Thursday, September 17th, 5 pm – 7 pm
At Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
7:00-7:30pm Procession from BMAC to NEYT/Sages
Join us for this special evening of entertainment, food and beverage, and a silent auction as we welcome audiences and artists to our 13th international festival! Your Gala ticket price supports the entire festival and helps make it possible for these international artists to come to Vermont and celebrate with us. So join us for speeches that call us into this particular moment in time for Sandglass and our world, meet these exciting performers, catch a special performance, and help this unusual form of theater stay a part of our home in southern Vermont!
As part of the opening Gala, renowned guest artist, Tom Lee will perform Sanbaso, a Japanese ritual dance purifying the space of performance. This performance was taught to Mr. Lee by his teacher Koryū Nishikawa V and the puppet with which it is performed is also a gift of his teacher.
More about Sanbaso:
We begin with Sanbaso
This evening’s presentation begins with Sanbaso, a ritual dance purifying the space of performance. Sanbaso opens many traditional performances in Japan, including noh theatre, where it is, itself, preceded by two other sacred dances, each performed by its title character: Okina (Old Man) and Senzai (A Thousand Years Old). Sanbaso, literally “Third Old Man”, is, among these three dancing deities, the one closest to humans, empathizing with and even partaking in their frailties and struggles. He is, therefore, special to the puppet theatre, where humble, mundane gestures of human life find expression. Sanbaso also reminds us that human actions play out within a sacred cosmology, where both Shinto and Buddhist deities preside. He is responsible for the fertility of the earth, which gives us essential sustenance. As Sanbaso stamps on the ground, he prepares the fields for planting and regeneration. His purification of the performance space initiates enactments that connect all living things with each other and the divine. Sanbaso invites us to an original understanding of Japanese performance, as described in the eighth century text Kojiki, Records of Ancient Matters: When the Sun Goddess Amaterasu has secluded herself in a cave, the noise of the other gods dancing, stomping, and laughing draws her back out, allowing light, fecundity, and joy to replenish the earth.
-Claudia Orenstein