Written by Laura Molzahn
Read the full article at Chicago Tribune
Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato, 96, has led a complicated life. And Melissa Thodos’ oneact about her had a complicated start, with a chance meeting years ago between Thodos Dance
Chicago’s board member Sharon Lear and Robert Karr, head of Project 120, whose job it is to revitalize Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side.
Lots of intertwined stories coalesced in Thodos’ new “Sono’s Journey.” But the bottom line was Osato’s Chicago upbringing. At 14, she auditioned for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo on the Auditorium stage — where Thodos’ premiere will be performed Saturday, with three company favorites, as part of the Auditorium’s “Made in Chicago” series. Osato left Chicago to join the Ballet Russe, then began dancing with American Ballet Theatre in New York; later still, she performed on Broadway and even did some film acting.
The year that Osato left Chicago, 1934, her parents became the caretakers of Jackson Park’s Japanese gardens and teahouse, a Tokyobuilt structure relocated and repurposed after debuting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. When Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, the Jackson Park teahouse and gardens were closed.
Thodos took an intuitive, organic approach to the many facets of Osato’s long life, she says. The beginning of the process was like “planting a seed, watering it in my mind.” Horticultural images also dominate when she describes Osato’s feelings about her art: “Dance enabled her to grow, like a garden, and flourish. It allowed her to face adversity.”
Osato encountered bias throughout her career because of her Japanese heritage, and after Pearl Harbor, her father was interned in Chicago. Meanwhile, on another continent, Thodos’ Greek mother faced violence and persecution in World War II Greece.
“I grew up hearing stories about war and extremes and difficulties,” Thodos says. “My mother lived through the Italian occupation, the Nazi occupation. When the Italians looted (their farm), they were a welloff family, so they lost a lot. When the Nazis came, they lost everything. Her oldest brother was in the Greek army, so they were able to get information just enough ahead to stay alive and keep going. She was at gunpoint twice.”
A firstgeneration GreekAmerican, Thodos grew up in a household where everyone ate Greek food and the kids got sent to Greek school. She compares the “cultural divide” to what’s depicted in the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”
She and Osato both experienced some cultural dissonance, but Thodos needed to research Japanese culture, which she did by talking to Osato, reading about it, and even studying Japanese traditional dance forms. “If I could feel how their bodies moved, I could find ways to articulate their culture,” Thodos says. “It’s all from the body for me. That helped inform the story and the choreography: There are points that are very specific and careful. Specificity, simplicity — like haiku, almost — found their way into the aesthetic.”
“Sono’s Journey” treats Osato’s life chronologically, though Thodos notes that she “did so much, I had to be selective or we’d be sitting there for three hours! As we did with Helen Keller (in Thodos’ 2013 ‘A Light in the Dark’), we picked a spot to end it. You have to set up the story in a way that everyone’s understood: Audiences will know why they are the way they are, though they don’t have to know everything. You want to leave some things open to interpretation.”
Thodos gave herself free rein on the music, specific to each scene and ranging from classical to music of the ’20s to contemporary. For a duet between Osato and her husband, for example, she used a Bach violin concerto that served her image of their connection.
“I loved choosing the music,” says Thodos. “But it took a long time.” Though she researched many pieces, she ended up using the music “that would continue to cycle through my head when I was thinking about a specific scene. Then I asked, ‘Does this match the sensibility? Will it carry the idea? What’s war? What’s romance? What’s loneliness?’ ” She describes her creative process as “messy, working on a lot of layers at once — but that’s not a bad thing! I try to keep it as open as possible.”
What really sets this particular historical project apart, she says, is “the opportunity to talk to Sono. At 96, she is still able to share her experience as an artist who’s lived this amazing life. That to me has been everything. When I’m feeling stuck — or just when I want to reinvigorate, I visit her.” Since the work’s inception, Thodos has met with Osato five times in New York, sometimes with project assistant Gary Chryst, a renowned former Joffrey dancer who worked with many of the same choreographers as Osato.
“I care about stories,” Thodos adds. “And I love that we as a dance company can tell stories, through this medium we share and love so much.”