Events

Premiered in March 1992. The following year, it was also performed in Ōdate, Akita Prefecture, where Kazuo Ohno spent his middle school years. Although there was a possibility that the piece would be staged in 1997 as part of the “Kazuo Ohno Retrospective,” launched in 1994, it was ultimately not revived after 1993, and was performed in full only three times.

The music was composed and performed by Haruna Miyake—who had also worked on the score for the butoh film 'Landscape of the Soul (1991),' featuring Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno. At the premiere, in addition to Miyake’s piano, Keizō Mizoiri (double bass) and Jo Sakimoto (harmonica) performed on alternating days.

In an essay on Kazuo Ohno, Miyake reflects on his dance as something like a constantly shifting balance, and writes that she sought “to create a sonic space capable of cutting into and opposing it,” making “music that maintains a precarious equilibrium” the basis of her compositional and performance approach (Haruna Miyake, “The Style of Condensation: The Dance of Kazuo Ohno,” Gendai-shi Techō, June 1992). This was a work that could not have come into being without her encounter with Ohno.

Structure (from the premiere programme):

1. Rimbaud’s 'A Season in Hell.' When I first read it (just after the war), it was not merely difficult—I could scarcely find words for it. Yet somehow, the word “Matsuri (festival)” alone seems to have been etched into me. Amid the cosmos and a fondness for insects, madness sustains me.
2. A dress held in the mouth
Bones thirst for water
3. One who delights in insects
A time of delighting in insects
The moment of delighting in insects
The solitude of delighting in insects
4. A washbasin and an earth cart
5. White lotus
In the twilight of spring, where has the woman’s spirit gone? Only Jizō and the flowers of dawn come to visit. The white lotus of repose for the soul—