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Japan Society Project IX – Pleiades By R. Pikser This tribute to the music of the late Iannis Xenakis offers insight to the current approach to music and movement
A director, a dancer, and a percussionist have collaborated in Project IX – Pleiades, a tribute to the late composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), which had its world premiere in Yokohama, Japan in April of this year and premiered in North America on May 2nd at the Japan Society.
The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, are among the nearest star clusters to Earth and are the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky. These stars have captured the imagination of different cultures from earliest recorded times, and various cultures have ascribed various meanings and traditions to them. Xenakis wrote a piece for six percussionists to celebrate these stars and evokes them with bell-like sounds on xylophonyes and marimbas.
Director/Choreographer Luca Veggetti, together with videographer Hiroyoshi Takishima and percussionist Kuniko Kato has created a video performance of Ms. Kato playing six instruments at once; she is shown on a large screen receding from down right to up left on the stage, diagonally away from the audience. In different sections she plays different instruments, but in each section, she plays only one, multiplied many times. Ms. Kato does more than justice to the score. She is also a pleasure to watch, a kind of dancer in her own right. Mr. Veggetti was wise to make her the focus of this production. Megumi Nakamura, the dancer, provides one more visual focus and a very calm energy to contrast with the music.
The opening section of Pléïades, performed to one of the videos, is clamorous and Mr. Veggetti chose well to give the audience a chance to adjust to the music by creating a sense of visual calm. Various instruments were placed about the stage, in front of or behind the screen, the whole strikingly lit in chiaroscuro by lighting designer Takeaki Iwashina. The two performers then slowly and carefully brought the instruments to the place stage right where they would, in the last section of the evening, be played live by Ms. Kato. The calm of these objects presented as sculpture, and the calm of the performers, provided an excellent contrast to the shrillness of the music.
The following sections of the piece were less striking. Ms. Kato and Ms. Nakamura changed places on the stage. Ms. Nakamura had floating movements to perform, as if she were exploring what her limbs were, though with no sense of delight in discovery. Ms. Kato performed variations on the movements she uses when playing various instruments. But her movements itself did not go beyond that point to new possibilities.
The music throughout was aggressive and seemed, like the movement, to repeat itself without any intellectual, imaginative, or aesthetic variation. It seemed as though, for both movement and music, imagination had all been used in the conception and in the technology, with no need or desire to further investigate the moments of execution. This critique can be made of nearly all current dance, and Mr. Veggetti is to be complimented for the use he did make of his imagination. This reviewer simply wishes he had pushed himself even further. Project
IX-Pleiades 
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