Sound Around 006: Weavings｜Orukoto

The sixth iteration of Sound Around showcases Kyoto-based Masahiko Takeda, whose interdisciplinary work ranges from electronic music to contemporary art and traditional crafts.
This is the sixth installment in a series of events showcasing performances by artists whose creative practices center on music in ways that transcend genre, medium, and preconceptions. The featured artist this time is Masahiko Takeda, a Kyoto-based practitioner whose work cuts across a wide range of mediums, from electronic music to performing arts, contemporary art, and traditional crafts. Inspired by his family background as the heir to a Nishijin weaving business, Takeda presents a stage performance that redefines the very act of weaving. Weaving is the act of joining fragments together and devising continuity, yet at the same time, a process of establishing new relationships that encompass gaps and disconnections. Instead of presenting such elements as sound, vocals, scent, body, and arrangement in a complete form, Takeda prepares merely the conditions and relationships for them to emerge onstage.
Drawing on the particular sense of arrangement found in the tea ceremony, the temporal structures of repetition and timing in the traditional Japanese court music of gagaku, and a decentered understanding of composition evocative of John Cage and Erik Satie, Takeda conjures up a stage where performers, audience, and space all intersect and interact with one other. The performance harnesses the potential of the theatre space to create a temporary loom that quietly weaves the things that happen onstage.