{"id":4220,"date":"2020-01-29T17:36:59","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T08:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/_sys2024\/en\/?p=4220"},"modified":"2020-02-21T17:24:43","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T08:24:43","slug":"two-stories-about-the-unfulfilled-human-dream-and-pursuit-of-permanence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/interview\/two-stories-about-the-unfulfilled-human-dream-and-pursuit-of-permanence\/","title":{"rendered":"Two stories about the unfulfilled human dream and pursuit of \u201cpermanence\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the fall of 2019, two stage productions co-directed by Hiroshi Sugimoto and the Odawara Art Foundation were performed in quick succession. In September, \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well\u201d by William Butler Yeats was staged at the Op\u00e9ra National de Paris, Palais Garnier, followed by a performance of \u201cSonezaki Shinju\u201d at New York\u2019s Lincoln Center in October. After watching the two pieces that represent two approaches as contrasting as contemporary ballet and bunraku, art journalist Yoshio Suzuki met Hiroshi Sugimoto for an interview about his take on life and death, which constitutes the very foundation of his work in the realm of performing arts.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cAs part of my life work, I have been photographing seascapes for a long time, the aim of which is partly also to explore what life and death are all about. Life is being created, and from ancient times, humans have been looking at the same sceneries as we do today. When I realized that such seascapes evoke the same sympathetic feelings in a lot of people, that came as a surprise, as did the fact that these pictures are being accepted as works of contemporary art. It made me genuinely feel that there is some kind of power in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hiroshi Sugimoto Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980 \/\u00a0\u00a9Hiroshi Sugimoto<\/p>\n

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Hiroshi Sugimoto continues to talk.
\n\u201cThe concept of time, or maybe better still, the generation of my awareness of life and death, is something that has always been the subject of my explorations. It appeared to me that the mindset that made me reflect on what exactly death means, was the same that reminded me of the fact that I was born in the first place. In other words, at some point in time and place, I suddenly became aware of myself, realized that I existed. I guess it is the same kind of sensation that now also made me realize that I am fading away. I feel that such mental preparedness is something that gradually comes up as we get older.
\nAt the end of the day, it seems to me that being born and dying is just the same thing; it\u2019s all part of the same natural cycle. When I was young, death was for me a scary thing that I was totally unable to comprehend, but maybe it\u2019s in fact quite a gentle kind of fella. The older we get, the weaker our bodies become, so when I imagine that I live on and on, I suppose I would end up in a constant state of physical pain. My eyes grow blind, my teeth fall out, and my body refuses to move as I want it to.
\nThis awareness of life and death, and the fact that I\u2019m doing \u2018At the Hawk’s Well\u2019 and \u2018Sonezaki Shinju\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s all related to one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last fall, Hiroshi Sugimoto co-directed two stage productions. In September, \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well\u201d by William Butler Yeats was performed on invitation from the Paris Opera\u2019s Palais Garnier, and in October, \u201dSonezaki Shinju\u201d was shown at the Lincoln Center\u2019s Rose Theater in New York. \u201cSonezaki Shinju\u201d was one of the opening performances at the Center\u2019s own White Light Festival, and part of The Japan Foundation\u2019s official \u201cJapan 2019\u201d program aimed to promote Japanese culture in the USA.<\/p>\n

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At the Hawk’s Well (H.Sugimoto) Hugo Marchand – Photo julien Benhamou<\/p>\n

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In 2019, the Acad\u00e9mie royale de musique, the predecessor of the Paris Opera so to speak, celebrated the 350th anniversary of its establishment in the era of the \u201cSun King\u201d Louis XIV. One of the premiere performances in the fall program of this commemorable year was \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well.\u201d Yeats, a poet and mystic who was fascinated by Celtic legends and myths, wrote this ballet piece inspired by Japanese Noh approximately 100 years ago. He must have been so intrigued by Noh because of its notion as kind of fantasy theater in which the spirits of the dead are being summoned on stage.<\/p>\n

Q: How would you define the meaning of Noh?
\nA: The liquefication of time.
\nQ: What does that mean?
\nA: Time flows in a single direction, from the past into the future, but Noh suspends this law and thereby liquefies time.
\nQ: A kind of time machine?
\nA: Dreams function as vehicles for that. It\u2019s called illusion.
\n(from Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed<\/em>, Shinchosha 2005)<\/p>\n

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At The Hawk’s Well (Hiroshi Sugimoto) \u00a9Ann Ray<\/p>\n

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Yeats studied Noh from the drafts of Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, an American art historian specializing in eastern art, and eventually wrote \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well\u201d that was first staged in 1916 in London in a dance theater format. In Japan, the material was first shown in 1949 in the form of a Shinsaku(new)-Noh piece by Noh scholar Mario Yokomichi, titled \u201cTaka no izumi (The Hawk Spring),\u201d and was further developed into the Shinsaku-Noh piece \u201cTakahime (The Hawk Princess)\u201d with Hisao Kanze playing the lead in 1967. This was the work that Yokomichi became mostly known for.<\/p>\n

