Sunday 15 February 2015

Fox's Window 11.3.11.



The current show Window Poems continues until 27 February with visual poems by Louise Carson (Canada) John "Jazzman" Clarke, Peter Evans, Charlie Fox, Louise Hart, Julian van Hauson, Anna Khan, Daniel Lehan, Jude C Montague, Frog Morris, Marie-Pascale Hardy, Steve Rushton, 
The Vessel, Tim Siddall, and Ted Smith-Orr  

Miyuki Kasahara then presents Fox's Window 11.3.11opening on Sunday 1 March - an adaption of her story telling performance stage she first created in 2011 in response to the Tohoku Tsunami disaster in Japan. 

http://www.miyukikasahara.com/htm_files/fox_window_menu.htm

Fox's Window was written in 1971 by Naoko Awa (1943-1993), an award-winning Japanese writer of modern fairy tales.

 

In the story, through the Fox’s window – the shape made by putting one’s index fingers and thumbs together to form a diamond – one can see through to an irrecoverable and magical past. The story goes . . . on his way home, a hunter lost in the woods chases a young white fox and he comes across a dye shop with the fox (in his human form as a boy) in a blue bell field. The boy dyes the hunter’s fingers in blue using the blue bells and creates a diamond shaped window with the dyed fingers he can look through. Whenever the hunter looks through, he sees a girl who he has loved and has lost contact with and his family who are no longer able to be with him. As the exchange for this magical window, the fox-boy requests the hunter’s rifle and the hunter gives it to him. When the hunter returns home, he washes his hands before he realizes that the dye will wash off. 

The story is about nature, transformation, and bittersweet pain of a fondly remembered past. 
It suggests loss of family, orphans, death and disaster that could be from war but remains ambiguous and universal. 

Kasahara has chosen this story as several years after the Tsunami disaster in Japan many people are still missing, losing their families, and numerous children are orphans.

The Kitchen Window becomes a Fox’s window where people can view elements of the story as well as the devastation caused four years ago. Factual data of what has happened to families in the disaster area since 11 March 2011 can be viewed outside through the window frame.




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