In a Memory Palace

In a Memory Palace is a profound meditation on displacement: both the physical displacement of refugees, immigrants, and others who make new lives far from their original homes, and the temporal displacement of fragmented memories. In the shifting rooms of the Memory Palace, love and regret, fear and hope emerge and recede, driven by a single deep desire: to have one’s story heard.

Drawing on her own family history, playwright Edith Newton tells the story of Hedwig Müller, a couturier who catered to Viennese high society in the interwar period and who, with Hitler’s rise, fled to the United States with her Jewish husband. Comprised of two acts and an interlude, the work is set in interwar Vienna and a nursing home in the present-day US. It draws heavily on the literary form and otherworldly quality of noh, where characters can simultaneously exist in a real place and time and, sometimes even more intensely, in the phantom world of memory.

The music of In a Memory Palace, co-composed by TN members David Crandall and Kevin Salfen, moves fluidly between the spare, intense stillness of noh and the opulence of late 19th- and early 20th-century Viennese concert music. Scored for the four instruments of the traditional noh ensemble as well as piano, cello and piccolo, it is itself a cross-cultural odyssey that reflects and enhances the multiple, fragmented worlds of Newton’s text.

Visually, the work will be an aesthetic feast, with masks by long-time TN collaborator Hideta Kitazawa and costumes by Margaret Mitchell. The work will be directed by TN member Jubilith Moore, with music direction by Kevin Salfen.

Preliminary costume designs by Margaret Mitchell

Mae-shite mask by Kitazawa Hideta

Mask courtesy of Kitazawa Hideta; mask image ©2022 Kitazawa Sohta

In a Memory Palace is perhaps the most ambitious project TN has ever undertaken, with two distinct developmental phases.

Phase 1 culminates in a live performance, and Phase 2 in a performance/installation, with audience members moving through four rooms of the Palace: the Gate, the Nursing Home, the Train Station/Design Shop, and Vienna in Splendor.

Phase 2 involves collaboration with the communities where In a Memory Palace will be performed, inviting audience members to contribute their stories of migration in sound and image to create an ever richer trove of communal memory.

Our first in-person rehearsal was held at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas in January 2023:

Principal Project Participants

DAVID CRANDALL (Co-Composer, Performer) holds a double degree in Music Composition and Japanese Language & Literature from the University of Michigan. In 1986 he was admitted to the Hōshō Noh Theater as an apprentice and worked as a professional noh performer in Tokyo for five years. Crandall’s Western-style compositions have been performed by marimbist Keiko Abe and by the Tokyo Quintet (JUGGLER and YAVANNA). He has composed short film scores (NIGHTERS and CRIME AND PUNISHMENT) and written the words and music for three children’s musicals (JOHNNY THE KING, THE MERCHANT OF CHEAT STREET, THE MOON ROBE).  His noh-based work includes the words and music for two original English-language noh plays (CRAZY JANE and THE LINDEN TREE), and music for Carrie Preston’s ZAHDI DATES AND POPPIES, Elizabeth Dowd’s GETTYSBURG, and David Surtasky’s EVENTIDE. Crandall also co-wrote the script and composed the music for a short film titled WIND WELL directed and co-written by James Cook, which was released in 2021.

KRISTIN JACKSON (Performer) is a Philippine-Irish-American choreographer born and raised in Manila. She has performed with Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians and the Broadway and National productions of THE KING AND I. Her company, Kristin Jackson Dance, was formed in 1990. Her dances for KJD along with choreography for theater, film and opera have been seen in both New York and Manila. A highlight of her creative work inspired by Noh theater was a multimedia collaboration with Nagasaki composer Keiko Fujiie, based on stories told by their and other families of the Japanese occupation in the Philippines. Ongoing studies in Noh theater have continued to inspire her work both as a choreographer and performer. Jackson holds a M.F.A. in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has served on the dance faculties of NYU and Queens College of the City University of New York. She received a Fulbright Scholar award in 2002 to teach at the University of the Philippines.

HIDETA KITAZAWA (Mask Maker) is second-generation woodcarving artist from Tokyo. An affiliated artist with Theatre Nohgaku, he designed and carved new masks for Theatre Nohgaku’s performances of PINE BARRENS, CRAZY JANE, PAGODA, the WHERE RIVERS MEET project, ZAHDI DATES AND POPPIES, BLUE MOON OVER MEMPHIS, GETTYSBURG, BETWEEN THE STONESs, PHOENIX FIRE, and THE NIGHTSONG OF ORPHEUS. His workshops and exhibitions have been held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Peking University; Central Academy for Drama, Beijing; East-West Center Gallery in Honolulu; Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas; and San Antonio’s Central Library, among many others. He has received numerous awards, including the Outstanding Youth Artesian Award for Tokyo 1997 and the Yokohama Noh Drama Hall Director's Prize in 2003. His carvings of Shinto floats and o-mikoshi sacred palanquins are in current use throughout Japan's Kanto area, and his masks are used extensively by a number of noh and kyogen professionals.

DR. ARA KOH (Pianist) has been a faculty member at UIW since 2013, giving piano lessons, teaching class piano, coordinating the piano seminar and accompanying the Cardinal Chorale. She has appeared in prestigious concert halls across the world as a soloist and collaborative pianist. She has performed in venues including Taipei National Art Center in Taiwan, Se-Jong Art Center and Gyonggi Art Center in Korea, Conservatoire Frédéric Chopin in France and Tobin Center in San Antonio. Koh frequently appears in various contemporary ensemble concerts including new music and composers’ concerts such as CASA. As an active collaborative pianist, she is often invited to perform at state and national conferences, including those for the Music Teachers National Association, the College Music Society and National Association of Composers. While a student she won the Fine Art Scholarship, CSULB University Concerto Competition, Aspen Festival Scholarship and PSU Graduate Research Exhibition Competition. Koh has received awards from The Music Teacher's Association of California for Solo Competition and the Piano Ensemble Festival and is in demand as an adjudicator working with local, state, and national competitions.

