Shirō Sano and Kyoji Yamamoto team up at Japan Society for Kwaidan
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, October 24, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Japan Society gears up for Halloween with the spooky presentation Kwaidan — Call of Salvation Heard from the Depths of Fear. On October 24 at 7:30, popular Japanese film and television actor Shirō Sano (Zutto Anata ga Suki data, Karaoke) will read five tales of the supernatural he selected by Lafcadio Hearn, aka Yakumo Koizumi (1850-1904), with live music played by guitarist Kyoji Yamamoto, of BOW WOW and VOW WOW fame. (Sano and Yamamoto both hail from Matsue City in Shimane Prefecture.) Japanese film fans will be familiar with Hearn’s oeuvre from Masaki Kobayashi’s 1965 horror anthology, Kwaidan, which consists of the Hearn tales “The Black Hair,” “The Woman of the Snow,” “Hoichi the Earless,” and “In a Cup of Tea.” The performance will be preceded by a short lecture by Hearn’s great-grandson, Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum director and folklorist Bon Koizumi, and a reception with the artists will follow the show, which is part of Japan Society’s Emperor Series, celebrating Emperor Naruhito’s ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1.
Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race founder Yu Murai’s Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth is silly fun, a goofy comic mash-up of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the late 1960s manga Ashita no Joe (“Tomorrow’s Joe”). Continuing at Japan Society through May 18, it’s a riotous twist on both stories that creates something fresh and new — and completely wild and unpredictable. The show takes place in and around a light-blue boxing ring onstage, open on two sides, along which the audience of no more than sixty sits. Inside the ring is a second, much smaller ring, with a malleable, flexible mat that occasionally is lifted to reveal various characters, bits of scenery, and video of a koi pond by Kazuki Watanabe. To get you in the mood as you enter the empty theater, audio plays of Steve Albert, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, and former champ Bobby Czyz calling the November 1998 championship bout between Ricardo “Finito” Lopez and Rosendo Alvarez. Beer, wine, and popcorn is available for purchase and can be consumed during the performance, as if you’re in a boxing arena. The three actors, Takuro Takasaki (Macbeth), G. K. Masayuki (Banquo), and Kazuma Takeo (Lady Macbeth), wear absurdly tight head-to-foot costumes that are a mix of wrestling uniforms and the sperm characters from Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex.
The dialogue can be seen on two monitors — unfortunately placed at angles that make it difficult to read and follow the action onstage simultaneously — but it’s not critical to catch every word, as there is a lot of repetition and exposition. The sixty-minute show features key plot points and quotes from Macbeth, including the witches’ prophecies and Macbeth’s rise to the top — to become both king and yokozuna — as he goes after King Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff; however, in this version, Lady Macbeth is not as central to his quest. There are also elements of Ashita no Joe, with such characters as Woolf and Joe, as well as tips of the hat to legendary sumo wrestler Kitanoumi and boxer Wajima Koichi. Along the way, Macbeth displays his boxing skills with the “back-spinning uppercut,” “triple cross counter,” and other punches and jabs and starts seeing apparitions of the men he has vanquished. “The boxing ring howls and calls for fresh blood,” one declares. There are also anachronistic pop culture references, a shaky-looking scaffold that serves as the castle (and where writer-director Murai runs things), and a battle scene in which six members of the audience need special protection. (We strongly suggest you sit in the seats warning about pebbles.) As with even the best boxers, not everything hits its mark, but more than enough does to score a knockout, a crazy, unusual immersive Shakespeare adaptation from a company that previously brought us Romeo and Toilet and King Lear, Sadaharu. There’s no telling what wonderful nonsense they’ll be up to next, but we’ll be there.
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
May 15-18, $28
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race founder Yu Murai transforms Japan Society into a boxing arena in Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, running May 15-18. The sixty-minute show is a seriocomic mash-up of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the late 1960s manga Ashita no Joe (“Tomorrow’s Joe”), written by Ikki Kajiwara (Asao Takamori) and illustrated by Tetsuya Chiba and which was turned into several anime series and anime and live-action films. The title translates roughly to “Tomorrow No Witch,” referencing the witches of Macbeth as well as one of the play’s most famous monologues. The protagonist is Joe Yabuki, aka Rocky Macbeth, an ambitious troubled teen who finds success in the ring — and there will be an actual boxing ring onstage, with an audience of only sixty people sitting around it. The boxers wear funky-weird head-to-toe costumes over five rounds of battles as Macbeth seeks the crown, as king and champion.
“We also have been believing in a false sense of security / that is nothing more than a prophecy. / The Birnam Wood has already started to move. / What will the witches whisper to us, / the people who have been pretending not to notice? / What will we whisper to the future Macbeths to come?” Yu Murai writes, fusing themes of postwar Japan with the 1960s counterculture, one of his specialties. (At the 2009 Fringe Festival, the company had fun with Romeo and Toilet, complete with toilet paper rolls and bathroom humor.) The cast features Takuro Takasaki, G. K. Masayuki, and Kazuma Takeo, with video design and operation by Kazuki Watanabe; opening night will be followed by a Meet-the-Artists reception. The presentation is being held in conjunction with the Japan Society exhibition “Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s,” which continues through May 31; Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth tickets get you half off gallery admission.
