Struggling with Shoka

What you see below is my current assignment. My teacher asked me to do an arrangement of spring branches, in this case, crab apple. The assigned form is shoka shofutai, or classic shoka. What you don't see below is the mess. I started on Monday; this is Tuesday. The floor is covered with spilled water, crab apple petals,  discarded branches, and pieces of my confidence. Yesterday I thought I had it finished. Funny how I think that until I need to photograph it to send to my teacher (see earlier post about an unusual way of studying ikenobo). As soon as I look at what I've done through the lens of my Canon, I suddenly see glaring problems I hadn't noticed before.

Now here's where the mess really starts. I have what I think is a completed, photographable arrangement, the water is all nice and clean as it's supposed to be, the stems are all lined up shoka-proper as best I can manage, BUT omg, all of a sudden, it looks absurd. So I have to start pulling out stems and replacing them with new ones, and the petals shower down all into the water and around me, and the stems I think I did manage to place correctly now fall over, and everything's all wrong.

 At this point I could give up, but what keeps me going is practicality. Today I have the flowers. If I give up, I may not be able to get more at this stage of bloom. So I have to do it NOW. I keep working to find the right shapes and insert them in the right places. I use a little strainer to remove all the fallen petals floating on the water surface (I think they're kinda pretty that way, but ikenobo says NO, the water must be clean). So I tidy up, and then I notice that I should have trimmed off some stubs of stems. I hate to touch anything again, lest it all come apart, but I take my scissors and snip off the stubs. It all comes apart again, petals raining, stems falling over. I knew it.

If you are asking yourself, why is it important to get it just so, I wonder that, too. But then I remember that I'm trying to learn how to create with a certain aesthetic. I don't have to do this. I could arrange flowers free-style and do it however I wish. But shoka, when done properly, offers a unique kind of serene beauty, and the only way I can learn to achieve that, I suppose, is by losing my own serenity in the process.

Boston Event, Part 2, Inspirations and Delights

Above is a rikka arrangement on exhibit at the Boston Ikenobo Anniversary Celebration earlier this month. (For introductory information about the event, please go back to the last post.) This rikka arrangement and the next one below were created for the celebration by contemporary ikenobo teachers in the ancient,

traditional styles, recreating historic arrangements. One of the inspiring moments for me as an ikenobo novice was simply standing and looking at these magnificent, monumental creations bringing to life an art form hundreds of years old. (It helped, too, that a fellow participant standing beside me had witnessed the construction of the above rikka and was revealing the secrets of putting together such an amazing arrangement. First stop: Home Depot.)

In fact, what made me want to learn the ikenobo style from the very beginning was seeing in San Francisco at the Ikenobo USA headquarters a rikka arrangment on display, which before I had seen only in old pictures. Their complex, sculptural, tree-like qualities appeal to me very much. I know rikka is a form difficult to master, and I'm eager to progress to the point that I can begin to learn it.

Even more inspiring to me in Boston was the full day of workshops. Because I've only been studying ikenobo for about a year, I was placed in the shoka/free-style workshop. In the morning we heard a lecture on shoka shofutai, the classic, traditional form of shoka and then attempted our own shoka arrangements. After lunch we listened to our professor from Japan, Professor Kobayashi, explain what free-style arrangements are all about and then, again, tried our best to create them.

This was a wonderful opportunity because I've been studying via email, photographs, and phone calls with a teacher in Colorado (I live Albuquerque, New Mexico). I hadn't seen shoka in the flesh (other than my own attempts), only photographs and drawings.  I had also never experienced a professionally taught workshop in ikenobo before. It was exciting to watch the carts of gorgeous flowers, some of which I had never had the opportunity to lay hands on, arriving in a corridor of the Back Bay Events Center where our workshop was to take place:  brilliant bird-of-paradise flowers, sunflowers, large satiny green leaves, and then later, stems of stunning helleconia, white orchids, palm fronds. I was nervous about what the professor might say about my arrangements as he went from table to table, looking at everyone's work, making large and small corrections, but I was also anxious to hear the in-person comments of an expert teacher from the source of ikebana, Japan.

 

I was also delighted by the unexpected. I knew that ikebana originated in a religious setting and has great spiritual significance. But I was surprised to find that it also includes competition and game-playing. On the first day of the celebration, the audience was allowed to see a ceremony apparently rarely performed that involved competition. It's called the mawari-ike ceremony and was established by Senjo Ikenobo in 1806 to improve skills through competition. Each competitor created an arrangement quickly, and then a judge selected the best.

 

Shoka arrangement in mawari-ike ceremony

The many Japanese teachers of ikenobo who accompanied Headmaster Sen'ei Ikenobo and his family to Boston definitely displayed playfulness and a sense of humor. A group of them performed a comic game for us, which reassured me that all is not seriousness in the art of ikenobo. The game involved a group of arrangements in progress before an audience. A bunch of teachers would come on stage, each bearing a leaf or flower from his or her favorite plant, and then be hit with the surprise task: use that leaf or flower for one of the named parts of a rikka arrangement not known to them beforehand. So one by one, each group would have to struggle to insert their usually inappropriate plant parts into ongoing rikka arrangements while we in the watching audience laughed at their efforts. It was very funny, but more than that, it demonstrated to me that all of us could take a lighthearted and undignified approach to their honorable ancient art form.