The Celtic prince Cu Chulainn comes to a dried up well in the mountains on a solitary island in the far-off sea. He made the journey to the well because he had heard that those who drink water from the well are granted eternal life. However, he finds the well guarded by the spirit of a hawk in the form of a woman, and there is also an old man who has reportedly spent fifty years there waiting for water to well up. During those fifty years, it happened three times that water came up, but each time the man fell asleep as soon as the hawk began to dance, so he never managed to drink. As the prince listens to the man\u2019s story, the hawk raises a cry and begins to dance again. Enchanted by the hawk lady, the young man instantly falls asleep, and he too is unable to drink the coveted water.<\/p>\n

Now what did Sugimoto make out of the material? The most characteristic element of the stage set was a T-shaped hanamichi<\/em> kind of passageway from the back of the stage into the audience, made of plain wooden boards. The equivalent in Noh is the so-called hashigakari<\/em> bridgeway. In the background was an arch-shaped structure onto which imagery was projected. As the story is set on a solitary island, Sugimoto initially considered using projections of his \u201cSeascapes,\u201d but eventually opted to use items from his new \u201cOpticks\u201d series. The \u201cOpticks\u201d works capture colors as dispersed through refractions of light through a prism. When looking at them individually, they are red, blue, and other colors, but they all originate from sunlight.<\/p>\n

The scene of Cu Chulainn arriving at the solitary island is accompanied by blue projections evoking images of the sky and the sea. Then appears the old man and talks about his experience at the well, and with the start of the hawk lady\u2019s fierce dance, the projections turn red. It\u2019s an emotionally exciting color. Then things turn white, and time stands still. Now that everything is quiet, the Noh player (Tetsunojo Kanze, and Kisho Umewaka as second cast) finally appears, and talks to the sitting young man. \u201cSo, dear Cu Chulainn, did you manage to get the water from the well?\u201d He throws him a cane and disappears. The young man takes the cane and stands up, but he cannot turn back time. It\u2019s as if everything had only happened in his dream. But he does still hold the cane in his hand.<\/p>\n

Artist Ryoji Ikeda, taking charge of music for the entire piece, played an important role as well. The music was an essential element for expressing the characteristics of the individual scenes as well as the aspect of continuity.
\n\u201cI conceived the piece scene by scene. This or that character would appear in this scene, and there would be a group dance in the next one. Something like that. I started off by making dozens of drawings to be used as a basic script. They mostly consisted of four frames, illustrating how things proceed from one scene to the next; when Cu Chulainn appears, when the old man appears, and where the well is. My idea for the climax was to have very strong light coming out of the well, and all that I conveyed through these drawings. That was also to inspire the design of some technical mechanisms, like using some kind of light to illuminate the well from above and make it look as if there\u2019s light coming out of the well. How to stage the \u201cdecisive\u201d scene and what to do with the light \u2013 it was basically all in the drawings, based of which Ikeda composed the music. Choreographer Alessio Silvestrin had those drawings as well, and came up with detailed diagrams,\u201d explains Sugimoto.<\/p>\n

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At The Hawk’s Well (Hiroshi Sugimoto), Tetsunojo Kanze, Hugo Marchand \u00a9Ann Ray<\/p>\n

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What further drew attention was the fact that fashion designer Rick Owens was in charge of the costumes. Owens read the story, listened to Ryoji Ikeda\u2019s music, understood the idea behind Sugimoto\u2019s rendition, and finally applied his own fashion concepts to all these elements. In this sense, the costumes came across as items in which the various creative elements that each individual involved has contributed to the piece, were consolidated quite naturally. Owens refers to John Chamberlain\u2019s sculptures as a source of inspiration for his costumes, and their shapes did indeed seem to be aiming to extend the human body. The costumes don\u2019t look out of place even when worn next to a Noh player on the same stage.<\/p>\n

When the hawk lady with her entirely red body and wings longer than her height appears, the lighting turns red. Then again, the stage is also very effectively shrouded in darkness. Human life, the dream and attachment to immortality, and on the other hand, the seduction of death. After performing her dance from one corner of the stage to the other, the woman spreads her sings and flies away.<\/p>\n

