Wandering and Wondering - Thursday, August 3rd, 4-7 pm

PRESS RELEASE
July 28, 2017
Kill Date: August 3, 2017

Something different for 1st Thursday…

Photo by Aurora Santiago

On August 3 Joan Laage will direct the 7th annual site-specific event Wandering and Wondering at the Seattle Japanese Garden. This year’s W&W is a free 1st Thursday event from 4-7 pm. The Seattle Japanese Garden is located at 1075 Lake Washington Blvd E. Wander through the garden and wonder at the sights, sounds, and spirits emerging from the landscape.  Experience the beauty and tranquility of the garden in a unique way.

Over a three-hour period, visitors to the garden will encounter dancers and musicians dispersed in surprising locations throughout the garden as the performers engage in a minute-by-minute response to all the scents, sounds, sights and sensations of the garden. Visitors can also enjoy a photo exhibit featuring W&W from its beginning in 2011. The event’s director Joan Laage (Kogut Butoh) is pleased to present Wandering & Wondering, an annual event in both the Seattle Japanese Garden and Kubota Garden, and for the first time in the Bellevue Botanical Garden.

This year’s dancers are Bruce Fogg, Douglas Ridings, Joan Laage, Katrina Wolfe, Erica Howard, Helen Thorsen, Shoko Zama and Consuelo Gonzalez with music by Gyre (Michael Shannon, David Stanford and Carl Lierman) and Christopher Hydinger. Wandering & Wondering 2017 is co-presented by the Seattle Japanese Garden, Kogut Butoh and DAIPANbutoh Collective, and sponsored by Seattle’s Best Smiles located in Madison Park.

Here’s an audience comments from our 2011 performance:
Thank you for the beautiful afternoon at the Japanese Garden on Saturday. The musicians and dancers were exquisitely sensitive to the beauty of the garden. An added bonus was the great blue heron who seemed to be joining his gestures to the dance. I sincerely hope this event will be continued next year, and every year after. We and the world need more beauty like this. Thank you to all who made this possible.

Our granddaughters

by aleks

Sophie and Ellie, docent Lynnda L.'s and my granddaughters, meet every summer  in the Seattle Japanese garden - we created a tradition for the girls to visit each other while exploring the garden.  This year Lynnda created a book for Sophie, memorizing several years of those visits -  the girls looked at the book while having an after tour snack.

SJG • 7/5/17 -Sophie, her little brother Nick and Ellie feed the koi

SJG • 7/5/17 -Ellie reading Sophie's book about their Garden visits

SJG • 7/5/17 - the annual 'bridge' picture - this year fantastically bombed by our  Master Gardener, Pete Putnicki :)

For the Lynnda's entire adorable book for Sophie go here (sorry, some pages copied upside down - don't know how to fix it, but you can still read them!)

P.S. I'll post links to posts about their previous Garden visits later tonight.

July 5th, noon: BOOK CLUB: Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

by aleks

SJG - 5/31/17 - Miriam, our Gardener, sheering the azaleas

Our Book Club meets this Wednesday at noon at TCR to discuss ''Thousand Cranes' (千羽鶴 Senbazuru, 1952), by Nobel Prize laureate Yasunari Kawabata and translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.

From wikipedia: [...] Set in a post World War II Japan, the protagonist, Kikuji, has been orphaned by the death of his mother and father. He becomes involved with one of the former mistresses of his father, Mrs. Ota, who commits suicide seemingly for the shame she associates with the affair. After Mrs. Ota's death, Kikuji then transfers much of his love and grief over Mrs Ota's death to her daughter, Fumiko. [...]

I agree with this thought from a review posted on 'Japanese Literature Book Group': [...] The novels by Kawabata, more than any of the other Japanese classics I’ve read, really make me regret the fact that I can’t read in Japanese. His writing is just so sparse and poetic. Although the translation does a good job at trying to portray the artistry behind the words, it simply must be more beautiful and meaningful in the original Japanese. I’ve heard Kawabata’s writing described as brush strokes, like writing haiku in traditional Japanese calligraphy, and I think that is a very apt description. [...]

Here a picture and about Shino ware (water jar), featured in the book...

From M.A.Orthofer, 20 January 2013 Review of the book: [...] An effective story of deep emotion and suffocatingly binding personal ties (that still exert a hold even after death), Thousand Cranes is uncomfortably but powerfully understated -- with the slightly stilted feel of the translation working quite well as well here. Presented like the smooth surface of a body of water, the roiling underneath is suggested but barely shown, leaving much for the reader to read into the text, as Kawabata presents a surprisingly deep, layered, and disturbing story in such a short space and with such simple brushstrokes. [...]

As much as I enjoyed the book and particularly the topic of Japan in 1950s being a transient state between cultural practices of the past and beginning to adopt western cultural and social customs, the words from the above review by Orthofer struck me as reflecting my own reading experience of this masterpiece: suffocating, uncomfortable and disturbing - but obviously that was the author's intent, so not unhappy about getting into his head for this reading journey :)...

If you are an over-thinker, and like to analyze everything in depth, this Eslkevin's Blog post titled 'THOUSAND CRANES, BEAUTY, WAR, WARES and SUICIDES' will be really up your ally - i know I appreciated every thought in it.  {About eslkevin: I am a peace educator who has taken time to teach and work in countries such as the USA, Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Mexico, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman over the past 4 decades.}.

So, book lovers: see you Wednesday at noon at TCR!

SJG - 5/31/17 - blooming irises