Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 3, $30, 7:30 PM
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
As part of the sixtieth anniversary of Japan Society’s performing arts program, the institution is presenting the North American premiere of Project IX — Pléïades, a multimedia music/video/movement piece. The “IX” in the title does not represent the Roman numeral “9” but the letters “I” and “X,” the initials of innovative Romanian-born Greek-French composer and musical theorist Iannis Xenakis. The evening is a collaboration between Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato, who has released such albums as Cantus and Kuniko Plays Reich; Japanese dancer and teacher Megumi Nakamura, who has performed around the world with Jiří Kylián’s Nederlands Dans Theater, her own Dance Sangra, and other companies; and Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti, who has previously created works for the New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Spoleto Festival, the Ballet of the Rome Opera, and the Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky and was the 2011 resident artistic director of Morphoses. Kato will play Xennakis’s 1988 Rebonds, a multiple percussion solo in two parts, while Nakamura will dance to Xenakis’s 1978 Pléïades, a work for six percussionists in four movements. (“Pléïades” refers to the seven daughters of Atlas in Greek myth as well as the star cluster in the constellation Taurus.) “Why Xenakis, and why our interest in Xenakis? Xenakis had a strong interest in Japanese culture, and in Japanese theater in particular — which I share, by the way,” Veggetti, who is married to Japanese artist Moe Yoshida and has worked with Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa on several projects, says in the above promotional video. “In particular about noh theater, which for him represented some kind of supreme form in terms of theatrical tradition, which conveyed his ideas about theater so exactly. And so we felt that because of this connection it was natural to build a project that hereditarily comes from Japan and that we’re performing here with Japanese performers.” The program will take place May 2 & 3 at 7:30; the May 2 performance will be followed by a reception with the artists.