The Camp Dance: The Music and The Memories (play)

Musical play set in an unidentified Japanese American concentration camp that is centered on the high school dances that took place in the camps as one of the centers of social life for teenagers. The play was written by Soji Kashiwagi and produced by the Grateful Crane ensemble in 2003. Grants from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program supported performances of The Camp Dance in eight California cities in 2004, as well as the production of a soundtrack CD. As part of the show, the cast performs a variety of popular songs from the period. In some shows, Mary Nomura , a popular Nisei singer known as the "Songbird of Manzanar" has performed with the cast. Since its inception, The Camp Dance in its original two-hour version and a fifty-minute version has been performed at a variety of venues and events in California and the West including the 2006 Japanese American Citizens League national convention in Phoenix, Arizona; the 2008 dinner of the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC; and the 2010 Minidoka Civil Rights Symposium as part of the Minidoka Pilgrimage.