Let me briefly outline how Sugimoto got to work on this piece to be performed for the 350th anniversary of the Paris Opera. When \u201cSugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju\u201d was staged at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris in 2013, Benjamin Millepied, who had been informally appointed as artistic director of the Paris Opera at the time, was in the audience, and reportedly got in touch with Sugimoto the next day to offer doing something together at the Opera. After that, the two of them eventually met up several times, whereas Sugimoto suggested right from beginning, \u201cIf we are going to do it at the Opera, then let\u2019s do \u2018At the Hawk\u2019s Well\u2019.\u201d
\n\u201cIt seems to me like a strange coincidence that Yeats saw Fennollosa\u2019s drafts that were in the possession of Ezra Pound, and eventually wrote the original material based on these. In addition, we also showed \u2018Takahime\u2019 at Mori Art Museum in 2005. That was the original Noh version, based on the idea to recreate the premiere performance with dancer Michio Ito, who went on to contribute to the completion of \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well.\u201d I thought it would be interesting to perform it once again in Paris, this time with a dancer from the Opera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though Millepied was later replaced by the current artistic director, Aur\u00e9lie Dupont, that idea was ultimately realized.<\/p>\n

The performances of \u201cSugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju\u201d at the Rose Theater at New York\u2019s Lincoln Center started on October 19, shortly after the closing day of the \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well\u201d shows at the Paris Opera. As mentioned above, \u201cSonezaki Shinju\u201d was part of The Japan Foundation\u2019s official \u201cJapan 2019\u201d program, and one of the opening performances at the White Light Festival.<\/p>\n

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\u00a9Yuji Ono, Courtsey of The Japan Foundation<\/p>\n

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The first Sugimoto Bunraku performance took place in 2011, with a few especially characteristic features. Puppets emerged from a completely dark stage, and different from regular bunraku, the presence of the puppeteers was thoroughly eliminated. The stage set in the background wasn\u2019t entirely visible, but only such elements as the torii (gates) of a shrine, shop curtains or bridge rails were highlighted as symbolic expressions of the respective scene\u2019s location or situation.<\/p>\n

Written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon in 1703, \u201cSonezaki Shinju\u201d tells the story of two lovers who committed double suicide in a forest near the Tsuyutenjin Shrine in Sonezaki, Osaka Nishinari. Ohatsu, one of the famous courtesans in Osaka, and Tokubei, a merchant at a soy sauce shop , vowed eternal love to each other. Blamed and cheated by his friend Kuheiji out of his money that he was going to give Ohatsu so she could decline marriage with a man she didn\u2019t love, Tokubei, in order to prove his innocence, expresses the wish to marry Ohatsu in the afterworld, so the pair choses to take their lives. It is a beautiful story about what became a prime example of \u201clove that is rewarded with the promise of reaching Nirvana in the afterlife.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a9Yuji Ono, Courtsey of The Japan Foundation<\/p>\n

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Staged in Paris, \u201cAt the Hawk\u2019s Well\u201d was about the human craving for eternal life, while in contrast, \u201cSonezaki Shinju\u201d in New York illustrated the choice of death for the sake of eternal love. Seemingly polar opposites, both pieces deal in fact with the unfulfilled human desire for something that lasts forever.<\/p>\n

Even though there is a crucial difference in the basic religious outlook, God and Buddha are probably both manmade concepts. Deities are modeled after the human being as perfect examples of the human species. But what does it mean for a human to be called to heaven by God? Should we aim to get to the place that Buddha admits us to? It appeared to me that this was the big topic that Hiroshi Sugimoto intended to address in the two pieces that were stage around the same time last fall.<\/p>\n

\u201cApproaches may be different, but to me it seems that they\u2019re all aiming for the same thing.\u201d (Hiroshi Sugimoto)<\/p>\n

In Sugimoto\u2019s case, this is not limited to these two recent stage productions. One may say that, also in all of his other works, he has been translating unfulfilled human dreams and desires into visible\/tangible formats. He creates \u201cDiorama\u201d that showcase living beings in all kinds of situations, \u201cunder the eyes of god\u201d beyond space and time; \u201cTheaters\u201d in which stories and histories are taken out of their time frames; and \u201cSeascapes\u201d that countless numbers of human beings have been viewing since ancient times. I was reminded once again of the fact that each of the tranquil sceneries that Sugimoto continues to depict in his works represents a stage in his untiring quest for the genesis of human awareness.<\/p>\n

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Hiroshi Sugimoto Teatro Carignano, Torino, 2016 \/ \u00a9Hiroshi Sugimoto<\/p>\n

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\nMain reference literature, materials<\/p>\n

– Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed (Shinchosha, 2005)
\n– Seigo Matsuoka, Fragile: A departure from weakness (Chikuma Shobo, 1995)
\n– William Butler Yeats (transl. Mineko Matsumura), At the Hawk’s Well (Kadokawa Bunko, 1953)
\n– Tetsuya Ozaki, \u201cHiroshi Sugimoto\u2019s \u2018At the Hawk’s Well\u2019\u201d in Fujingaho, January 2020 issue
\n– Mariko Omura \u201cOpera Garnier, \u2019At the Hawk’s Well\u2019 de Hiroshi Sugimoto no sekai o tanno,\u201d published on FIGARO.jp
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