When Portland director, producer, and playwright Dmae Lo Roberts was researching the subject of her new youth chamber opera Shizue, which begins a long journey throughout Oregon this month, she met with the grandson of the opera’s subject. Hood River community leader and artist Shizue Iwatsuki was a master practitioner of the Japanese art form of ikebana, flower arranging. But no flowers grew in the freezing Idaho concentration camp to which the US government consigned Shizue and her family during World War II. After telling Roberts stories about his grandmother, Harry Iwatsuki brought out a magical object. “During her time in the Minidoka camp, she made an ikebana arrangement in a bottle using sticks, stems, yarn and wire,” and other found materials, Roberts remembers. 

---

THE ART OF LEARNING: An Occasional Series

---

The revelation sent chills down Roberts’ spine. The improvised ikebana arrangement symbolized Shizue’s tenacity, resilience, and persistence — qualities that would sustain her through the cruel camps and other challenges down the decades thereafter. 

By the time the aged Shizue taught her grandson Harry the art of ikebana, she’d come to view the art form as a metaphor for life itself. Each arrangement contains a flower “that is above, that represents heaven, and one below, that’s the earth,” she told him, “and here in the middle is where we are.”

Roberts decided to make that story a central theme for Shizue, a story about a powerful Oregon woman who could coax beauty from even the most dire circumstances. 

The 50-minute, one-act chamber opera, composed by Kenji Oh with a libretto by Roberts, opened last weekend, October 4-5, at downtown Portland’s Brunish Theatre to sold out shows. The production then moves to various cultural and educational venues before briefly alighting at Hillsboro’s Walters Cultural Arts Center on October 26, where tickets remain available. After that, the show goes on the road to about 50 schools and other venues throughout rural and suburban Oregon. 

The show also represents an evolution for Portland Opera. It’s part of the company’s long standing educational and outreach efforts that bring opera beyond its usual urban enclave and predominantly aging, affluent audiences to schools and communities in Oregon’s outback and other places where live opera seldom happens. And it’s the latest installment in a new Portland Opera initiative to stage and set to music the inspiring true stories of underrepresented Oregon communities. 

Taking the show on the road

Shizue is the second production in Portland Opera’s Our Oregon Project, which commissions youth chamber operas that tell the stories of Oregonians from communities whose experiences haven’t always been explored on stage. It’s part of the company’s main education effort, Portland Opera to Go (POGO), so named because after premiering on public performance stages, the shows tour schools and community centers around the state. 

“Portland Opera has been in schools since its inception,” notes Alexis Hamilton, Manager of Education & Community Engagement. Hamilton was herself a young artist in the program, then its tour manager, and now she heads up the project. “Around 2004, we rebranded those education efforts as Portland Opera to Go, where we come into school assemblies with full sets, costumes, and piano accompaniment.” 

Anyone who thinks of opera as an elitist, adult art form (which hasn’t always been the case) might be surprised to think of it serving rural and low income Oregonians — especially children. “I have found when working with littles that opera is easy for them,” says Hamilton. “Opera is just a story told through music. It’s music and it’s a story, and if you like music and you like a story, then you’re two-thirds of the way to liking opera. Littles are used to not understanding every single thing that happens to them. So if they miss something, they don’t mind. They pick it up later. It’s older people that are more intimidated if they think they don’t know everything. Young people will accept it.”

Opera is nothing if not larger than life — big emotions, big sounds, big drama — and really, that’s not really so far from other kid-friendly, larger-than-life, music-augmented spectacles like cartoons and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hamilton fondly remembers Schoolhouse Rock and often uses Looney Tunes’ famous “What’s Opera, Doc?” to demystify opera to audiences young and old. 

POGO doesn’t just parachute in with the performance at a school assembly. “If I can help an audience understand why we do the things we do,” Hamilton says, “they start to get it, and they start to relax. Providing such context is a big part of POGO in general and Our Oregon project in particular.” In advance of performances, Hamilton conducts “teach-the-teacher” sessions, creates teachers guides, and opera lesson plans — a curriculum integrated with the students’ regular subjects that goes out to the teachers at each school POGO visits.

“For curricular purposes, there’s nothing better than opera,” Hamilton explains. “It’s at the intersection of everything they’re already studying: literature, social studies, art, and you can’t have music without math. I can teach anything jumping off from opera.” 

With Shizue, for example, she uses the composer’s penchant for incorporating Japanese folk song melodies as a point of departure to explore modern musicians’ analogous use of sampling in pop and other music. They even get to learn one of the major folk songs.

Such lessons show students that they’re already familiar with a lot of what’s going on in an opera, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes in class presentations, she’ll play a snippet of opera music, ask the students what they think is going on, and they’ll get it immediately.

The POGO artists also help on the educational side. When POGO alights at a school, the performers themselves visit classrooms to talk to students directly about the show and opera and bring it all down to a personal level. 

“You have to be a lot more than a good singer and great performer,” Hamilton says of the POGO artists she hires. “You really have to be a great communicator across the board and treat everyone with respect. I interview everybody I’m considering. I need people who love the art form and do not think this is beneath them. We have run into farmers in the middle of Nowheresville, Oregon who listen to the [Metropolitan Opera] broadcast every Saturday morning, or we might have teachers who’ve never seen a live performance in their lives.”

It’s also a demanding job. Beyond singing and acting for an hour, POGO artists “have to be their own roadies,” she says. “They have to load up the set, unload the set when they get there, put in the set, put in their classroom time, do the show, tear down the set — and we might do a second show that day” in a second venue. 

Those early POGO productions were truncated youth adaptations of traditional operas (Rossini’s Cinderella, Mozart’s Magic Flute, et al), although in 2022, the company turned to contemporary fare with A Journey of Faith / Un Camino de Fe , which explored the challenges a Latina teenager’s family faced as immigrants to the United States. The youth operas were often revelatory for students in the rural Title I schools (those with high numbers of lower income students) that receive the majority of POGO visits. Hamilton remembers shows in tiny towns like Fields and Crane that might play to only a couple dozen kids. Hamilton says the company charges only $2 per student, far below its production and travel costs, and performs more than 10 percent of its shows for free.

“We’ve never turned away anyone who really wanted us,” Hamilton says. “We have generous funders (more than a dozen foundations and public arts agencies) who enable us to go places where nobody else goes,” Hamilton says. Once POGO performed at a school in Halfway that had recently lost its only music teacher to budget cuts forced by Measure 5 property tax limits. “We drew “the whole damn town,” she recalls. “After that performance, the city decided, ‘we have to fund a music teacher.’ And they did.”

Operas for Oregonians

POGO began evolving in 2018 when Portland Opera embarked on a strategic plan that involved gathering feedback from the company’s constituents, including audience members, its staff and artists, and the broader community. “We heard over and over that they wanted us to put the Portland in Portland Opera, and to commission new works,” Hamilton says. 

Thus was born Our Oregon, a program that would commission new works featuring Oregonian subjects. New operas can be phenomenally expensive (they’re often now created by multi-company consortiums), so Portland Opera decided to start with lower-budget youth operas, whose sets, props, costumes, and artist requirements are much more affordable than main stage mega productions. 

When it came to choosing the subjects of the new operas, Portland Opera adhered to a vision whose expansiveness was inversely proportional to its expenses. “We’re not just Portland’s opera company, but we also have a big responsibility, not just to our audiences, but also to the larger ecosystem,” Hamilton explains. “We were already going all over the state, so we wanted stories that featured people who were traditionally not represented” on opera stages. They chose to create new youth operas depicting Oregonians from Native, African American, Asian American, and Latino perspectives. Each will take two years to develop, alternating with more of those traditional youth opera adaptations in off years. 

The series kicked off with 2022’s Beatrice, which told the story of “Beatrice Morrow Cannady, who lived in Portland from 1912 to 1938,” Dmae Lo Roberts wrote in ArtsWatch, “fought the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon, co-founded the Portland chapter of the NAACP, and was the first Black female editor of Portland’s first Black newspaper, The Advocate.”

Portland Opera’s then-interim music director Damien Geter recommended composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum. Chosen as a response to the recent racial reckoning protests in the wake of the recent police murder of George Floyd, the show presented Cannady’s eventful life in a charming setting that you didn’t have to be a child or even a journalist to enjoy. Hamilton says it went over well in school performances, too. 

Still, as much as I enjoyed Beatrice’s catchy music, I do wish Portland Opera had considered other Oregon composers who write beautifully for voice, such as Judy A. Rose or Sydney Guillaume. One of the lessons Hamilton says she learned from Beatrice was the importance of working with creators embedded in our own community. 

From Okayama to Hood River

So, for Our Oregon’s second opera, Hamilton sought local artists connected to the Asian Oregonian experience. It’s hard to think of any local dramatic storyteller more connected with those communities than Dmae Lo Roberts, a frequent ArtsWatch contributor who’d spent part of her childhood in Japan. You can read about the award-winning Portland theater artist and producer’s extensive background in telling multicultural stories on stage and over the airwaves in her ArtsWatch biographical note. Hamilton asked Roberts to write the libretto and story for what became Shizue — and to direct the production.