MARGARET MITCHELL (Costume Designer) as designed costumes and scenery professionally for over 30 years, and she is a Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, TX. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and has designed professionally across the USA and in New Zealand. Mitchell's design work has represented the United States at the Prague Quadrennial three times and has been exhibited at World Stage Design. In the past year her costumes and costume designs have been included in exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio and at El Centro Nacional a Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Mitchell’s costume designs are published in Rebecca Cunningham's book, THE MAGIC GARMENT, and in Brockett and Ball's THE ESSENTIAL THEATRE. Her costume designs are included in the permanent collection of the Robert L. B. Tobin Theatre Arts Collection at the McNay Art Museum.

JUBILITH MOORE (Director, Performer) is a performer, director, writer, teaching artist and producer. A graduate of Bard College, she has devoted her professional career to exploring the ongoing life of traditional Japanese and contemporary American theatre.  She is a Founding Company Member of Theatre Nohgaku and was Artistic Director of Theatre of Yugen from 2001 to 2014. Her many roles have included the waki in the world première productions of Greg Giovanni’s PINE BARRENS Jannette Cheong's PAGODA, and her BETWEEN THE STONES. She played the spirit of Elvis in Deborah Brevoort's BLUE MOON OVER MEMPHIS. She directed Carrie Preston’s ZAHDI DATES AND POPPIES as well as 2015 Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla’s SONG OF THE YANAGUANA RIVER. Moore has been honored with The Ana Itelman Prize for Performance and The Carter Tobin Prize. Her production of PURGATORY won the Best Ensemble award at the 2001 LUNAEA Festival. She has been the recipient of a Japan Foundation Fellowship and Theatre Communication Group’s Future Collaborations and Leadership University grant.

EDITH NEWTON (Playwright) is a writer based in San Francisco.  She is the author of IN A MEMORY PALACE, the IN A MEMORY PALACE blog, the ON THE BRIDGEWAY blog, and a novel entitled STILL SHOTS OF A BIRD IN FLIGHT.  Her first exposure to Noh was reading THE ONLY JEALOUSY OF EMER, a Noh-inspired play by William Butler Yeats, while a student at UC Berkeley in the mid 1970s.  That experience led to a lifelong interest in Noh and in Classical Japanese literature more generally.  Edith has studied Noh utai (singing) with Masayuki Fujii and David Crandall.  She studies kana calligraphy, the style of brush writing used by women of the Japanese Heian period, with Sakiko Yanagisawa.  Edith is the daughter of immigrants who fled Vienna after the “Anchluss,” the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938.

KAYU OMURA (Kotsuzumi) is a kotsuzumi shoulder drum player of the Kō school. Daughter of Kita school shite actor Sadamu Omura, she was exposed to noh at a young age and began taking kotsuzumi lessons in high school. She entered Tokyo University of Arts in the noh division specializing in kotsuzumi and graduated in 2009. In addition to her busy noh performance schedule, Omura teaches drumming in the Tokyo area and has appeared in such fusion works as the English noh OPPENHEIMER in Sydney, Australia, the opera-ballet-noh collaboration OPPOSITE-INVERSE in London, and the noh-chamber opera KAYOI KOMACHI / KOMACHI VISITED in Vancouver, Canada. She performed with Theatre Nohgaku in their 2018 national tour of BLUE MOON OVER MEMPHIS, their 2019 premiere production of EMILY in London, and their 2019 East Coast GETTYSBURG tour in 2019.

KEVIN SALFEN (Co-Composer, Music Director, Performer) is Associate Professor of Music at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. He has degrees in composition and musicology from the University of North Texas. His work on Benjamin Britten has been widely published, and he has presented at a wide variety of conferences on topics ranging from British music to animé. Salfen became a member of Theatre Nohgaku in 2011, and his performances with them include the Marksman in the première of ZAHDI DATES AND POPPIES and the chorus leader and music director for GETTYSBURG. An award-winning composer, Salfen’s music has been performed in England, China, and throughout the U.S. He wrote the music for 2015 Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla’s SONG OF THE YANAGUANA RIVER, part of the outreach-performance project WHERE RIVERS MEET, for which he also acted as executive producer. Salfen’s NEW YEAR CANTICLES was performed in July 2016 at the National Cathedral.

MIKIKO UESUGI (Set Designer), a scenic designer based in San Francisco, has designed many dozens of productions that include: OUR PRACTICAL HEAVEN for Aurora Theatre Company; BODY FAMILIAR for The Magic Theatre and DROWNING IN CAIRO for Golden Thread Productions. She has also designed for Deborah Slater Dance Theater, Traveling Jewish Theatre, ODC, Campo Santo + Intersection, Make *A* Circus, Exit Theatre, Theatre of Yugen, Marin Theater Company, Crowded Fire Theater, TheatreWorks, ACT M.F.A. program, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Chanticleer among others. Uesugi's industrial and TV projects include: The Golden Ring Awards for Asian American Arts Foundation as production designer and Nash Bridges as a set designer. In addition, she has assisted the scenic designers Loy Arcenas, Neil Patel, Richard Hudson, Robert Brill, Kate Edmunds, Eric E. Sinkkonen and Yukio Horio. She is a recipient of the 1998-2000 National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Program for Designers, the Dean Goodman Choice Award and the Isadora Duncan Dance Award.