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Sotoba Komachi - UC San Diego 2021

Summary of Production

Director: Michelle Huynh
Lighting: Harry Foster 
Scenic Designer: Nick Ponting
Costume Designer: Euihung song
Assistant Sound Designer: Ethan Eldred

"A modern adaptation of a Japanese Noh theatre classic, Yukio Mishima’s Sotoba Komachi tells the story of a 99 year-old woman’s encounter with a poet who deems youth and romance as life’s most crucial desirabilities. When the old woman takes the poet on an amorous, picturesque journey of her past, the memories that unfold incite both tragedy and peace on the stage. In our intercultural production of Mishima’s re-telling, we explore the strained relationship amongst time, beauty, and death and the gendered traumas of the aging body and hopeful impossibilities." - UCSD Promotion Material

For this production, the music that Stewart composed was centered around the Taiko drum, shamisen, and Kabuki percussion. The director and Stewart explored a mixture of traditional Japanese instrumentation filtered through the musical stylings of Kubrick films. Much of the score was written in the rehearsal process to add specificity to timing and mood.   

Additionally, Stewart collaborated with the lighting designer, Harry Foster, to send values over OSC to his lighting console. By doing this they were able to trigger lighting gestures at specific places in the music and raise and lower the lights depending on the SPL of the cues or microphones. This was accomplished through custom-designed Max/MSP devices and utilizing Ableton Live as the audio playback engine. This made for an extremely collaborative and cohesive design process.