SPAC’s new production of the fantastical musical play “The White Hare of Inaba-Navajo” will be presented as part of this year’s Open-air Performing Arts Festival ahead of its official world premiere in France in June.

While “Inaba no Shiro-Usagi” (“The White Hare of Inaba”) is a famous Japanese fable, a similar story was also widely known among Native American peoples, and in this new play MIYAGI Satoshi and his SPAC team trace that linkage based on a bold hypothesis proposed by the great French social anthropologist Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS (who died, aged 90, in 2009).
Commissioned by the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to commemorate its 10th anniversary, this work sees MIYAGI putting all his energies into creating an ambitious musical style especially suited to a festival staging of this work — a style through which he aims “to deeply explore a quite different culture and the dynamics of that quest.”
Now, ahead of its Paris premiere, SPAC will stage an open-air “preview” of “The White Hare of Inaba-Navajo” in Shizuoka City’s central Sumpujo Park, a splendid venue familiar to all those who saw “Mahabharata – Nalacharitam” there in last year’s festival — a work of his that MIYAGI also presented as the opening performance of the Musée du quai Branly’s new Théâtre Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS in 2006.

In the age-old Japanese fable “Inaba no Shiro-Usagi,” one story tells how a divinity named Ōkuninushi no Mikoto cleverly lined up crocodiles to make a bridge so a white hare could cross a river between two places called Okinoshima and Inaba — but then just before it reaches Inaba the hare meets a white hare that is crying because it had been skinned by the crocodiles.
Although the hare’s tale is just a small part of the Japanese fable “Kojiki,” by the time it crossed the Pacific to North America, the tale told of two hero brothers who crossed a river by stepping on snakes (instead of crocodiles) until one of them is swallowed by a serpent.
With certain similarities that are quite striking, and commonalities in their general outline, even though the story became more condensed in North America with the lapse of time, LÉVI-STRAUSS brilliantly succeeded in developing an enormously imaginative hypothesis through which to extract the essence of the fable.

Shizuoka Performing Arts Center
SPAC was founded in 1995 by the Shizuoka prefectural government and commenced its full-fledged activities in 1997 under the direction of SUZUKI Tadashi, its first General Artistic Director. As a pioneer of publicly funded performing-arts organizations in Japan, SPAC retains its own staff of actors, technical and production staff, who are based at its own venues and facilities. The mission of SPAC is not only to create original pieces, but also to invite progressive artistic companies and creators to Shizuoka and to develop human resources seeking expression through the performing arts. Since April 2007, when he was appointed as the General Artistic Director, MIYAGI Satoshi has led SPAC in a buoyant new phase of development and expansion.

◎Starting 30 minutes before each performance, there will be a pre-performance talk.

Conception and direction: MIYAGI Satoshi
Text: collective writing of KUBOTA Azumi and the troops
Music: TANAKAWA Hiroko
Space design: KIZ Junpei
Costume design: TAKAHASHI Kayo
Lighting design: OSAKO Koji

Performed by AKAMATSU Naomi, ABE Kazunori, ISHII Moemi, OUCHI Yoneji, OHTAKA Kouichi, KATO Yukio, SAKAKIBARA Yuumi, SAKURAUCHI Yu, SATO Yuzu, SUZUKI Mariko, DAIDOMUMON Yuya, TAKEISHI Morimasa, TATENO Momoyo, TAMOTSU Kana, TERAUCHI Ayako, NOGUCHI Syunsuke, HONDA Maki, MAKIYAMA Yudai, Micari, MISHIMA Keita, MORIYAMA Fuyuko, YAMAMOTO Miyuki, YOKOYAMA Hisashi, YOSHIUE Soichiro, YOSHIMI Ryo, WATANABE Takahiko

* FUSE Asuka has been cancelled to play, thank you for your understanding.

A creation of the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center in coproduction with the Musée du quai Branly
Organization: Committee of Open-air Performing Arts Festival