The title might suggest some kind of fairy tale, but I'm in fact just writing about a performance and an exhibition I saw last week in the eastern and westerns parts of Tokyo. "Kinoko" stands of course for Strange Kinoko Dance Company, who presented their new piece "Anata no negao wo nadetemiru" at Kichijoji Theatre (7/10-16 ), while "Fireworks" is part of the title of Miyanaga Aiko’s solo exhibition at Sumida Riverside Hall Gallery & the Asahi Beer building (6/16-7/15). The "summer journey" is a reference to Mukaiyama Tomoko’s concert (7/13 &14 at Monnaka Tenjo Hall). There is nothing these three artists have in common, but I felt that the "combining the ordinary with the extraordinary" theme was something that connects the three of them.
The Kinokos are always fretting about how to involve their audiences in the extraordinary world of dance in a natural way. This attitude becomes most obvious in the dancers' costumes that aren't much different from their daywear, and the music that is usually interspersed with familiar pop songs. They sometimes play the rough trick of animating visitors to dance along, but the most typical element in their performances are chats thrown in here and here. This time, those conversations left particularly strong impressions in scenes of two dancers each performing on stage. Some scenes consist entirely of "guess what I saw on TV the other day" kind of talk acccompanying precisely choreographed moves. The gap between serious dance and casual chat often causes ripples of laughter in the audience.
This style is comparable among others with Chelfitsch’s "dissociation of physical movements and spoken lines" kind of dramatic experimentation, but in the case of Strange Kinoko, it’s much more fun to understand their art as a "humorous sport between the ordinary and the extraordinary", and in my view that’s also the more exciting perepective. It surely requires serious training to talk without losing one’s breath. In order to pull the everyday into the realm of the extraordinary, these girls must be training a lot and in an extraordinary way, thanks to which they manage to produce scenes that seem to be taken from daily life but are in fact far out. Hidden behind the laughter in the audience is, through certainly unconsciously, an expression of admiration.
Miyanaga Aiko’s "Fireworks from the River" was an exhibition of sitespecific works inspired by the Asakusa/Sumidagawa area that is famous for its fireworks displays. Miyanaga creates literally transient objects using naphtalene, which sometimes evaporate and disappear with time, and always inspire the viewer to think about life and death. Furthermore, this time the artist exhibited a delicate installation using threads soaked with water and covered with crystallized salt from the bottom of the Sumida River.
As salt is very sensitive to moisture, the shape of that work looked different each day, depending on the degree of humidity in the air. The exhibition coincided with the beginning of the rainy season, and as Tokyo even experienced a major typhoon during the period, the grains of salt on the thread’s surfaces had reportedly grown in size toward the end of the exhibition. At the same time, the sizes of the shoes, scissors and boats made of naphtalene gradually decreased. I saw the exhibition two days before the end, and found the objects mostly reduced to traces of themselves and barely visible. The white color with its various implications reinforced the general "once in a lifetime" impression. The materials, themes, and the actual objects were plain ordinary, and like the salt the Japanese use to make watermelons taste sweeter, here they enhance the flavor of the entire exhibition.
The same thing one can say also about Mukaiyama Tomoko’s "Sommer Reisen - Schubert and the sounds of the city". For her latest project the pianist who, with her own bold, riotous interpretations, is at home in classical and contemporary music alike, put together a program based on Schubert’s "Impromptus". The first thing that deserves a mention is the fact that the concert in Tokyo took place in a hall on the building’s eighth floor, the second the view of the cityscape the uncovered windows offered the visitors. While performer and audience were gathering in an acoustically closed environment, optically they were all right in the middle ofthe city. The surrounding landscape becomes temporarily invisible when closing one’s eyes to concentrate on the music alone, but as a matter of course this doesn't mean that it disappears.
As expressed in the title, the combination of the piano performance with the "sounds of the city" was a central, noteworthy element. The technique of having live music compete with sampled city noises surely isn't particularly new. But here, time and again the ear that is riding high on the music is being pulled back down into the ordinary (or real) world as soon as the familiar sounds of the streets we usually absorb unconsciously burst in on the piano’s graceful melodies. These interruptions — or collisions — hit the listener/viewer with the same violence as Godard’s movies,an effect comparable with that of an alarm clock in the middle of the night. Awakened by the noise, I found myself staring out of the window on a scenery that had been dipped in an orange glow when the concert started, and was now wrapped in complete blackness out of which only the headlights of the cars on the metropolitan highway hit my eyes. It was a visual and optical reconfirmation of the obvious fact that music, art, and our own lives are parts of a superb, urban world.
Erik Satie in the early 20th century proposed "Furniture Music" that doesn't interfere with daily life when performed. Kinokos, Miyanaga and Mukaiyama have undertaken attempts to introduce aspects of the ordinary world into the extraordinary environments of stages, exhibition and concert halls, and by doing so emphasize the extraordinariness of their respective artistic work. It is surely not exaggerated to say that these artists turned the "furniture (-like) music" concept upside down to create "musical furniture" and suggest daily life as a part of creative activity. Anyway, this time’s events were occasions for visitors to experience a wide spectrum of emotions in which anger was probably the only feeling that never arose.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO