Tag Archives: japan society

NIHON BUYO DANCE

Geimaruza will perform nihon buyo dance at Japan Society this weekend (photo courtesy of the artists)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
March 3-4, intro lecture & demonstration, $12 (free for same-night ticket holders), 6:30
March 3-4, performances, $55, 8:00
Saturday, March 4, workshop, $75, 2:00
Sunday, March 5, family program, $28, 4:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.geimaruza.com

Geimaruza, a Japanese troupe consisting of alumni from Tokyo University of the Arts, will be at Japan Society this weekend with “Nihon Buyo Dance,” offering a mélange of kabuki and folk-dance performances, workshops, and a family-friendly event, melding the contemporary with the traditional. On March 3 and 4 at 8:00, six dancers and eight musicians (playing shamisen, fue, taiko, otsuzumi, and kotsuzumi) will perform Ayatsuri Sanbaso (Puppet Sanbaso), Oshukubai (The Nightingale in the Plum Tree), Shunkashuto (Four Seasons), and the musical numbers “Nagare,” “Toki,” and “Shishi.” featuring three drummers and fue). Each show will be preceded at 6:30 ($12, free for ticket holders) by the lecture-demonstration “A Comprehensive Intro/Demo to Nihon Buyo with Geimaruza.” On Saturday at 2:00 ($75), the workshop “Nihon Buyo Dance & Music with Geimaruza” will teach participants various movements, set to live music. The weekend comes to a close on Sunday at 4:00 ($28) with “Nihon Buyo Dance for Kids & Families,” featuring an introduction to kabuki-based dance and performances of Ayatsuri Sanbaso (Puppet Sanbaso) and Oshukubai (The Nightingale in the Plum Tree).

GIRL X

HANCHU-YUEI will perform GIRL X at Japan Society February 16-18 (photo © Hideto Maezawa)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
February 16-18, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.hanchuyuei.com

In March 2016, Japan Society presented an English-language reading of Suguru Yamamoto’s Girl X (Yojo X). Now the fully staged, original Japanese version will be making its North American premiere at Japan Society, with three performances February 16-18 at 7:30. Written and directed by Yamamoto and performed by his theater collective HANCHU-YUEI, the black comedy takes place in Shinjuku in 2013, focusing on the after-effects of the March 11, 2011, earthquake. Kazuki Ohashi and Sachiro Nomoto play all the parts, primarily a young man with a hammer, his ex-girlfriend, and her younger brother, interacting with projections on a screen, casting giant shadows amid changing colors and text from other family members as Yamamoto (I Can’t Die without Being Born) explores communication between people and technology in contemporary society. The opening-night presentation will be followed by a reception with members of the cast and crew.

CRUEL BEAUTY: A ROMANTIC WEEKEND WITH MEIKO KAJI — LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE

Meiko Kaji reprises her role as an avenging angel-demon in LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG WITH VENGEANCE

LADY SNOWBLOOD: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (修羅雪姫怨み恋歌) (SHURAYUKIHIME URAMI RENKA) (Toshiya Fujita, 1974)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, February 11, 4:30
Series runs February 10-12
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society prepares for Valentine’s Day with the awesome weekend series “Cruel Beauty: A Romantic Weekend with Meiko Kaji,” paying tribute to the legendary genre actress and pop singer, who will turn seventy in March, by screening five of her films February 10-12. “Japanese movie stars don’t get much more iconic than actress Meiko Kaji,” guest curator Marc Walkow writes in a program note. “She remains an inimitable presence in Japanese cinema, and an icon who continues to inspire filmmakers and audiences around the world.” The series gets under way Friday night with the international premiere of Kinji Fukasaku’s 1975 three-part yakuza film New Battle without Honor and Humanity: The Boss’s Head and also includes Teruo Ishii’s Blind Woman’s Curse, Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, and Yasuharu Hasebe’s Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, works that show off Kaji’s skills in contemporary and historical action movies. One of her most intense roles is Lady Snowblood, based on the manga by Kazuo Koike (Lone Wolf and Cub) and illustrator Kazuo Kamimura. Japan Society is screening the second film in the duology, 1974’s Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, on February 11 at 4:30. In the first film, set during the Meiji Period of the late nineteenth century, Yuki Kashima is born in prison, her dying mother declaring her to be an asura demon who will avenge the murder of her father and brother and the mother’s rape. The cinematography pays tribute to its manga roots, with impressively composed shots that one can almost see on the page, the pacing between wide-angle and closeup echoing the rhythm of panels and frames. In the second film, Yuki, known as Lady Snowblood, has become a coldhearted master assassin who kills virtually without emotion. Hired by Seishiro Kikui (Shin Kishida) to recover an important document, she poses as a maid to infiltrate the home of anarchist Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami) but soon finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy and coverup that could bring down the corrupt government following the Russo-Japanese War. Allying herself with Ransui’s hot brother, Shusuke (Yoshio Harada), she wields her sword with skillful abandon, leaving an ever-growing pile of bodies in her wake.

