Chiharu
Shiota
Stage
Design
for
"Idomeneo,
re
di
Creta",
Art
Geneva
2 February 2024
"...Everything is quiet and calm in the museum, but the stage design is restless. In my artwork, the string is like an extension of a brush stroke from the canvas but on stage, the string is everything. I create the space, the ocean, and nature with this material." – Chiharu Shiota
"...Everything is quiet and calm in the museum, but the stage design is restless. In my artwork, the string is like an extension of a brush stroke from the canvas but on stage, the string is everything. I create the space, the ocean, and nature with this material."
– Chiharu Shiota
Visual artist Chiharu Shiota will design the sets for the production “Idomeneo, re di Creta," an opera-ballet with music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, premiering on 21 FEBRUARY 2024.
Chiharu Shiota, presentation of stage design for Idomeneo, re di Creta, booth by Grand Théâtre de Genève, Art Geneva 2024, Switzerland, photo Julien Gremaud.
Thread and its avatars — ropes, cables, laces, and tethers — are the trademarks of Chiharu Shiota. The threads she uses here are red ones; a red thread is a powerful karmic talisman in Japan and East Asia. With these threads, she weaves performances, body art, and installations in a protean process, exploring temporality, movement, memory, and dreams that demand mental and physical involvement from the viewer.
The artist states: “Usually, the visitor moves through my installations. But creating for the stage requires completely different conditions. For the stage, I must create for the performer, they interact with their environment and the audience watches from afar. I am drawing in the air with thread, and for the stage, I have created everything out of lines. During the opera, the dancers will move and pull the rope and change the line in the space, they can make everything disappear or create an entire ocean. Everything is created from this material. This is the first time I have worked with the thread like this, it is active during the opera and will move around. It has a mind of its own. This is only possible because of the dancers. I cannot do this in the museum. Everything is quiet and calm in the museum, but the stage design is restless. In my artwork, the string is like an extension of a brush stroke from the canvas but on stage, the string is everything. I create the space, the ocean, and nature with this material.”
