Seth Yarden
Personal Background, Education and
Experience
I was born on July 27, 1968 in Rhinebeck, New York.
I have been based in Kyoto since 1996.
Fascinated by language, body movement and images since childhood,
I studied both the French and Japanese languages while still in high
school and also dedicated myself to the study of the martial art of
Tae Kwon Do. I studied filmmaking, languages and literature at Hampshire
College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1990. From 1990 to 1996 I
lived in Portland, Oregon and was very active in the local arts scene,
organizing and engaging in frequent performance art events, nightclub
cabarets, happenings, dance performances and the like. Around the
same time, I studied Chen-style T'ai Chi under Gregory Fong and modern
dance under Toshiko Namioka.
I first came to Kyoto in the beginning of 1996. I was
active in the local Kyoto dance and performance scene, both in the
amateur traditional milieu through Traditional Theater Training (TTT),
studying Kyogen under Akira Shigeyama, and in the butoh and contemporary
dance scene, working with Lee/Dancing Commune, Hiromi Miyakita, Chisato
Seino and Kiyoko Yamamoto and many others. In the summer of 1996,
I performed twelve times in the middle of the Kamo River in central
Kyoto. I stopped performing in 1999, after a performance tour around
France.
In 2000-2001, I held two photography/installation exhibitions
at Sugarmonger Gallery. Some of the images I have made will be available
for viewing here in the near future.
I started working as a free-lance Japanese-to-English
translator in 1998. Recently, I have been working on a variety of
projects concerned with arts and culture communications and promotion.
I look forward to continued development in this area while taking
on new challenges in other fields as well. Please refer to the
Publications page for a list of
recent clients and projects.
Seth
Yarden January 2005
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