jarring memory has shot through her body. The dancers’ movements speak to one another—sometimes jagged and fraught, other times comforting—as though both are struggling through the weight of the same history. Ultimately, they find solace in each other. The sequence closes with the bodies lying flat side-by-side, leaving behind the unspoken echoes of a journey of pain, remembrance, and familial togetherness.

Hisako’s House, a live performance and series of video projections premiered in June 2023 for an intimate audience directly inside the location that inspired it: the late 1950s mid-century home of Mineko Williams’ grandmother, Nancy Hisako Nishimura, in Lombard, Illinois.

A core chapter of Hisako’s House, Beams, has now been adapted into a site-specific multimedia installation at the SKF/Konstnärshuset Gallery (Stora Galleriet) in Stockholm, Sweden—a historic landmark built in 1899 that serves as the home of the Swedish Artists’ Association. Curated by Ashik Zaman, the exhibition is located at Smålandsgatan 7, 111 46 Stockholm, and runs through Saturday, June 13th.

Grounded in the post-World War II history of the Japanese-American diaspora, Beams explores the aftermath of wartime incarceration. It delves into the specific history of her grandmother’s forced removal from her home in Long Beach, California to the Manzanar concentration camp in Inyo County, California, while contextualizing the broader fate of over 125,000 Japanese-Americans who were systematically uprooted and imprisoned by the U.S. government. Through this personal lens, the work confronts the forced assimilation, erasure, and systemic silencing that the entire community faced as they were pressured to rapidly rebuild their lives in the decades that followed.

Mineko Williams is a director, contemporary choreographer, and dancer based in Chicago. She has received the Walder Foundation Platform Award (a major unrestricted grant for mid-career Chicago artists) and is a recipient of a Princess Grace Foundation-USA Choreographic Fellowship. Apart from major commissions across the globe—including creating original works for premier companies such as the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Malpaso Dance Company, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet—she was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2014. She is the founder of Robyn Mineko Williams and Artists (RMW&A), an arts organization that brings together a rotating roster of designers and creators to produce interdisciplinary, collaborative performances. Before transitioning into directing and independent choreography, Mineko Williams spent twelve seasons as a company member with the highly regarded Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Japan Contemporaries contributor Jake Price spoke with Mineko Williams about the creation of these two deeply intertwined works, the history that shaped them, and what lies ahead for the project.

Editor’s Note: This article was edited for clarity and relative brevity.

Jake Price for Japan Contemporaries (JP): The production and installation are both very beautiful and thoughtfully done, but before we get into the production itself, I’m most interested in the foundational aspects of the project and how it came about. 

Robyn Mineko Williams (RMW): Yeah, so it really came about just by being curious about my grandma’s life during the pandemic. As a performing artist, all my work stopped, so I had time to go to her house and ask her questions about her life. Generally, things that I was curious about. She was in her early 90s at the time, and was starting to decline cognitively, but was still very with it.

I think as a mom and having seen my own mom caretake for my grandma, I just was thinking about this lineage and how we parent. And about the choices we make and where those influences come from. Specifically, about my grandma. She had such a different life than I’ve had. 

JP: Right, your grandmother’s experience was vastly different from your own.

RMW: Yes. There was just a lot about her experience specifically, and then the Japanese American experience that I didn’t know about, because my family didn’t talk about it at all. So, it was like a combination of learning about my grandma’s life, but then, more broadly, truly, what happened to Japanese Americans. It was about learning about the incarceration and the aftermath of it. Also, the mapping of my family, being in California, going to (concentration) camp, coming to Chicago, and asking why are we all here? 

JP: Are you Nisei, Saisei? (Second/third generation.)

RMW: I’m Yonsei, actually! 4th generation on my grandma’s side and Gosei, 5th generation on my grandfather’s! My family goes way back. And actually, on my grandpa’s side when World War II happened, they were quite American—like generations in.

JP: Wow, that’s amazing. Very few can count their lineage back that far. To me, that just deepens the tragedy of what they, Americans, experienced all the more. At the very least I’m glad that you are telling this story. I’d like to know more about your family’s history.

RMW: My grandma lived in Long Beach. My grandpa lived in Lompoc, California. However, one of the great pleasures of going down this pathway and of making this work and learning about the history is connecting with other people, other families that have similar experiences who have similar character traits. Without hearing other stories, I always just thought, “Oh, that’s just how my family is. They didn’t talk about certain things.” Then, talking with other colleagues or other Japanese Americans of different generations, I’ve learned that, actually our experience is like a shared trait.

JP: Yeah. Can you go on about that? That’s really important, I think. Keep talking about it.

RMW: I think that the silence I had all around was like silence versus sound—this silence was just like generally what was the house like, you know, when my mom was growing up in it versus what it was like when I was in it. There wasn’t a lot of talking in her generation. But when I went to her house it was such a warm, loving place.

I think that sound versus silence also kind of translates towards how families talk to one another about certain subjects. There was left unsaid on my Japanese side of the family this history with camp, but also in their love language. I think it’s much different than how I relate with my 11-year-old son. However, I think love was shared through food and different actions rather than words. I found similarities of these traits in conversations I had with other Japanese American artists and researchers.

