Mizu

A bucolic park on a blustery end-of-summer day. A floating wooden platform on a small lake begins to draw a crowd. As families gather, the performers arrive, one of them enveloped in an isothermal blanket. Molded in ice and articulated with metal hinges providing mobility to its head and limbs, the frozen puppet is carefully attached via a complex system of strings to the wooden half-moon structure rising from the platform. While one puppeteer manipulates the body of ice via the strings, a choreographer begins to dance with the puppet as music plays on loudspeakers positioned on the shore. The platform is gently unmoored and left to drift out while the sun glistens through the moving ice forms in turn reflected from the lake’s surface.

The dance grows increasingly intimate as the melting progresses. Hanging from above the puppet to climbing onto the puppet’s shoulders to cradling the puppet in her arms, the body of flesh fuses with the body of ice until a climatic sequence in which dancer and puppet swing and turn with increasing speed and force until the ice breaks and the puppet comes crashing down to the platform. The dance slows, the platform sinks, the broken puppet and the drenched dancer engage in their final embraces, spinning above the surface as ducks and birds continue their passage through the shared performance space.

This collaboration between Elise Vigneron and her company the Théâtre de l’Entrovert with circus artist and choreographer Satchie Noro adopt the Japanese word for water in making the foreign familiar and the familiar foreign. An open embrace of interconnectedness, this outdoor marvel combines nature and art in an ode to our return to the elements.       – A. Street