Embracing the life of the tribute and the memory of the soul of billion years, the innocence
from darkness to light and death to life is constantly repeated and continues to open.
The beginning of the universe is love.
The flower stares at the stars.
“HANA” is a single life that opens endlessly in innocence, turning from darkness toward light, from death toward life, toward the love that began the universe.
Once, when I had lost my sense of worth and stood at the bottom of solitude, it was the memory of flowers—breathing quietly, dignified and free from the measures of the world, living and dying in their purity—that saved me.
And now, beyond this age of distance and fear born of a controlled and shuttered society since the time of the plague, even if a harsher future should arrive, flowers will still open in silence, upheld by the earth and reaching toward the sky, offering their lives to nature and to the generations to come. Those flowers are none other than symbols of our own souls.
Within an ultimate simplicity, like a haiku pared down to its essence—nothing on stage but a single suspended flower, white ash scattered below, and a red garment—live music and Butoh resonate together, not to explain with words but to mirror within each witness the hidden flower inside them: its joy and rage, sorrow and ecstasy, even its madness. Holding prayers to the masters of nature and to the ancestors of Butoh, this work reveals the essence of life that continues to bloom beyond living and dying, the universality of the soul entrusted into one flower bearing all light and darkness, gods and humans alike: the ultimate creation of Butoh artist Atsushi Takenouchi and musician Hiroko Komiya.
A mesmerizing theatrical ritual in a poetic meditation on rebirth, in which every viewer finds their own light.