JP: Tangentially I’m making a film about a Ukrainian American artist whose grandmother and mother had similar experiences as yours did. We talked about how trauma can sometimes skip a generation. So, I can only imagine how strong your grandmother was, but also how she kept these experiences locked in. Because she was going though the really hard times, she just had to push on and maybe didn’t even realize how hard it was because she was right in the middle of it. And so then coping with the fallout of the trauma falls on the future generations to take on the role of speaking about this experience as you’re doing. I’m taken by the phrase that you address generational trauma in terms of “ripples of history” which seeps into successive generations.

RMW: Yeah, definitely. For this project I interviewed my grandma a handful of times, my Aunt Pauline who was at Manzanar as a kid and also conducted interviews with my mom and her three older brothers. I asked my uncles some questions about if they ever thought about how their parents’ experiences in camp affected how they were raised. Although they replied that they hadn’t really questioned it that explicitly, they did all share that they often thought about how wild and unimaginable it was that their parents had to go through that. My uncles shared that their parents worked hard to provide a good quality of life for them. But I do remember thinking our lenses looking at this family history are different. I do think it’s my generation and the generations that come after me, that are asking questions about the critical thinking or impact the events experienced and the ripples of them. For previous generations it was about survival, a way of thinking that, “this is our lives. This is what we have to do.”

JP: Exactly. When they left the camps, they had so much life to cope with—rebuilding life first and foremost. Can you talk to me about how those ripples come into your life? I mean, even if you weren’t fully aware of them before the pandemic, I think of them like this current that always has a small heartbeat and then it becomes more apparent over time.

RMW: Yeah, well, I think that for me, that there is a lot that my mom did to break certain cycles of trauma and silence. The way she is with me is very different than the way her mom was with her. My mom and I are very close, very warm, you know. We talk about everything. I’ve gathered that this is different from how they related to each other.

After our interview, Robyn wrote to further add: I also was thinking after chatting with you that although I gathered later in life that my mom and grandma’s relationship was quite different from the close bond I share with my mom, it was always clear to me, from the time I was a kid right up to the end of my grandma’s life, that there was a lot of love between them. Maybe it went mostly unspoken on their timeline together, but it was there. Hisako’s House and Beams both hold multiple layers of relationships, trauma, resilience and love in them. I think some of this was witnessed by people, some of it witnessed by the walls that these dynamics lived in and some of it just lives in and through us. At times when I am asked about the project, its contents and what surfaced for me making it, I realize after the fact that I forgot to mention how I also saw (and felt) a lot of love woven through it all. I wanted to be sure to share this part of their relationship, too. 

JP: (Picking up from the original interview): Right, so the distance, even though there is a deep sometimes unexpressed love, strikes me as an example of how a middle generation breaks the earlier generation’s pain for the next generation’s benefit.

MW: Yeah, and that trickles down to my son now too. And in terms of the cultural parts, I think there’s been this interesting way of reconnection to the Japanese culture and to food and music and events and happenings. My grandma tried to hold on to certain things, but she also had to let go of certain things. So, for example, she had to let go of language, but she held on to food. She held on to the Obon festival (a multi-day Japanese Buddhist event honoring the spirits of ancestors). 

And my mom actually loves Obon and cooking my grandma’s recipes—I think it’s just that generationally, my generation and my son’s are much more excited and motivated to recapture and learn about what parts of the culture and language were lost…That was a huge part of wanting to talk to my grandma because I was thinking, what should we keep doing? What can I learn? What should we keep holding on to? Because after they’re gone, my grandma was my touchstone to Japanese culture.

JP: Sure. And in trying to understand your mom’s way of thinking and that of her generation, they felt a greater need to assimilate and also keep going because they too were a part of rebuilding after the mass incarceration.

RMW:  My mom was born in ‘59. Her brothers were born just a little bit before them. I think they wanted to fit in, you know, they were living in the suburbs of Chicago and they did experience racism. Like when my mom was in elementary school, she was telling me, these kids and their parents would call her, they’d talk down to her about bombing Pearl Harbor and make these racist comments. And that was just the norm.

JP: How did your exhibit make its way to Stockholm?

RMW: The curator, Ashik Zaman, is a friend and now married to a friend of mine. When he was visiting Chicago, we got into a conversation about what I was working on. At that point, I had finished the performance (of Hisako’s House), but I filmed the whole process. I had all this footage that I intended to make into a film. However, with the performance finished and my grandma’s house being sold, I was trying to figure out another way to continue the life of this work. And this is when Ashik suggested it could be an installation, which is something I’ve never done. So, it was a bit of a leap for me, but also very timely. This was when the administration (from Biden to the second Trump presidency) was shifting over again.

JP: Let’s talk a little bit about the present situation. I don’t want to get overtly political. But, we are living in a time where history is repeating itself. So that must have been on your mind.

RMW: I’ve always felt an urgency to share these performances and share my grandmother’s story more broadly because I don’t think that even now in America, stories like my grandmother’s are widely known. I was surprised that some of my dear friends had no idea that this history was a part of my personal history or that the mass incarceration had even happened. And with the current administration we’ve been seeing signage being erased from places like Manzanar in an attempt to erase this history. This just lights my fire even more brightly and more urgently to keep going. It’s awful. It’s just really awful. So, yes that’s the feeling I have. It just gives me more urgency, like I gotta go now. I can’t wait. I can’t wait for anyone to say yes. I just have to figure out ways to keep getting it out there.

Beams runs through this Saturday, June 13th, at SKF/Konstnärshuset (Smålandsgatan 7, 111 46 Stockholm, Sweden).