I Am YEG Arts: Mieko Ouchi

On November 20, 2023, the EAC and our friends at the Edmonton Community Foundation will celebrate 25 years of Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund (EATF) awards. In recognition of the upcoming anniversary of EATF and our roster of more than 200 EATF recipients since the award’s inception in 1998, we’re highlighting some of the incredible past EATF recipients on the EAC blog. Today we feature Mieko Ouchi, an award-winning storyteller and two-time EATF recipient (1999 and 2011)… 

As an artist, Mieko Ouchi is known to wear a lot of different hats. She is a writer, director, dramaturge, filmmaker and actor with years of experience in theatre, film and television. But no matter which hat she is wearing, Mieko strives to tell thought provoking stories and encourage others to do the same. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts feature, Mieko talks about the themes she is most drawn to when it comes to crafting a story, why she always comes back to theatre, and the exciting projects she’s working on next. 

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton and what keeps you living and working here. 

I first moved to Edmonton in 1987, right after I graduated from high school in Calgary, and I came up because of the U of A. I started off in genetics and was very quickly pulled to the dark side of theatre and I ended up doing a BFA in acting from the drama department. In the back of my mind, I always thought I would move away to Toronto or Vancouver, but I started a small theatre company while I was in school – Concrete Theatre, that I just stepped down from a few years ago – and it turned into a 31-year love affair with the company and with the city. Along the way I discovered that my home was actually here and not somewhere else. 

Tell us about how you got your start in theatre and the other mediums you work in. 

My career in the arts really could be summed up with the statement ​“how hard can it be?” I think that’s how I always start things. I think, oh, I’d really like to try doing that. How hard can it be? And then I find out it is hard. But I guess that first impulse has encouraged me to jump into things that I don’t always have training or skills to do when I start doing it. But there’s something I love about starting at the bottom of a mountain of skills, knowing that there’s so many other levels to get to. 

When I started off in theatre, as a student, I was that theatre kid that did anything in my summer jobs. I worked at Theatre Network, I worked in the drama department, I filed people’s headshots, I sharpened pencils for workshops, I cleaned toilets, and I sold tickets. I volunteered at the Walterdale Theatre on many shows. I worked on lots of little indie projects and community projects, and slowly built up those skills. As I started to make films, I really started the same way, just thinking about how I had a story I wanted to tell and then going how hard could it be to make one? Surely, I can figure this out. I found an amazing community at FAVA and at the National Film Board. And through the community of documentary and dramatic filmmakers, technicians and crew members in town,. I was able to make some really interesting films, as well as plays along the way. And that’s all led me to have a professional career in both those things. It was the slow accumulation of experiences, relationships, and skills. 

What is it about theatre that continues to captivate you and has you returning to it time and time again? 

My roots are in theatre. I think acting training has been an incredible way to launch myself as a theatre artist because it teaches you so much about structure, about motivation, about script analysis, about understanding story from the inside of a human experience. And that led me to dive into writing and directing. I think the thing that keeps bringing me back to theatre is that live element and the ability for storytelling to be refined and improved as we interact with audiences. That was the one thing that really challenged me about film and TV; once the film was made, it was locked forever and when I was watching with audiences and I was getting all the reactions, I was never able to go back and change or tweak things. The beautiful thing about theatre is that there is still the ability to do that. Through previews, you hear the audience, and if you feel a little bit of a lull, and you’re like, oh, if I tighten up the text in that area, maybe I can keep it alive or bring a little bit more energy there. Or you think, oh, I’m getting in the way of this joke. If I just trim something out, I could make that joke sing a little bit better. I really love that kind of interactive give and take with the audience, and I think that’s what excites me as an audience member too, knowing that I also have that direct effect on the art. 

What themes are you drawn to as a storyteller?

As a storyteller, I think family has been a deep pool that I have dove into many times in different ways. I’ve made scripts and films about my Japanese Canadian heritage and also my European settler heritage in southern Alberta on my mom’s side. My latest play Burning Mom is actually about my mother. It’s a one person show featuring an actor playing my mom, and it’s about her decision to go to Burning Man the year after my father passed away when she was 63, on this wild pilgrimage/​RV road trip that she took to the world’s largest art festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. I feel like what has shown me over the years is that every family has these incredibly interesting stories. It’s not that my family is uniquely interesting. I think every family has these stories, but it takes an artist to perhaps help find those stories and help highlight those ones that are universal that people can connect to. 

The other thing I’m really drawn to as an artist is the journey that we go on as artists. So for example, my play The Blue Light explores the life of Leni Riefenstahl, who was the infamous filmmaker who made films for Hitler during World War 2 and worked with Joseph Goebbels to essentially brand Hitler in that war. And when I found out about her, I was just so devastated because I was looking for female role models as filmmakers. I was looking for women who had done incredible work and there were so few of them. And then when I found Leni and found that she had supported the Third Reich and Hitler, it was just like, how did someone allow their art to be used in this way? That play is really about that journey of trying to figure out how a talented artist would go down that path of having their work used in that way. It’s such a challenging idea to wrap your head around, but one that I think we all need to be aware of as artists now, as we become aware of the impact that our work can have on the public discourse around issues. 

