Simon Starling, the winner of the 2005 Turner Prize, is producing a play referencing W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh theatre with an accompanying exhibition in Glasgow this summer.
At Twilight: A play for two actors, one dancer, 8 masks and a donkey costume, a collaboration with the theatre director Graham Eatough, takes as its starting point Yeats’s 1916 play At the Hawk's Well, inspired by a Noh play Yeats discovered through Pound. Starling came across the Noh play while working on Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) in 2010, which consisted of a film featuring the Japanese mask-maker Yasuo Miichi and a series of masks.
“I was intrigued that there was a precursor to my idea of conflating a story about a Japanese Noh play into something else in a Western context,” Starling explains. He says he was initially hesitant about working in theatre, but changed his mind after receiving a request from Katrina Brown, the director of The Common Guild, a visual arts organisation in Glasgow. “You get to a point in life where you can make an awful lot of exhibitions and it’s really nice to find other ways to think about things,” Starling says. The exhibition at The Common Guild is a prologue to the play, being performed (at a venue to be confirmed) in late August.
The Venezuelan choreographer Javier De Frutos choreographed the Hawk’s dance, starring the Scottish Ballet dancer Thomas Edwards—a segment of which is presented as a film in the exhibition and features music created by the Chicago-based musician Joshua Abrams and the musical ensemble Natural Information Society. There are costumes made by Kumi Sakurai and Atelier Hinode in Tokyo, including one of Eeyore, the famously lugubrious donkey from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories.
Miichi has made a set of masks portraying real and fictional characters, including Yeats, Pound and Michio Itō—a Japanese dancer who performed in Yeats’s play in 1916. The nine masks are being exhibited on charred tree trunks echoing the blasted landscapes of the First World War.
“It’s a lot about steering the boat and keeping it on course,” says Starling about the elaborate collaboration that tries to “make sense” of At the Hawk’s Well a century after its first performance. The boat analogy recalls Starling’s well-known projects, such as Shedboatshed for which he won the Turner Prize.
• Simon Starling, At Twilight: A play for 2 actors, 1 dancer, 8 masks and a donkey costume, is at The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2 July- 4 September