touring performances

Denise Uyehara is a member of the California Arts Council Touring Roster. Performances require a theater venue and technical crew. Uyehara is also available for lecture/performances and other residency activities. Click here for booking/contact information.

Big Head

Big Head revisits the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and considers current-day treatment of those perceived as "the enemy now", including Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and South Asian Americans. 

A work that has been in the making since early 2001, this poetic, interdisciplinary performance offers up letters from Rohwer Internment Camp in Arkansas, responds to recent hate crimes and imprisionments, and considers the coalition-building between these various communities during times of crisis. 

A non-linear montage of images, clay animation, movement, and text, Big Head evokes the mysteriously winding path of collective memory, and how we interpret our past to provide hope for the future.  

Performance includes testimony by Edina Lekovic, Shady Hakim, Lulu Emery, Tamadhur Al-Aqeel, and Lillian Nakano.  Dramaturgy by Tamadhur Al-Aqeel. 

"Mesmerizing...a coup de théâtre. Uyehara, a virtual conflation of Laurie Anderson, here addresses imperiled democracy in the present war-shrouded landscape."

- Los Angeles Times

"Powerful, compelling, potent and deeply chilling."

- LA Weekly

Maps of City and Body

Uyehara draws shimmering blue and green maps over her body as she evokes what marks us in our migration towards more borderless identities: blue numbers on a Jewish woman's arm; a Chicana biker neighbor; queerness; love and violence between Asian women and men; a grandmother's fiery suicide.

In this moving and provocative performance, Uyehara reveals to us the marks on her body as memories, and through them, she shows us our life destinations.

Visuals by Lee B. Directed by Chay Yew. Commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum's Asian Theater Workshop. Maps premiered in 1999 at Highways Performance Space, co-produced with the Taper's Asian Theater Workshop. Also presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, East West Players, The Asian Art Museum and the Modern Language Associan conference in San Francisco, the 3rd Conference on Asian Women in Theater in Tokyo, and for the MuuMedia festival at the Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland.

Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels

This show excites all the genders to laugh, talk and respect each other. Uyehara tells it like it is through the Vegetable Girl, Mad Kabuki Woman, Asian Queer/Bi Girl, an Asian Guy, "that Asian male/female thang", 'The Joy Fucked Up Club'.

She examines love, violence and respect among men and women, HIV/AIDS, women loving women. Premiered in 1994 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, and toured nationally at venues including the Painted Bride, PA, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, Northwestern University, the excerpts at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Hairou, China.

"Best Performance Artist, Western Region...Serious but hilarious, she strips away performance-art pretenses while gleefully subverting her audiences' expectations."

- Entertainment Weekly

"Critic's Choice"

- L.A. Weekly
- San Francisco Bay Guardian