The challenge

Asian-Americans helped build the United States, but many other Americans still view them stereotypically, or worse. As gaps grow between rich and poor, and many low-income people and communities of color feel voiceless, the nation's racial and ethnic communities sometimes even lash out against each other. Nobuko Miyamoto remembers how just such a conflict erupted between Korean-Americans and African-Americans after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Her challenge is to encourage these diverse communities to tell their stories—with a strong voice, so that these stories can change the nation. “Work needs to be done to create deeper understanding between diverse cultures on an ongoing basis,” Miyamoto says. “Knowing our stories and the wisdom within our cultural roots connects us to our deepest self…this is ultimately necessary as we strive to make peace in this chaotic and divided world.”


Seeds of commitment

During World War II, when Miyamoto was a child, she was relocated like many Japanese Americans, even though she was a Sansei—a citizen whose ancestors had lived in this country for three generations. Her adult experience is unique: Miyamoto has danced on Broadway—in the original Flower Drum Song, in 1959—and in films such as The King and I (1955) and West Side Story (1961). She is also an experienced singer, songwriter, director, and choreographer. The roots of Miyamoto’s activism, however, date back to 1969, when she attended a national conference in Chicago and, along with Chris Iijima, a blues/folk singer and guitarist from New York, composed a song for an Asian-American audience of community elders and young activists working against the Vietnam War.

“That song was the collective expression of our Asian brothers and sisters to stop the killing of people who looked like us,” she recalls today. “The electricity of that moment, the realization that, until then, we had never heard songs about us, set the course of my journey for the next 30 years.” Community art as a catalyst for social change is her real vocation; this is the task, Miyamoto says, that fate has assigned her to do. “I am blessed,” she says, “because my work and beliefs are one.”


Accomplishments

Miyamoto describes herself as a “community artist” who believes that art is “a powerful tool, not only as presentation but as a process of discovery—a way to engage and build community.” In 1978, she founded Great Leap as an Asian-American arts organization. Twenty-five years later, Great Leap is a thriving, multicultural performing arts group that gives voice to the experience of contemporary Asian-Americans as well as African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other groups. In Southern California, Great Leap’s multicultural performances reach more than 20,000 children and youths in the public schools. Through touring performances, workshops, and residencies, the organization reaches an additional 10,000 youths, college students, and adults nationwide.

In 1992, responding to tensions between Los Angeles’s African-American and Asian-American communities, Miyamoto took what she had learned with Great Leap to shape a healing multicultural touring show that includes Latinos and African-Americans and is called “A Slice of Rice, Frijoles, and Greens.” Her group’s ongoing residency program, “To All Relations,” brings together people from diverse backgrounds to explore and tell their own stories, thereby, in Miyamoto’s view, creating an alternative narrative for the world’s future. “I believe there is no better way than the arts to open the cultural, racial, and economic chasms which abound,” she says. “We have a powerful, creative tool to educate, entertain, and transform our world.”


Her Leadership style

A Buddhist, and a practitioner of yoga and tai chi, Miyamoto offers quiet, gentle leadership by example. Her leadership is grounded, she says, in “listening, watching, waiting, and being still.” Teams that combine community performers with professional artists create many of Great Leap’s productions. Through these collaborations, Miyamoto has nurtured new leaders in community art. One such new leader is Hung Nguyen, who founded the first Vietnamese-American theater group.

One of Miyamoto’s primary missions is to encourage artists to tell stories about their experiences as Asians in America. Her influence sends ripples of cross-cultural creativity far beyond her own organization: Jo Anna Mixpe Ley, a young Latina writer, was inspired, for example, to use a group-storytelling method of Miyamoto’s with incarcerated and gay and lesbian youth. Occasionally, Miyamoto contributes her skills as a guest teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she helps a younger generation learn to tell their stories. “I’m often surprised and pleased by younger people who tell me that seeing one of my performances or participating in one of my workshops
changed their life or opened a new horizon for them,” she says. “Many of them aspire to lives that combine art and activism.”


The future

Recent Great Leap projects have extended far beyond California. An example is Miyamoto’s collaboration with community groups in Detroit to create a Harvest Dance, “I Dream a Garden,” celebrating that city’s urban gardening movement. But during this difficult economic period, Miyamoto plans to keep Great Leap closer to home. So the organization is forming new partnerships with such groups as Muslim Public Affairs Council, Arts 4 City Youth, and Weeds to Wonder, an urban gardening program in Los Angeles. Great Leap also recently produced a community theater project called “To All Relations: Memories of Boyle Heights” at the Japanese American National Museum. Great Leap is further exploring how to groom new artistic leadership for Great Leap. “I’m motivated by the power of the arts as a process of discovery,” Miyamoto says, “to awaken people to new ideas, connect with other cultures and create community.”


More about Nobuko Miyamoto and Great Leap, Inc.

“Because Nobuko’s approach is so personal, warm, and direct, she is able to give folks a new sense of excitement about their lives. Individuals gain confidence to do things they didn’t know they could.”
— Sojin Kim, associate curator of the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles