Toy Garden Reprise

9 Sep. 2021 | 7pm

10 Sep. 2021 | 3:30pm and 5:30pm

11 Sep. 2021 | 3:30pm and 5:30pm

18 Sep. 2021 | 1pm and 4pm

25 Sep. 2021 | 1pm and 4pm

2 Oct. 2021 | 1pm and 4pm

16 Oct. 2021 | 1pm and 4pm

Toy Garden, one of the most quintessential of Kikuo Saito’s theater productions, is a conceptual, wordless performance piece made in collaboration with choreographer Eva Maier, Saito’s first wife. Toy Garden was originally conceived during a theater residency at Duke University in 1996 and later performed in 1997 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan’s East Village.

Saito said Toy Garden was about what he imagined to be in the famously missing half of the Italian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies, and his set included a performer moving across the stage in an iguana costume and a woman wearing a skirt-like cage filled with live doves. The original Toy Garden production featured actors, choreographed dances, set pieces of constructed animal and pyramid forms, and costumes echoing the Renaissance clothing depicted in the original painting. A painterly backdrop of the words “Venice” and “Venezia” randomly repeated across a grid suggested a place, while sounds evocative of ticking clocks and cutlery-use alternating with selections of Baroque string music added to the sense that past, present, and future were merging. Of all the theater pieces created by Saito, Toy Garden stands out for its graphic use of space and large and often-slow theatrical gestures, which bring to this cosmopolitan dream-Venice the elements of Japanese Noh theater, a genre Saito knew well.

Toy Garden Reprise reframed some of the classic elements found in the original Toy Garden. Working more minimally, Toy Garden Reprise included reimagined set pieces, shifted in scale; the Venice backdrop, now made digital; and dance sequences from the original choreography. In this re-staging with NYC-based dancers, we imagined the ways Saito might have continued experimenting with and refining this classic work of his theater oeuvre.

This project was made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor’s office and the New York State Legislature and administered by ArtsWestchester.