“I had done a lot of work telling Japanese American stories,” Roberts told ArtsWatch, including the first Asian American history series on public radio. “I’ve written plays, books, poetry, but never a libretto. I asked a bunch of questions before I said yes.” Hamilton answered them all to her satisfaction, until it came to the last one. 

Roberts: “Does it have to rhyme?” 
Hamilton: “Uh, no.”
Roberts: ”OK, I’m in.”

Roberts’s first call was to her longtime acquaintance Linda Tamura, an emerita Willamette University education professor, scholar, author, and granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, who was raised on a Hood River orchard. Along with an impressive record of scholarly articles and exhibitions, she’d written books about Japanese Americans and had worked with Roberts on Oregon Children’s Theatre’s Covid-quashed 2020 production, The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559. Roberts, looking for underrepresented stories, asked Tamura if she knew of any Japanese Oregonian women whose lives might make a compelling stage drama for kids and adults. 

Tamura didn’t have to look far beyond her own Hood River origins. The 19-year old Shizue Iwatsuki had moved Japan to the Columbia River town in 1916. Trained in the high culture arts of poetry and ikebana flower arranging, the young bride found herself working on her new husband’s family’s apple orchard and living “in a cramped hut with a wood stove, kerosene lamp, outside toilet, and no running water,” according to Tamura’s Oregon Encyclopedia profile. 

Over the next several decades, Iwatsuki faced a series of challenges, several chronicled in Shizue. Maybe the toughest was her family’s incarceration in three of the US government’s notorious World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans who’d committed no crimes. Roberts’s libretto reveals the kind of struggle so many women of color and immigrants have faced — not necessarily a single dramatic moment, but a lifetime of courageous perseverance and adaptation. Before she died in 1984, Shizue Iwatsuki somehow managed not only the immense work of running a family business and motherhood, but also became a much-honored community leader — and continued making her art. Her poetry won the highest honors in Japan and she continued to pursue the art of ikebana.

Roberts describes that special kind of heroism in a Japanese word, gaman, which approximately means “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” And when she read Shizue’s lyrical poetry (one of her poems graces Portland’s Japanese American Memorial Plaza in Tom McCall Waterfront Park), Roberts knew she had an opera subject. 

Staging a Life

To create the music, Hamilton turned to California-based Japanese American composer Kenji Oh, who has worked with various West Coast ensembles and choirs and composed for theater, film, dance, TV, and (likely a Portland Opera first) gymnastic floor exercise. (He’s a gymnast too.) He also happened to be just putting the finishing touches on his own first opera. 

Oh’s appropriately Western/Asian hybrid score for the vocal quartet accompanied, by John Cage-style prepared cello and piano, combines East (Japanese children’s melodies, a cello modified to resemble the Japanese shamisen) and West (operatic leitmotivs for characters a la Richard Wagner). It also employs the technique pioneered by Portland-born composer Lou Harrison of assigning European musical styles to represent Western characters or ideas, and juxtaposing them against Asian musical styles appropriate to those characters. Hamilton says it sounds a bit more “operatic” than Beatrice’s more musical-theater style score. You can hear a few excerpts and more through mid-October on All Classical Portland radio’s valuable Thursdays@3 program. 

While Oh worked on the music, Roberts plunged into her research, using her connections with local Japanese American cultural organizations and institutions, and with Tamura’s introduction, meeting with Iwatsuki’s descendants. Her grandson Harry Iwatsuki regaled Roberts with stories about and images of his grandmother. And showed her that improvised ikebana in a bottle she’d created in the camp.

So many stories — and it all had to fit in a 50-minute opera with a four-member cast, and suitable for kids and families. “How do you tell a story that starts at age 19 and goes to age 78 — in music?” Roberts wondered. “I came up with the concept of splitting her into the elder [played by Chihiro Asano] and younger [Lindsey Nakatani] Shizue, so they could sing to each other, become narrators to each other. Then each actor can become multiple characters when not playing the title role.”

One challenge that didn’t daunt her: writing for kids. “I don’t think it’s that much different to write for young people as for adults,” Roberts says. “Sometimes a lot of writers write down to kids. I don’t want to underestimate young audiences. I read YA novels all the time, and I don’t think there’s anything they can’t grasp.”