And I’d say the third thing that really fascinates me is the ways that we try to encounter the world. So, I’ve written a lot around things like sexual consent and violence between teens. I’ve written a lot for young audiences through my work at Concrete Theatre, really looking at celebrating cultural heritage and the stories that get passed down to us. I think those have been three areas that I generally go back to with new fascination. 

What’s one of the biggest professional risks you’ve taken and how did it influence where you are today?

I think the biggest risk I’ve ever taken as an artist was to begin to make my own work. And I did that very early on, really just a year out of me graduating from theatre school in 1992, and it was at a time when there were not a lot of people making their own work. I was kind of at the forefront of that movement in Edmonton’s theatre community, and I so admired the people that had come ahead of me, but they really weren’t that much older than me, that were breaking that ground. I knew it was risky to put myself out there as a creator, to tell my stories, but ultimately, that decision has led to my career becoming what it has become and having that confidence that my stories, that stories from our community here in Edmonton, could live side by side with international storytellers, filmmakers, playwrights. As my work has been able to travel to other countries to film festivals, to theatres around the world – my plays have been translated into six languages and have been performed in other countries – I realized that we are on equal footing with all of those places and all those people. And now in my work as an educator and as an arts administrator, I try to infuse that confidence and that belief in others to say you have amazing abilities, I think you’re an incredible artist. Let’s get your work out to the world and let you see yourself in that context.

This year we’re celebrating 25 years of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund award. As a two-time recipient (1999 and 2011), how has this award impacted your career as an artist in Edmonton?

Receiving the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund award twice, which I count myself extremely lucky to have had that happen, those were really important steps in my career. I think for me, it felt like the city believed in me, believed in me as an artist, and was willing to invest some money in me, not around a specific project. It was really saying we believe in you as a person, and that you will use this money to sustain yourself as you’re working to create something wonderful. I think as artists, projects don’t always take the allotted time that they’re supposed to. You get a grant and it’s like, well, it’s supposed to be done in three or four months. Some of my plays have taken six years to write and so that funding from the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund was critical in sustaining me during those times of non-commercial work where I was spending that time digging deep into a story and figuring out how it might come out as a piece of art. Having that support from your community means a lot because being an artist is hard. It’s not an easy path to build for yourself and more importantly to sustain. This is a really important program. I’m so thrilled to help celebrate it and to encourage it to continue and many people to apply in the future.

Tell us a little bit more about what you’re currently working on or hoping to explore next.

I recently received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award, which was an incredible recognition. I feel so blessed to have received that and part of the award is a two-week residency at the Banff Centre. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I am going to spend my two weeks on out there in one of these little writing studios in the woods. I have kind of a semi-secret project I’ve been working on; I’ve been working on my first novel. I would like to spend some of that time working on that project, and I’m just starting a brand-new play. I’m hoping to dive into the first half of that first draft, which is always an exciting place to be. I don’t know how it’s going to end yet, but I have a sense of place and I have a sense of character of where I want to start.

I also have an upcoming tour coming up of a play that was supposed to happen during the COVID times that got postponed with Concrete Theatre. It’s a remount of a Deaf family opera called Songs My mother Never Sung Me by Dave Clark, who is also an EATF recipient. The piece is a song cycle featuring a mixed cast of Deaf and hearing artists, and it’s performed in sung English and ASL. We’re going to be touring that after Christmas, up to St Albert and to Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon and Inside Out Theatre down in Calgary. I’m really excited to dive back into that piece after so many years of postponement and to finally bring that show to some audiences in other communities and other cities.

About Mieko Ouchi

Writer, director, dramaturg, and actor, Mieko Ouchi trained at the University of Alberta’s BFA Acting Program, the Women in the Director’s Chair Program, and the National Screen Institute. Her award-winning films have screened at over thirty festivals, including the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals and Asian American film festivals in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Her plays The Red Priest (Eight Ways To Say Goodbye), The Blue Light, The Dada Play, Nisei Blue, I Am For You, Consent, The Silver Arrow, and Burning Mom have been translated into six languages, been finalists for the 4 Play Series at the Old Vic, UK; the Governor General’s Literary Award; the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award; the City of Edmonton Book Prize; and Sterling Awards, and have been recognized with the Carol Bolt Award, Betty Mitchell Awards, and the Enbridge Playwrights Award for Established Canadian Playwright. Her work as a director and dramaturg — both at Concrete Theatre where she was Co-Artistic Director and Artistic Director for thirty-one years, and with writers and companies across the country — spans TYA to indie to large-scale work. Mieko now works as Associate Artistic Director at the Citadel Theatre.