Session House Annual Report 2018: Taiju Matsumoto

Taiju Matsumoto’s “Children’s Theater for Grown-ups Too”
How to Receive the Results

　I planned the project “CHILDBOOK—Let’s Open Books for Children,” which combines dance with readers’ theater, out of a wish that audiences would find themselves enjoying and experiencing contemporary dance without bracing themselves too much beforehand.

 

Much contemporary dance is abstract, with neither story nor explicit meaning. It is performed while leaving a great deal to the sensitivities and experience of the audience watching it. In Japan, it still tends to be avoided as incomprehensible, dark, or self-absorbed.

 

That led me to wonder whether we might put all our energy into creating for “children”—who have not yet acquired any set frameworks, yet whose eyes are as discerning as professionals’—and try to let it reach them. Above all, this required me to be prepared to abandon the attachment to my own ways of creating that I had cultivated until then.

 

　When we actually tried it, fathers, children, grandparents, people involved in education, and others who had not previously come to dance performances showed interest and visited. We received many responses unlike any we had had before: “I bought the original book,” “My husband, who never cries, sat beside me watching intently with tears in his eyes,” “My child, who tends to be hyperactive, watched quietly and intently.”

 

But combining dance and readings is not itself the purpose. As to whether we achieved our original intention of awakening an interest in contemporary dance, I feel anew that I want to further raise the quality of the dance through choreography and study how to integrate it with readings.

 

Taiju Matsumoto

 

Excerpt from Session House Annual Report 2018

 

Photographs from the performances on September 23 and 24, 2018
Dance Bridge International 2018, from Tokyo
Taiju Matsumoto’s “Children’s Theater for Grown-ups Too”: “What Do People Live By?”