Performance Added For SHINNAI MEETS PUPPETRY, Coming Up at 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 five 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.”  Due to popular demand, an additional performance has been added on Friday, November 8 at 5:00pm, with the complete schedule as follows: Thursday, November 7 at 7:30pm; Friday, November 8 at 5:00pm & 7:30pm (7:30pm performance followed by an artist Q&A); Saturday, November 9 at 2:30pm & 7:30pm.

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 mischievous tanuki (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.

About Shinnai-bushi:

Shinnai-bushi is a genre of joruri (song-storytelling accompanied by shamisen music) from Japan that originated in the mid-18th century.  Shinnai-bushi developed as a style of pure storytelling, without the accompaniment of puppets or dancers.  Shinnai-bushi’s lyrical melodies capture the sorrow of love and the subtleties of human nature, and they have been appreciated in rural and folk contexts in Japan for centuries.  Among many renowned shinnai-bushi storytellers throughout the genre’s history, Grand Master Okamoto Bunya (1895-1996) significantly contributed to the modernization and promotion of shinnai-bushi in the twentieth century.  Bunya created about 300 original compositions, finding inspiration in Japanese (and foreign) literature, poetry, folk stories, and myths to create his new shinnai-bushi repertoire. Working with spirited choreographers/dancers, he also experimented with shinnai buyō (shinnai dance).  

Artist Biographies:

Sachiyo Takahashi is an artist, composer, and musician who creates storytelling through objects and sound.  Composing sensory elements in a minimalist manner, she explores the border between narrative and abstraction to generate fables for the subconscious.  Takahashi founded Nekaa Lab in 2006 together with other "lab members" (stuffed toys and tiny figurines). She produces performances, installations, and writings while observing human nature from alternative perspectives.  Sachiyo's Microscopic Live Cinema-Theatre – unique performances projected from a miniature stage – has been appraised as a quirky yet imaginative merging between theatrical and cinematic experiences. Takahashi is also an accredited master of Okamoto school shinnai-bushi, one of Japan’s traditional song-storytelling music styles that uses shamisen accompaniment.  Performing under the stage name Okamoto Miya, she has been introducing this art form overseas through her Shinnai Meets Puppetry series, collaborating with innovative puppeteers.  Outside of Japan, Takahashi has presented both nationally and internationally, including performances at Prague Quadrennial, St. Ann's Warehouse, La MaMa, HERE and Japan Society in NYC.  She is a proud recipient of multiple grants, such as the Jim Henson Foundation, NYSCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, New England Foundation for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation. 

Emma Wiseman is an artist interested in puppets and objects.  She has worked as a puppeteer, puppetry designer, consultant, teacher, and collaborator with individuals and organizations including Dan Hurlin, Robin Frohardt, Sachiyo Takahashi, Nick Lehane, Derek Fourdjour, Swoon, the Kennedy Center, CO/LAB Theater Group, Signature Theatre Center, and the University of Rochester, among others.  Emma’s original work looks at relationships between humans and spaces/objects that are considered boring or mundane.  She documents examples of particularly depressing plants in the built environment through the Instagram account @sad._.plants. 

Rowan Magee is a puppeteer, designer, and director living in Flatbush, Brooklyn.  He has puppeteered on international tours with Phantom Limb Company, Robin Frohardt, Nick Lehane, and Dan Hurlin; in New York for Chris Green, Lake Simons and Spencer Lott; and on Broadway in Angels in America and Life of Pi.  In 2019, Rowan operated the titular reference puppet for the film Clifford the Big Red Dog.  He has designed and built puppets and props for films, operas, plays and schools, and is a curator for the Object Movement Festival, a winter residency and spring showcase of experimental puppet artists in NYC.  He made his Met Opera debut with El Niño in May 2024.

Shinnai Meets Puppetry performances are as follows:

Thursday, November 7 at 7:30pm 

Friday, November 8 at 5:00pm & 7:30pm — Followed by an artist Q&A 

Saturday, November 9 at 2:30pm & 7:30pm

Tickets: $38/$28 Japan Society members. *Limited seating. *Performed in Japanese and English with English surtitles.   

This event coincides with Japan Society Gallery's fall exhibition, Bunraku Backstage.