The sequel, a kind of Eastern spaghetti Western, is not nearly as focused as the original, with inexplicable plot twists (especially the inconsistent use of guns), but the violence is extreme and beautiful; blood doesn’t just gusht out of Yuki’s victims but sizzles on the soundtrack. In the opening scene, Lady Snowblood is ambushed at a cemetery as she mourns her mentor; after dispatching everyone, she coolly drinks from the pond where one dead man’s blood has spilled, the taste of vengeance sweet indeed. The film features brutal torture and a propensity for stabbing eyes, as if pounding into our heads that justice is blind. The villains also are spreading the plague, as various people’s faces and bodies become grotesque and deteriorate, referencing the effects of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Pay close attention to the final blood splatter.) Although not nearly as good as its predecessor, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is still a must-see, particularly for the formidable Kaji, an avenging angel-demon and preying tiger who served as the direct inspiration for Black Mamba (Uma Thurman) in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. I (and she even sings some of the songs). All of the films in the Japan Society series are sequels or follow-ups, but don’t let that scare you off. “In the world of Japanese genre filmmaking — samurai and yakuza films, exploitation movies, horror films — sequels were very rarely linked to each other by a continuing storyline,” Walkow explains. “Viewers needn’t be worried if they haven’t seen the original entries; all the films stand on their own.”

FILM SCREENING AND ARTIST TALK: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 27, $15, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Emmy-winning Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the recent MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut. Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last forty years taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in Emmy-winning CUTIE AND THE BOXER

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves. Cutie and the Boxer is screening January 27 at 7:00 at Japan Society and will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with Ushio and Noriko in the gallery, where Ushio’s “Tokyo Bazooka” was on display in 1982 and where the couple was part of the memorable “Making a Home” exhibition in 2007.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE SHOWCASE 2017: JAPAN + EAST ASIA

(photo © Naoshi Hattori.; courtesy of Aichi Arts Center)

Five duos will perform at Japan Society’s seventeenth Contemporary Dance Showcase: Japan + Asia (photo © Naoshi Hattori.; courtesy of Aichi Arts Center)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 6, and Saturday, January 7, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Traditionally, we like to end our year by seeing the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in its December season at City Center, then start every other year off right with the Contemporary Dance Showcase: Japan + East Asia every January at Japan Society. The seventeenth edition of the biennial event takes place January 6 and 7, as five acts will perform special duets. The 2017 lineup features the North American premiere of Korean company JJbro’s playful and energetic Jimmy & Jack; the North American premiere of Japanese troupe Co. Un Yamada’s unique interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1923 Les Noces (The Wedding), which the maestro called “Choreographed Scenes with Music and Voices”; the North American premiere of Taiwan company B DANCE’s Hugin/Munin, involving the title characters, ravens whose names mean “thought” and “memory,” respectively, sitting on Norse god Odin’s shoulders (choreographed by Po-Cheng Tsai); the North American premiere of Taiwain troupe In Theatre’s Tschüss!! Bunny, choreographed by Yen-Cheng Liu, examining life and death and rebirth, inspired by the concept “Now is the moment, and creation is the assembling of the fragments of lives”; and the world premiere of TranSenses, a collaboration between Japanese dancer and choreographer Akiko Kitamura and Canadian media alchemist and audiovisual sculptor Navid Navab. There are still tickets left to catch this biennial treat; the January 6 performance will be followed by a Meet-the-Artists Reception.