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, April 12, and Saturday, April 13, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Wisconsin-born, Tony-nominated choreographer Karole Armitage follows up Art of the In-Between, which debuted last October at National Sawdust in Brooklyn in the Celebrate Mexico Now festival, with the world premiere of You Took a Part of Me at Japan Society this weekend with her company, Armitage Gone! Dance. Loosely inspired by the fifteenth-century noh play Nonomiya, the kazura-mono piece features Lady Rokujō, a character from The Tale of Genji, and deals with memory, obsession, and love. Created in collaboration with MIT Media Lab and part of Carnegie Hall’s Migrations: The Making of America festival, You Took a Part of Me features a live score by Reiko Yamada played live by multi-instrumentalist Yuki Isami; longtime Armitage dancer Megumi Eda will perform the lead role. The set includes a bridge known as a hashigakari that extends into the audience. The April 12 show will be followed by a meet-the-artists reception, while the April 13 program will conclude with an artist Q&A.
“These are the memories of human beings,” Cambodia photographer Kim Hak says in Cross Transit, an engrossing collaboration with Japanese dancer and choreographer Akiko Kitamura and Amrita Performing Arts Center of Phnom Penh. There’s one night left — March 23 — to see the show at Japan Society. With the seventy-five-minute multimedia piece, Kitamura continues her exploration of the future of Asia, following To Belong, on which she worked with Indonesian artists on such topics as diversity and inclusion. Cross Transit is Kitamura and Hak’s attempt to recapture a past that has gone missing because of the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979; in a way, the work is a dance about photography and architecture. In voiceover Cambodian narration that is translated by an English speaker, Hak explains that many families, including his own, had to either destroy or bury personal photos to protect themselves from the oppressive regime, hiding their identities to avoid being arrested, tortured, and killed.
While recovered family photos and new pictures taken by Hak of abandoned buildings are projected behind them on three stretched canvases, Kitamura, Ippei Shiba, Yuka Seike, Yuki Nishiyama, Llon Kawai, and Chy Ratana move about the otherwise dark stage like lost souls or ghosts, reaching out with their hands and arms, trying to make connections in awkward, aggressive ways. They dance in haunting silence, to Hak’s words, narration by Paul Dargan, electronic noise, a Cambodian pop song, percussive sounds evoking gunshots and the snap of a camera, original music by Hiroaki Yokoyama, and vocalizations by Yoshie Abe; Akihiko Kaneko designed the set and the projected films, with dramatic lighting by Yuji Sekiguchi and naturalistic costumes by Tomoko Inamura. The motion of the dancers is initially slow and individual but eventually moves more closely in unison, with several impressive lifts and carries and rolls along the floor. In one section the dancers call out words in English, Japanese, and Cambodian, including “Here,” “Home,” “Now,” and “What are you talking about?” (The non-English words are not translated.) The Cross Transit project, which began in 2014, continues with “vox soil,” a collaboration between Cambodian, Indonesian, Indian, and Japanese artists. Kitamura (Enact Frames of Pleasure, Ghostly Round) and Hak will participate in a Q&A following the March 23 performance at Japan Society.
Japanese dancer and choreographer Akiko Kitamura’s Cross Transit is a multimedia collaboration with Cambodian photographer Kim Hak (photo by Sopheak Vong)
Japanese dancer and choreographer Akiko Kitamura’s Cross Transit has been traveling across the world, and it pulls in to Japan Society this week for two shows, on Friday and Saturday. The seventy-five-minute work is a collaboration between Kitamura, Amrita Performing Arts Center, and Cambodian photographer Kim Hak, with performers from Japan and Cambodia — Kitamura, Ippei Shiba, Yuka Seike, Yuki Nishiyama, Llon Kawai, and Chy Ratana — moving in front of a stretched canvas onto which their shadows are cast and Hak’s deeply personal photographs and video, capturing a Cambodia that is fading from memory, are projected in a collage-like, fragmented manner. The piece also includes text by Hak, with costumes by Tomoko Inamura, lighting by Yuji Sekiguchi, sound design by Hiroaki Yokoyama, and set design and projections by Akihiko Kaneko. Kitamura (Enact Frames of Pleasure, Ghostly Round), the founder of the Leni-Basso dance company, spent time in Phnom Penh studying Cambodian movement, spiritual rituals, and martial arts and participated in workshops with Hak; Kitamura, who was last at Japan Society for the world premiere of TranSenses in January 2017, has also collaborated with Indonesian artists on To Belong in her quest to incorporate a wide range of Asian artistic styles into her movement language and to bring countries together through cultural exchange. The March 22 performance will be followed by a meet-the-artists reception, while the March 23 show will be followed by an artist Q&A.
Hachioji Kuruma Ningyo Puppet Theater presents two programs at Japan Society this week
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
February 28 – March 2, $40, 7:30
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Hachioji Kuruma Ningyo Puppet Theater rolls into Japan Society this week with its unique brand of storytelling, led by fifth grand master Koryu Nishikawa V. Moving large puppets on a three-wheeled dolly, the company will present two female-centric programs, one consisting of Yugao, Date Musume Koi Higanoko, and Tsuri On’na, the other Yugao, Date Musume Koi Higanoko, and Kuzunoha; Yugao is a new work by Nishikawa V based on a story from The Tale of Genji. Each show will be preceded by a lecture by Dr. Claudia Orenstein of Hunter College; opening night will be followed by a reception with the artists. The works will be performed by Ryuji Nishikawa V, Ryusha Nishikawa, Ryuki Nishikawa, Ryukei Nishikawa, and Yoshiteru Nishikawa, led by Nishikawa V, with gidayu chanter Koshiko Takemoto and live shamisen music by Sansuzu Tsuruzawa and Yaya Tsuruzawa. In addition, there will be a “Hachioji Kuruma Ningyo Performance and Workshop” for students on Friday and a “Master Class on Kuruma Ningyo Puppetry” on Saturday and Sunday. And on March 10, Nishikawa V will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Family Afternoon — Pens & Poems for children ages twelve and under with an adult.
