Video footage from MIKAWA sound / garrett fisher visuals / tori ellison Supported by Jack Straw Cultural Center’s Artist Residency Program and New Media Gallery. Based on the recording The Iris on 16 Visions Records. fisherensemble.org | toriellison.com Inspired by the haunting world of the ancient Japanese epic Tales of Ise, and the riverbank where a poet meditates on his lost love, Mikawa combines fiberoptic sculpture, sound, technology, and dance in an immersive, contemporary exploration of longing, beauty, and the ephemeral. In the 1464 Noh play Kakitsubata (“Iris”), a poet whose life has lost meaning leaves the Capital and his beloved and heads east to the famous iris marshes of Mikawa (meaning “river of life” or “body’s river”). Based on a classical poem composed centuries earlier, Tales of Ise, the play may have inspired James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and is performed in Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece Late Spring. When he reaches a stream where the iris—associated with yin/yang, its leaf male, its flower female—blooms, a traveling companion says, “Make a poem on the traveler’s heart by using each letter of the word Kakitsubata at the beginning of each line.” And so the poet wrote: KArakoromo KItsutsu narenishi TSUma shi areba BArubaru kinuru TAbi o shizo omo Colorful Chinese Kimono she wore, worn soft To the touch, my love, How far away from her I’ve Traveled on this long journey! Kakitsubata. The Iris. With fragile materials and themes from Japanese landscape painting, Tori Ellison’s fiberoptic sculpture interprets Mikawa’s river landscape, where the poet meditates on romantic longing and loss and invokes the Iris, a river deity who reveals the mysterious beauty of the ephemeral. Fisher’s music, itself an imaginary landscape, brings the voices and sound to this otherworldly realm. Ellison’s abstract interpretation of a watery landscape is inspired by Japanese woodblock print and screen depictions of evening light on water. The soundtrack is based on Fisher’s new recording The Iris.