HANASAKA JIISAN (THE OLD MAN WHO MADE FLOWERS BLOOM)

Ryohei Kondo’s playful HANASAKA JIISAN makes its North American debut this weekend at Japan Society (photo © Naoya Ikegami)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, December 10, 7:30, and Sunday, December 11, 2:30, $28
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society is hosting the North American premiere this weekend of a rather unique retelling of the favorite mukashi banashi folktale Hanasaka Jiisan (The Old Man Who Made Flowers Bloom), a wild and wacky version by Ryohei Kondo and his all-male Condors dance company. In the story, a childless couple’s dog finds treasure in their backyard, but things go awry when a greedy neighbor then borrows the pooch so it can dig up treasure on his land as well. Currently celebrating its twentieth anniversary, the twelve-member Condors troupe has previously performed such shows as Nezumi no Sumo (Rats’ Sumo), Apollo, Conquest of the Galaxy: Mars, and 2012 Angry Men, an adaptation of 12 Angry Men. The Tokyo-born, South America-raised Kondo, who brought Goats Block the Road, Part III: Goat Stampede to Japan Society in January 2011, has a talent for creating works that combine silliness and unpredictability with a strong social conscience, sharing Japanese culture while avoiding preaching. (He has also choreographed Takashi Miike’s crazy The Happiness of the Katakuris and Yatterman.) Performed by Michihiko Kamakura, Yoshihiro Fujita, Kojiro Yamamoto, and Kondo, Hanasaka Jiisan features playful props and costumes (by Hiroko Takamatsu) on Hanako Murayama’s ever-changing set. It will be preceded by Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based Maiko Kikuchi’s Pink Bunny, a parade consisting of puppets and unusual objects marching across the stage in short vignettes. In November 2015, the Pratt graduate’s No Need for a Night Light on a Light Night Like Tonight had its world premiere at La MaMa; Pink Bunny premiered in 2014 as part of St. Ann’s Labapalooza! Answering the question “What do you want to be?,” the piece will be performed by Maiko Kikuchi, Shun Kikuchi, Monica Lerch, David Commander, and Zac Pless.

TREASURED NOH PLAYS FROM THE DESK OF W. B. YEATS

Living National Treasure Tomoeda Akiyo and Kita Noh Theater Company will be at Japan Society to perform works that inspired W. B. Yeats (photo © Seiichiro Tsuji)

Living National Treasure Tomoeda Akiyo and Kita Noh Theater Company will be at Japan Society to perform noh works that inspired W. B. Yeats (photo © Seiichiro Tsuji)

TRADITIONAL THEATER
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, November 19, $40, 7:30, and Sunday, November 20, $60, 5:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

In 1913, Ezra Pound introduced W. B. Yeats to the Japanese noh drama, and by 1916, Pound published English translations of fifteen noh plays and Yeats had written At the Hawk’s Well, which was directly inspired by the Japanese form. In honor of the centennial of that literary moment, Japan Society will be hosting two noh programs performed by the Kita Noh Theater Company, led by Tomoeda Akiyo, who was named a Japanese Living National Treasure in 2008. The first program, on November 19, consists of highlights from Nishikigi, Kumasaka, Tamura, Shojo, and Kagekiyo, presented in such styles as maibayashi, shimai, and subayashi, which differ in use of masks, costumes, chants, and music. Williams College music professor Dr. W. Anthony Sheppard will also give a talk about noh’s influence on Yeats. In addition, the related exhibition, “Simon Starling: At Twilight (After W. B. Yeats’s Noh Reincarnation),” a multimedia installation in which Turner Prize winner Starling reinterprets Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well for the modern era, will stay open until 7:15; the performance will be followed by a Meet-the-Artists reception. On November 20 at 5:00, the second program will feature full versions of Kayoi Komachi and Shojo-midare, from Yeats’s collection, preceded at 4:00 by a lecture by Princeton University professor Dr. Tom Hare. (There will also be an “Image-in-Focus Series: Tomoeda Akiyo” gallery talk at 2:00.) Tickets for both events are sold out, but there will be a waitlist at the box office beginning one hour before showtime.