'Like Stepping Into a Spectral Forest of the Dead': On Yeats's Noh Reincarnation at Japan Society

Cross-cultural narratives abound in Simon Starling's At Twilight (After W. B. Yeats’ Noh Reincarnation) at Japan Society. An investigation into the Irish poet's foray into [Japanese] Noh Theater, Starling's show at Japan Society isn't an exact recreation but rather a complex inquiry into the factors that influenced the performance's original production.

Hyperallergic's Allison Meier writes: "Entering Simon Starling’s At Twilight (After W. B. Yeats’ Noh Reincarnation) at New York’s Japan Society is like stepping into a spectral forest of the dead. Charred tree trunks hold faces aloft, these masks ranging from strange modernist forms to realistic human visages. At the center, a screen shows a man dancing to a gong and drum beat, his movements contracting and soaring out to animate the hawk wings that drape his arms." More:

Many of the exhibition’s disembodied faces represent a person connected to the moment in 1916 when Irish poet W. B. Yeats staged his At the Hawk’s Well. The one-act play featured a young and old man at a hawk-guarded well of immortality. The work, presented in the London home of the Cunards, a major shipping family, merged Irish folklore and Japanese Noh theater traditions, albeit in an imperfect translation. As the English artist Starling notes in the video below, “in many ways it’s a project about mistranslation … both on my part, but also on Yeats’s part back in 1916.”

Little documentation exists of At the Hawk’s Well — a few photographs, costume illustrations, and the script. Starling morphed these fragments into his reinterpretation. The costumes, masks, and props on view at Japan Society are from Starling’s Twilight, performed this summer in Glasgow. Alongside these objects is a sort of three-dimensional version of Starling’s displayed “memory map,” a collage of images that connects this obscure Yeats play to the broader community of Modernism at the height of World War I. At its middle is a gnarled tree. The blackened trunks that balance the masks are a reference to the brutalized environments of war, as well as the Ashdown Forest of Sussex, where Yeats and the American poet Ezra Pound wintered during their collaboration. These woods were later immortalized in A. A. Milne’s 1926 Winnie the Pooh. As a tribute, Starling added the sad donkey Eeyore to Twilight, removable tail and all.

Learn more at Hyperallergic.