Last month Good Company Arts in partnership with Iina Naoto and Mizuhito Kuroda, hosted a unique group of renowned artists from Japan and Aotearoa New Zealand to workshop together in Tokyo.
The team included master taonga pūoro practitioner Mahina-Ina Kingi-Kaui, Okinawan master musician Kyohei Matayoshi, and Noh theatre master artist Kanji Shimizu.
It was an amazing wānanga that set in motion the foundational steps for developing this project. The mahi (work) intertwines traditional and contemporary arts practice through a new cross-cultural lens - situating ancestral knowledge and stories within a digital and performing arts context.
Japan and Aotearoa are island nations surrounded by ocean - the kaupapa or conceptual discussions began around our collective relationship to water - exploring wai/mizu as a fluid connector, differentiator, facilitator, communicator, reflector - a master conductor. With excellent translation support from Kyle Yamada our workshop moved between Japanese-English and Māori languages. Also in the group was GCA Creative Producer Donnine Harrison, Lavinia Kingi-Kaui, a Tokyo Zokei University film student and GCA Director, Daniel Belton.
Domo arigatou gozaimasu Prof Iina Naoto (Tokyo Zokei University) and theatre director Mizuhito Kuroda (Gecko Parade) for your collaboration, arranging the venue (Monten Hall) beside Tokyo’s gentle Sumida River, and for inviting wonderful guest artists Kyohei and Kanji to meet the brilliant Mahina Kingi-Kaui.
It is rare that artists from Japan and Aotearoa can be supported to research and workshop ideas in this way. We are grateful to Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa for supporting our wānanga (development workshop in Tokyo), and the team is excited for the potential of what has begun. Tahitanga e whai kaha ai tātau. In unity, we have strength. In the words of a Māori proverb or whakataukī: Kei tēnā, kei tēnā, kei tēnā ano. Tōnā ake ahua, Tōnā ake mauri, Tōnā ake mana. Each and every one has their own uniqueness, life essence and presence.
“In this film post production process I have worked with Jac Grenfell’s (KANO) new motion graphics as scenographic components. Performing artists are montaged within these digital renders which are derived from water - the crystallography of water is recreated in a geometric language for film by KANO. Pythagoras said ‘physical matter is music solidified’.
Noh artist Kanji Shimizu is depicted stepping across these spectral structures, traversing them, like walking glacial terrain. Everything is in motion and yet frozen. We see Mahina Kingi-Kaui and Kyohei Matayoshi with their instruments, playing. They are embedded in the architecture of the water crystallography and it becomes part of them - merging into this shifting environment. References to the molecular activate the dialogue between water and land bodies. Crevices become oceanic shelves, with a sense of great spatial becoming.
Mr Shimizu asserts the age old craft of Noh theatre into this collaboration, while Matayoshi and Kingi-Kaui contribute their cultural sounds and music (strings with blown, spun and percussive instruments). Okinawan and Māori traditional musical instruments (taonga pūoro), improvised together. Collaborators discussed the work of Dr Masaru Emoto who claimed that water was a ‘blueprint for our reality’ and that emotional energies and vibrations could change the physical structure of water” Daniel Belton
