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.
In Ballet 422, Jody Lee Lipes takes viewers behind the scenes as twenty-five-year-old New York City Ballet dancer Justin Peck choreographs the 422nd original piece for the prestigious company, Paz de la Jolla. One of fifty dancers in the Corps de Ballet, which the film calls “the lowest rank” of the NYCB, Peck was named by company head Peter Martins to be the New York Choreographic Institute’s first active choreographer-in-residence for the 2011-12 season, and he is the only current NYCB dancer to choreograph for the company. Documentarian and cinematographer Lipes (NY Export: Opus Jazz, Tiny Furniture) focuses on the fascinating collaboration that goes into creating a ballet. “As a former soloist with New York City Ballet, I had long dreamed about pulling back the veil on the making of a new ballet,” producer Ellen Bar explains on the film’s 