SHINNAI MEETS PUPPETRY Comes to the Japan Society

Japan Society will present a world premiere double bill of contemporary puppet theater with Shinnai Meets Puppetry, created & performed by Sachiyo Takahashi/Nekaa Lab with Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman.  Shinnai Meets Puppetry will have four performances only, taking place Thursday, November 7 through Saturday, November 9 at Japan Society (333 East 47th Street) as part of the continuing Fall 2024 Series “Ningyo! A Parade of Puppetry.” 

Shinnai Meets Puppetry is a world premiere featuring the works One Night in Winter & The Peony Lantern.  Following her highly popular run of SHEEP #1 at Japan Society in 2021, NYC-based artist Sachiyo Takahashi/Nekaa Lab presents two whimsical and spooky tales: a fable on the unlikely friendship between a shapeshifting tanuki (raccoon dog) trickster and a heartbroken old man; and a classical Japanese ghost story about a spurned lover who seeks revenge in the afterlife.  These stories were set to rustic, lyricaltraditional shinnai-bushi style storytelling music with shamisen accompaniment by shinnai-bushi Grand Master Okamoto Bunya (1895-1996).  Takahashi, who practices shinnai-bushi under the authorized stage name of Okamoto Miya as a direct disciple of Bunya’s successor, performs this spirited and expressive music on voice and shamisen, while her collaborators Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman animate these fantastical stories with their original puppets and new puppetry techniques.  Magee and Wiseman utilize a range of rod and hand puppetry, as well as shadow puppetry inspired by the visual vocabulary of Japanese traditional magic lantern entertainment (utsushi-e).  Inspired by Bunya’s innovative spirit, Shinnai Meets Puppetry introduces shinnai-bushi repertoire to international audiences with visual accompaniment by innovative American puppeteers.  This double bill runs approximately 60 minutes with no intermission.  Recommended ages 8 and up.

In The Peony Lantern, a famous ghost love story by San'yūtei Enchō, a samurai’s betrothed, Otsuyu, dies of a broken heart while waiting for her lover to return.  In death, she and her maid devise a plot to haunt him and bring him into the realm of death with her.  Each night, she visits the samurai at home, bathed by the light of the peony lantern she carries to disguise her true nature. Despite placing a protective charm on the house after his servant’s warnings, the ghost succeeds and pulls the samurai with her into hell.  Mirroring the atmospheric quality of the shinnai-bushi tune by Okamoto Bunya, lead puppeteer Emma Wiseman and Rowan Magee perform shadow puppetry inspired by the traditional Japanese utsushi-e stage technique, which uses multiple portable light sources for the projection of each character.  Puppets and materials are occasionally pressed tightly against the screen to reveal their texture and color, and sometimes held further away to create a blurred image, enhancing the uncanny existence of the characters and the space between the living and the dead.  The shadow screen also unfolds along with the story, with the divided windows of the screen serving as film-like frames to represent the narrative from multiple perspectives and scales.

One Night in Winter is a fable equally comedic and heart-wrenching, recounting the unexpected encounter between a magical and mischievoustanuki (Japanese raccoon dog) and a lonely old man on a cold winter’s night.  Living alone in a mountain temple after having tragically lost his son, the man receives a surprise visit from a tanuki hoping to get warm. Knowing the tanuki has the power to shapeshift into other forms, the man asks to see his son one more time.  To enhance the rustic atmosphere of the story, lead puppeteer Rowan Magee, together with Emma Wiseman and Sachiyo Takahashi, developed simple one-person-controlled rod puppets inspired by traditional folk puppets from Sado Island in Niigata, Japan. The bodies of the puppets are represented by the arms and hands of the puppeteers under the puppets’ fabric clothes.  A particular highlight of the puppet design and manipulation techniques for this piece is the tanuki, who is able to turn his appearance into the deceased son of the old man instantly.