Japanese dance opera at „new work”
Kieler Nachrichten, Oktober 22, 2002
kwi
Initial scepticism towards danced concerts proves in most cases to be grounded. However, the co-operation between the Folkwang Tanzstudio from Essen and the Düsseldorf Ensemble musikFabrik for the opening of the NDR Concert series turned out as a highly professional success. Henrietta Horn doesn’t deny the concert situation for a moment but rather draws on it and develops an intense and ever deepening dialogue between music and dance.
She transforms – analogue to Japanese theatre and new tone composition – the fable from the Muramachi epoch in strongly stylised yet expressive dance. Inspired by the music and their own emotions, the characters change out of static poses with gesturing movements, visually suggesting scenes of the drama in exciting formations with the musicians.
A finely woven net
Henrietta Horn choreographs the opera ESHI – der Maler
tanzdrama, 6/2002
Irmela Kästner
The mythological world of medieval Japan is still alive today in the country’s contemporary music and theatre, and not least because the Japanese music and related theatre arts of that era were considered very highly developed. Tightrope walking between the traditional and the modern is certainly a hallmark of contemporary Japanese art. When in addition the East meets the West in this delicate undertaking, as presently in Hamburg for the NDR series “das neue werk” (the new work) with the theme “Labyrinth Mythos”, an uneven challenge is at hand.
Under the musical direction of Robert HP Platz, the Folkwang Tanzstudio and the Ensemble musikFabrik performed ESHI - der Maler, a chamber opera by the contemporary Japanese composer, Akira Nishimura, with choreography by Henrietta Horn. Sensitively, but with an artistically convincing and self-assured hand, the choreographer has taken an important and successful step into what is in many respects a multidisciplinary terrain. Nishimura orientated his composition from 1999 on the tradition of the Bunraku theatre and, even though his orchestration is solely for western instruments, expressly wanted the character of this form of classical Japanese puppet theatre preserved.
The puppeteers breath sole into the figures and Sarah Leonard’s broad ranging soprano gives them a voice. Horn places her dancers amongst the seven strong orchestra of musicians which she also directs in this minimal but, nevertheless, highly dramatic play. Based on a 15th Century Kioto story about the dreadful ruler Shogun and the fanatical artist Yoshilde whose daughter Shogan worships and is ultimately brutally sacrificed for the sake of art by her own father, it all sounds fairly exotic. Horn extracts arresting images from this web of despotism, supremacy struggles and questing for truth and beauty in art, and finds a coherent balance between abstraction and the dramatic development of the characters in typical movement motives. She gives the mighty Shogun (Francesco Pedone) two players at his side who help him to soaring leaps. The three of them form a triumvirate of power that the choreographer establishes right from the beginning. Shogan, legs astride, sits raised in the background while his players (Tanja Berg, Franko Schmidt) mirror his angular movements and gestures amongst the musicians.
Horn uses the relationship between the characters and their players as a chance to win new interpretive freedom. She opens up the normally closed gap between puppet and puppeteer to the wider interaction of others so as to express and heighten the characters intentions and inner conflicts. She achieves this wonderfully with the character of the painter (Manuel Quero) who turns his puppeteer into a slave who he tortures and beats in the aim of attaining his own truth. It’s in these inner dialogues that the soul and mythical quality of the material is revealed and given contemporary expression. Horn finds her most abstract and transcendental form of this language for the figure of the daughter played by Japanese dancer Mu-Yi Kuo. At first held back, her finely woven arm movements envelop in a net of fleeing string tones and, as the drama reaches its climax, we see her shaking almost imperceptibly as if she was burning in the fires of hell. The orchestra members enthusiasm to cooperate allowed the choreographer to position them, standing or sitting, either diagonally or face on to the audience; any changes of formation were part of the choreography. Virtuous but at the same time sparing, Nishimura’s composition is orchestrated in places just for one instrument which spins the thread of the story with the soprano voice singing from off scene. In this acoustically transparent building and through the impressively concentrated performances of her dancers, Henrietta Horn succeeded in giving the myth a new face.