WE ARE STILL HERE | Welcome!

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Program and Concert Schedule

Concert Program

COMING SOON! Click to view the program order, read bios of the featured artists, and learn what's coming up next for Resonance Ensemble.

Concert Schedule

EXPO

2:00pm - House Opens

2:50pm - Opening Call by Spirit Church Drum Circle

3:00pm - Peformance begins
The program is 90 minutes with no intermission

4:45pm - Post-concert panel
Panelists include Vanport Mosaic, Chisao Hata, Shohei Kobayashi, and Katherine FitzGibbon

Directions + Parking Info

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EXPLORE THE WORLD OF WE ARE STILL HERE

FEATURED ARTISTS

Shohei Kobayashi

Chisao Hata

Kenji Bunch

Heath Hyun Houghton

Claire Forstman

Ayanna Woods

Eric Tuan

Caroline Shaw

Toru Takemitsu

Concert Curator, Conductor
Arranger for Minidoka by Kenji Bunch (World Premiere)
Guest Artist
Author of On This Land: The Aseembly Center Prayer (2024)
Commissioned Composer
On This Land (World Premiere)
Guest Artist
Creative Collaborator
Rehearsal Pianist
Composer
Shift
Composer
Tule Lake Sketches
Composer
Her Beacon-Hands Beckon from To The Hands
Composer
Arranger for Sakura

IN REMEMBRANCE

More than 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes and unjustly incarcerated during World War II.

In Portland, the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center was hastily converted into the Portland Assembly Center, one of fifteen temporary detention centers used to confine Japanese Americans before they were sent to more permanent concentration camps—such as Minidoka in Idaho.

From May to September 1942, approximately 3,676 Japanese and Japanese Americans from Oregon and southwest Washington were held at the Portland Assembly Center in overcrowded, makeshift conditions.

Today, that site is known as the Portland Expo Center.

Oregon’s Japanese Americans: Fully Documentary produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting

We Are Still Here seeks to activate this historic site through sound, word, image, and song. In addition to concert day, we invite you to learn more through videos, podcasts, articles, and more at the link below.

Learn more

REMEMBRANCE IN WORDS & MOVEMENT

Chisao on a 2022 KOIN 6 segment speaking about their work to honor and highlight Portland’s historic Japantown

The centerpiece of today’s program is a presentation of Chisao Hata’s PORTLAND ASSEMBLY CENTER PROJECT. Conceived by Chisao and developed in partnership with Heath Hyun Houghton, PACP explores the lives of Japanese Americans who were subjected to the consequences of Executive Order 9066, including historic, economic loss, forced imprisonment, and cultural reckonings.

Through this examination, the Project exposes the racial dynamics that continue to govern how we share the lands we call Portland, Oregon.

PORTLAND ASSEMBLY PROJECT
Created by Chisao Hata & Heath Hyun Houghton

FEATURING STORIES FROM
George Hara | Lilly Irinaga | Emi Somekawa | Harue Ninomiya | George Nakata

ARTISTIC COLLABORATORS
Spirit Church, Drum Circle | Original Music by Joe Kye | Dance choreography and performance Toshiko Namioka

“This is American history, and we want the true American history – the good and the bad and everything that we experience as people of color in America – to be told. That’s what we’re doing, and that’s what we continue to do, and we want more people to be able to tell that story.”

— Chisao Hata, on her work with JAMO

*From Chisao Hata’s installation at the 2023 Vanport Mosaic Festival: Coming Home.*

Chisao was also part of the Irei Monument Project. The project expands and re-envisions what a monument is through three distinct, interlinking elements: a sacred book of names as monument (慰霊帳 Ireichō), an online archive as monument (慰霊蔵 Ireizō), and light sculptures as monument (慰霊碑 Ireihi). Drawing on traditions of monuments built in America’s internment and concentrations camps—such as the Manzanar Ireito, the Amache Ireito, and Rohwer’s Ireihi (Soul Consolation Towers or Monuments)—the project aims to memorialize the past and repair the fractures caused by America’s racial karma.

The Ireichō (a large-sized book of names) contains the first comprehensive listing of over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated in US Army, Department of Justice, Wartime Civil Control Administration, and War Relocation Authority camps. Embedded into the very materiality of the Ireicho are special ceramic pieces made from soil collected by the project from seventy-five former incarceration sites from Alaska to Hawaii, Arkansas to California, and from almost every other region of the United States. You can read about Chisao’s involvement here.

REMEMBRANCE IN SONG

Commissioned by Resonance Ensemble, today’s performance of On This Land is one of two premieres by Kenji this weekend. The other premiere (commissioned & premiered by Chamber Music Northwest) interweaves music with narration by actor & activist George Takei, performing excerpts from his memoir— Lost Freedom: A Memory—reflecting on his time as a young boy in one of these incarceration centers. This afternoon, we share the world premiere of Kenji’s On This Land, a setting of an original poem by Chisao Hata.

“As I was reading through Chisao Hata’s searing and heartfelt poem “On This Land,” I noticed two elements in the text: one describing in stark detail the history of the Portland Assembly Center, and another asking the reader to imagine how this experience must have felt to the prisoners themselves. To highlight this duality in the words, I split the choir into two antiphonal groups, one delivering facts and the other asking for our empathy. Gradually the two groups begin to merge and finally come together at the very end. On This Land is approximately 12 minutes in duration.”

— Kenji Bunch

REMEMBRANCE IN ACTION

Vanport Mosaic is a memory-activism platform. We amplify, honor, and preserve the silenced histories that surround us to better understand our present and shape a future where we all belong. Vanport Mosaic was born from a collective desire to make the invisible visible. Since 2014, we’ve brought together Vanport flood survivors, descendants, artists, activists, educators, and historians to co-create spaces of collective memory and healing. We began as a grassroots initiative and have since evolved into a nationally recognized nonprofit platform for memory activism. We believe in telling stories with people, not about them–using art and celebration to heal, remember, and envision a more just future. The Vanport Mosaic Collective is a living, evolving community of memory workers: artists, educators, storytellers, historians, cultural strategists, survivors, descendants, and organizers. Remembering is an act of resistance.

Learn more

ABOUT THE MISSION

“This is not just a performance. It’s a declaration. It’s a reminder that the land remembers even when the official record tries to forget. The Portland Assembly Center Project: We Are Still Here is memory activism in action. It is a ceremony, a reckoning, and a refusal to let erased histories stay buried. We return to this site not to reenact the past, but to confront it, name it, and make space for healing.”

— Laura Lo Forti, co-founder and director of Vanport Mosaic

This event, co-presented by Vanport Mosaic and Resonance Ensemble, marks a third year of intentional collaboration between the two justice-oriented organizations.

The Portland Assembly Center Project: We Are Still Here marks the closing of a two-day activation of the Expo Center as part of Vanport Mosaic’s 10th anniversary festival.

On May 31, the annual Vanport Day of Remembrance, the organization hosts tours, performances, pop-up exhibits, screenings, singing, and a memory activism fair.

In addition to The Portland Assembly Center Project: We Are Still Here, Portland audiences have further opportunities to study and honor Japanese American history in our region in the two weeks leading up to the performance as part of the Vanport Mosaic Festival.

On May 31, Chamber Music Northwest featured performances by Kenji Bunch, George Takei, and works by Andy Akiho and Paul Chihara, offering another powerful reflection on Japanese American history through music.