At VIDF, Hiromoto Ida shares a love story in Birthday Present for Myself
An old man raises a glass of sake to himself in moving meditation on life and loss
Hiromoto Ida, Birthday Present for Myself. Photo by Masayosi Suzuki
CANCELLED: Vancouver International Dance Festival has just had to cancel Birthday Present for Myself on March 17 and 18at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts due to illness
HIROMOTO IDA’S Birthday Present for Myself tells the story of an old man raising a glass of sake to himself in celebration of what will be his last birthday. To make it, the multidisciplinary artist connected virtually with a composer in Russia using Google Translate, travelled to the 100-year-old home of a Noh mask maker in Kyoto, drew from text by pioneering Japanese contemporary theatre playwright Shogo Ota, and hired B.C. musicians to accompany him live on stage. Years in the making, the artist thoughtfully putting pieces of the puzzle together over time, Birthday Present for Myself is a meditation on moving forward when those we care about the most have to leave us.
“It’s a love story,” Ida tells Stir by phone from his home in Nelson. “My dad passed away a few years ago. I went to Japan for one week when he was in hospital. My mom, without him, was having a hard time adjusting to her life. She came to Canada and stayed with us for two months, and we could speak and I could really listen to her. It made me think about what it feels like when someone left you after you’ve been together for so long.
“We’re all disappearing, and that can make us lonely but we have to carry on,” he says. “The piece is about love.”
Coming to the 2023 Vancouver International Dance Festival, Birthday Present for Myself merges dance, theatre, classical music, and voice. As the old man, a composer, reminisces about the richness of his life, he is visited by the spirit of his late wife (Lindsay Clague). Ida says he started working on the piece in 2015, though when he reflects on the moments in his life that led to the idea, he says its origins go back much further.
Ida was seven years old when his grandfather died. He was living in his native Tokyo at the time, where it’s common for funerals to take place in people’s home, the deceased in a coffin, before the family goes to the crematorium together. They waited there while his grandfather’s body burned; he remembers seeing clouds of smoke lift up into the sky. “Maybe that was trauma, something I’ve been carrying all my life until now,” the artist says. He was 14 when his grandmother died. “That had quite a heavy impact for me.”
Those losses, Ida says, made him realize early on it’s important to do what you love in life. He studied theatre and worked as an actor in Japan then took up dance upon moving to Vancouver in 1987, first working with Karen Jamieson Dance Company. The 61-year-old father of two grown children heads Ichigo-Ichieh Dance, performing his works worldwide, and continues to act.
Birthday Present for Myself takes its name from one of the pieces of music it features, written by Russian composer Pavel Karmanov. Ida fell in love with the composition upon being introduced to it by clarinettist Nicola Everton, who will perform it, and many other works, live along with pianist Sue Gould, cellist Jeff Faragher, and violinist-violist Martine denBok. When Ida reached out to Karmanov to ask if he could use the song, the composer offered it and several others, including “Different rain” and “Past perfect piano solo”.
In creating the piece—which features streaks of humour that Ida conveys in converstaion—the affable artist found himself thinking about his own aging process. “I started this around 2015, in my 50s, so it’s not like when you’re 25 and your life is all ahead of you,” he says. “I’m talking about everyday life, living life, but I was also really getting tired of my body in a way. I kind of wanted to put my face off, have it go away. So I became curious about something: maybe I could dance in a mask.”
He emailed Kyoto-based artist Mitsue Nakamura, a revered maker of Kagekiyo Noh theatre masks who has dedicated herself to the craft since 1983 and exhibited works across Japan and beyond. She invited him to her home. When he arrived at the century-old traditional Japanese abode, she had many masks laid out for him to look at on a table upstairs. She said: “Here they are: these are all my little children. Pick whichever one you like and bring it to Canada but please bring it back again.” (He will return the mask after Birthday Present for Myself completes its run. “I can only see the floor when I wear it,” he says with a laugh.)
Through the old man’s inner world and emotions, Birthday Present for Myself plumbs the depths of love, transformation, renewal, and the beauty in the day-to-day.
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