These performances coincide with Japan Society Gallery’s Bunraku Backstage exhibition, providing a rare glimpse behind the scenes of Japanese puppet theater. Showcasing actual working puppets, props, instruments, and costumes on loan from the National Bunraku Theatre, Osaka, alongside Basil Twist’s intricate stage mechanisms and painted screens for Dogugaeshi; and unexpected bunraku-inspired multimedia works by contemporary artists, this exhibition unveils the artistry and collaboration that goes into a staged bunraku performance, as well as the ongoing inspiration and influence of Japanese puppetry on contemporary artists.  The Gallery will be open for public viewing from October 4, 2024 through January 21, 2025.

The Fall 2024 Series Ningyo! A Parade of Puppetry launched with Basil Twist’s Dogugaeshi, a 20th anniversary revival of Twist’s Bessie award-winning fusion of mind-bending contemporary puppetry and nearly extinct traditional puppetry techniques from Japan’s Awa region (September 11 – 19) and continued with National Bunraku Theater, the long-awaited return of traditional bunraku puppet theater brought to New York City by Japan’s National Theatre (October 3 – 5).  Following Shinnai Meets Puppetry(November 7 – 9), the series concludes with The Benshi Tradition and the Silver Screen: A Japanese Puppetry Spin-off (December 12 & 13), linking the legacy of bunraku to Japan’s silent film tradition of the benshi, with modern benshi star Ichiro Kataoka and shamisen musician Sumie Kaneko joining forces across two separate screenings of silent samurai classics.  

In Winter/Spring 2025, Japan Society will present the 20th Contemporary Dance Festival: Japan + East Asia (January 10 – 11), featuring ensembles from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea that represent the hottest contemporary dance coming out of East Asia today. Next, the French gothic horror Le Barbe Bleue gets a Harajuku makeover in Shuji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (January 15 – 18), a mazelike retelling of the original tale and the Bartok adaptation by underground theater / filmmaker legend Shuji Terayama, further subverted into a wild burlesque showcase by the crossdressing, all-female company Project NYX, all directed by experimental theater veteran Kim Sujin. The season continues with the 19th Installment of the Annual Play Reading, presenting the play the far side of the moon (March 10), a haunting meditation on aging and loneliness in the modern era written by Izumi Kasagi and directed by NYC-based Skye Kowaleski.  Following the play reading, traditional Japanese instrument rockstars The Shakuhachi 5 have their North American debut concert in The Shakuhachi 5: Shakuhachi Vogue – A Visual Concert (May 16), featuring an impressive range of new and traditional works over four centuries to the backdrop of a mesmerizing video collage of ukiyo-e images, designed by visual artist Tei Blow. The season culminates with the music series Shun Ishiwaka: Jazz Transcending (June 5 & 7), in a set of two contrasting programs, one on each night, that place the rapidly transcendent star percussionist and musician Shun Ishiwaka front and center for American audiences.

All events take place at Japan Society, located at 333 East 47th Street in Manhattan.  Tickets on sale now.  For tickets and further detail, please visit www.japansociety.org or call 212-715-1258. (Non-member tickets include a $3 processing fee.)

About Japan Society

Japan Society is the premier organization connecting Japanese arts, culture, business, and society with audiences in NYC and around the world.  In over 100 years of work, we’ve inspired generations by establishing ourselves as pioneers in supporting international exchanges in arts and culture, business and policy, as well as education between Japan and the U.S.  From our New York headquarters, a landmark building designed by architect Junzo Yoshimura that opened to the public in 1971, we look forward to the years ahead.

Since the inception of the Japan Society Performing Arts Program in 1953, Japan Society has introduced nearly a 1,000 of Japan’s finest performing arts to an extensive American audience.  Programs range from the traditional arts of noh, kyogen, bunraku and kabuki to cutting-Edge Theater, dance and music.  The Program also commissions new works to non-Japanese artists, produces national tours, organizes residency programs for American and Japanese artists and develops and distributes educational programs.

Tickets & Information: 

Tickets for performances and related events at Japan Society can be purchased by calling the Box Office at 212-715-1258 or in person at Japan Society (M-F 9:00am – 5:00pm).  Japan Society is located at 333 East 47th Street, between First and Second Avenues (accessible by the 4/5/6 at 42nd Street-Grand Central Station or the E at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street).  For more information, call 212-832-1155 or visit https://www.japansociety.org/

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