Ikenobo Anniversary Event in Boston, March 2013

 Boston hosted a very special ikebana Event (yes, that's with a capital E) last week, and I'm glad I was there, along with hundreds of other ikenobo teachers and learners, Japanese and American. The Fairmont Hotel, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Back Bay Event Center were filled with a bilingual hubbub, spectacular flowers and arrangements, solemn ceremonial and memorial moments, and laughter, too, during games and workshops.

Rikka workshop

First, a brief explanation. This blog is about ikebana--Japanese flower arranging, which has a long history and great cultural importance in Japan--and how learning it has opened a door into the world of Japan for me. I began learning about ikebana in a general sense in 2010 and then about a year ago also began studying a particular style of ikebana, ikenobo. (See previous posts for more on this subject.)

Rikka workshop

 

Ikenobo is the oldest style of Japanese flower arranging, proclaiming its 550th anniversary of recorded history in 2012. Just recently the headquarters of ikenobo in the United States in San Francisco also commemorated its 45th anniversary. Both anniversaries were celebrated in Boston this month--hence the Event. Boston was selected because it is the sister city to Kyoto, where the headquarters of ikenobo in Japan is located.

From the right: Ikenobo family, Sen'ei Ikenobo, Yuki Ikenobo, and Masafumi Ikenobo 

 

Memorial ceremonial arrangement

sunanomono rikka arrangement

The ikenobo headmaster, Sen'ei Ikenobo, known as the iemoto, and his daughter Yuki, his designated successor, traveled to Boston for the three-day celebration, accompanied by many Japanese teachers and students.On the agenda for the Event were two days of ceremonies and one full day of workshops. Among the ceremonies was a memorial on March 11 to the thousands who lost their lives in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan exactly two years before. The workshops were taught by Japanese professors in the three particular forms of ikenobo: rikka, shoka, and free-style. Rikka is the oldest and most difficult to master of the forms.

To the left is my effort at shoka shofutai, the classic original form of shoka. Below is my effort at free style, which is actually more challenging for me because there are no set rules to follow--the arranger is free to style it as he or she wishes, while keeping in mind the basic tenets of ikebana.

Happy New Year, Japanese style

In Japan the New Year is greeted with celebration and good wishes, just as it is in the USA, but the displays and decorations are quite different. Instead of having New Year's symbolized primarily by champagne glasses, Times Square, and confetti, in Japan one sees floral arrangements known as kadomatsu. Though these arrangements differ greatly in size, color, and ornamental additions, they traditionally include three plants--pine, bamboo, and plum (branches). If you google the word kadomatsu and then look at the images a search will bring up, you can see the enormous variety of the kadomatsu displays.


"According to Iwao Nagasaki, curator of textiles at the Tokyo National Museum, many patterns that first came from China...acquired unique meaning to Japanese over the years." The Chinese thought the grouping of these three plants "just symbolized the innocence of three good friends in winter: bamboo, which never breaks, the pine, which stays green all year, and the plum, which blooms while it's still frosty. One thousand years after the pattern entered Japan...this trio of plants became auspicious." * In other words, this popular arrangement of the three plant friends in Japan has become a physical, floral wish for good fortune in the coming year, particularly for strength, longevity, and the ability to flourish in spite of adversity.

The arrangement you see above is my first attempt to put these three plants together in a shoka design (a particular type of ikenobo arrangement) especially for New Year's. The bare stem to the left is ornamental purple-leaf plum (Prunus cerasifera). If I had access to plum branches in Japan, they might already have burgeoning buds on them in that milder, moister climate. Unfortunately, here in drought-stricken, high-altitude New Mexico where the temperatures are well below freezing, the plum is just a branch with buds waiting for warmer days still a month or two away. The plant in the center is a cold-hardy bamboo I grow in a container, located right now on my back porch with a furniture blanket wrapped around its feet. It's a Fargesia 'Rufa.' I've trimmed many of the bunches of leaves off of it in the interest of a more sculptural shape, one of the techniques of ikebana. The plant to the right is pine, an ornamental that was planted in my neighborhood, not necessarily native.

A traditional kadomatsu arrangement is usually placed outside the door of a home or other building. The plants are often arranged in a rustic-looking container with a special rope called shimakezari and a shide design attached. So, my three friends above are arranged in a container that is a hollowed-out mulberry branch from my yard (I always save some of what the arborists remove from my trees). A neighbor who is a woodworker hollowed enough of the tough wood out so that I could use it for an ikebana container. I've wrapped natural twine around the container several times and hung my own crudely homemade version of shide, a zigzag design often found on Shinto shrines and other places or objects sacred to Shinto. The result is an ikenobo ikebana version of a New Year's display that is older even than ikebana itself, a display that extends a millennium back into Japanese history and the introduction of Buddhism into the country.

I like the idea of beginning my new year with such an ancient tradition rooted in the natural world. Happy New Year to you!

*This quote comes from Singer, Jane. (1995). "Meaningful Motifs: Japanese Patterns and Designs." Ikebana International Vol. 39, No. 2: 8-16.