In one respect though, especially when writing for the stage, kids are actually tougher. “You’ve got to entertain them, but also move fast,” she says. “I wrote with that in mind. [Shizue] moves fast and covers so much ground. The only thing I worry about is them losing some of the facts” along the speedy timeline. She hopes Portland Opera’s contextual education guides and the students’ teachers will help fill in any gaps.

Some of Shizue’s story is conveyed through the set designed by previous Roberts collaborator John Kashiwabara, who faced similar space constraints — working with classroom spaces as small 20’ by 20’, or as capacious as a full auditorium stage, or, this past weekend, Portland’s Brunish Theatre. “We needed a set that was portable and super flexible,” Hamilton says. Director Roberts will block and rehearse both the compact and expansive versions. 

Kashiwabara’s reversible four-panel design and ground cloth variously morphs into Hood River fields and orchards and prison camps. Roberts suggested using an outsized suitcase as a centerpiece that both evoked the limited baggage the interned Japanese American citizens were allowed to take with them, and symbolically carried their lifetime of memories. Shizue’s poetry also permeates both the libretto and the set design.

Roberts also enlisted Unit Souzou’s Michelle Fujii and Toru Watanabe to choreograph the actors’ movements.

Engaging the Community

Roberts workshopped the first version of her libretto with Japanese American actors whose families shared some of the same history Shizue had endured. She incorporated their feedback along with the audience’s into her revisions.

That two-year timeline — double Beatrice’s, another lesson learned — also allowed Portland Opera time to muster support. “With Shizue we want to involve as many people in the local community as we can,” Hamilton says. “We’re seeing the enthusiastic response from the community, with Linda Tamura and Dmae talking it up” at events and in the media. More than a dozen members of Shizue’s family will be coming to the show from Idaho, Montana, and Oregon. 

“We have a very activist community here that’s very interested in how they’re represented,” Hamilton says. No doubt referring to the rabidly racist misrepresentations in works like Madame Butterfly and The Mikado, she acknowledges that “opera doesn’t always have the greatest history with Japanese Americans. We’re willing and anxious to participate in that conversation. It’s both gratifying and intimidating because we want to do it right.” 

That includes the educational material. Along with engaging members of the community in the opera’s creation, Hamilton has borrowed lesson plans from the Japanese American Museum of Oregon for the teacher’s guide. “Since Shizue was a poet, we have language arts lesson plans about Japanese poetry and a variety of multimedia ways to access it. We’re providing a packet that gives the historical context of the camps. We’ve tried really hard to make sure that a teacher who knows nothing about the art form or the history has everything they need.” And with incidents of anti-Asian racism rising in recent years, and the looming specter of further incarceration of innocent Americans of color, depending on how political winds shift, that history might soon prove newly — and sadly — relevant to those students today and tomorrow.

Ultimately, though, POGO’s connection with students, in Shizue and other operas, stems from the art form’s real superpower. The source of what Hamilton considers its universal appeal to kids in Eastern Oregon and Portland urbanites, comes down to one thing. “Emotion,” she declares. “Opera is all about emotion. It’s an emotional art form and when an opera does it right, there is nothing that can touch it for drama, catharsis, and emotional content.”

That’s why the lessons stick, she says. “Brain science tells us that the things you remember most in your life have high emotional content. So I can just tell you that Japanese Americans were incarcerated in 1942 for no reason other than their Japanese ethnicity, and you’ll say, OK. But if I tell you a story about an individual who lived through this thing and wrote poetry and set that to music that is moving, that hits different because I’ve personalized it. It multiplies the power of the entire thing.” 

Like Shizue’s makeshift flower arrangement in a bottle, POGO is showing that opera can bring rare beauty, and lasting lessons, to even the unlikeliest places.

***

Portland Opera To Go’s Shizue is presented at community center and school performances around the state, with public performances Oct. 26 at 2 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. at the Walters Cultural Center in Hillsboro.

Among other performances: 3 p.m. Oct. 11 at Beaverton’s Elsie Stuhr Center; 10 a.m. Oct. 12 at the Garden Home Recreation Center; 7 p.m. Oct. 17 at Hermiston High School; 2 p.m. Nov. 10 at Birkenfeld Theater in Clatskanie; 7 p.m. Nov. 14 at Hood River High School; 2 p.m. Nov. 17 at Happy Valley Library. 

***

Also see Angela Allen’s review of the production, “A powerful poetic punch: Portland Opera premieres Dmae Lo Roberts and Kenji Oh’s ‘Shizue: An American Story.’“