Program Notes
Steven Kazuo Takasugi
Il Teatro Rosso (2025)
We began this project with two vintage performance venues in mind: La Sala Rossa and the Cinéma L’Amour, both theaters with womb-red, velvet decor, situated on St. Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, Quebec. There is the intuition that every theater’s interior itself has an interior somewhere, and this is no better said than with a red theater. It works like a subconscious: vague and floating and imaginary. The earth, too, seems to have a hidden interior: the vastness and depth of the sea.
The old master poets knew this, an obsession with a submerged existence touching the infinite, and they understood its connection with the child and childhood innocence. As all life began in the ocean, those creatures who were cast on to dry land always still have this longing to return home. It is the original nostalgia, nostos + algia : pain, longing for the homecoming. Our two poets, Edward Thomas and Giacomo Leopardi, both endured this yearning to return to the depth of that sweet, fetal interiority, that amniotic, watery world, but now only made possible by a gentle drowning, by sweet disaster, a surrender to the current, to the waves, a most intentional and welcome shipwreck that brings us finally home. But bitter and grouchy old men never get there, nor believe in any of it.
—Steven Kazuo Takasugi
For Il Teatro Rosso, I wanted to create a timeless visual universe for the musicians of NO HAY BANDA to inhabit. Unrestrained colors, theatrical stagings, and video fragments. The musicians are the cast, performing Takasugi’s musical epic from a vaudevillian showroom. The result is a ‘visual soundtrack’ which follows the music, an inversion of the relationship between film and film score. The images contained in this film are woven into a fictional world both familiar and remote, nostalgic but askew. Our world is a ‘red theater’—but when we pull back the curtain, what will we see?
—Huei Lin, video artist
