Word: flower
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...have a distinct style of their own. Its originator was the great Danish choreographer, August Bournonville (1805-1879), and a dash of Bournonville was what the balletasters came to Jacob's Pillow for. In two pieces, the dancing lesson called "Konservatoriet" and the pas de deux from the "Flower Festival in Genzano," they found it-gay, pretty romanticism instead of the drawn-steel tension of the Diaghilev tradition, verve and enthusiasm instead of icy perfection. Surprise of the program was a snippet from Coppélia, choreographed in 1896 by Danish Hans Beck after the French ballet-master, Saint...
...famous flower arranger known professionally as Wafu (Gentle Breeze), young Teshigahara was arranging flowers at four, at 14 often replaced his father in classes, as a teen-ager plowed through the Chinese classics. But at 26, Teshigahara, who had chosen as his ikebana name Sofu (Cool Green Breeze), decided to strike out on his own. What Sofu did was as shocking to the classicists as pounding out madrigals to a boogie-woogie beat. The central canon of ikebana for centuries has been Ten-Chi-Jin (Heaven-Earth-Man), where heaven is symbolized by the tall central flower...
Young Sofu began by calling his new approach the Grass Moon School, often dispensed with such traditional props as water vases and bamboo tubes, using instead a tiny flower or bud stuck in an empty lipstick container, the cap off a toothpaste tube or an empty perfume bottle. Sofu even went so far as to dye flowers, incorporate red bird feathers, use dried grass, withered leaves and dead flowers. A current popular Sofu arrangement: a dead lotus pod with a purple delphinium...
...Wives. Sofu's revolution was just beginning to win converts when World War II put an end to such civilized luxuries as flower exhibitions. Sofu kept on practicing his art in private; then the B-29s which knocked out Tokyo demolished the Grass Moon School building. Sofu's postwar comeback owed much to Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, who, Sofu says, "had a good basic understanding of the nature of Japanese flower arrangement." Some 6,000 U.S. occupation-force wives took up Sofu's style; about 400 of them earned the Grass Moon certificate, are qualified to teach...
Today Sofu's books on flower arranging sell as fast as they come off the presses. A Sofu exhibit at Tokyo's Takashimaya department store earlier this year sold 35,000 admission tickets in advance. With some half-million followers in Japan making up Japan's second largest flower arranging school,* Sofu now thinks he can afford to ignore the criticism of traditionalists who grumble that "Sofu has taken the soul out of ikebana." In reply Sofu simply quotes his own Grass Moon motto: "Always look forward to a fresh and vivid world and do not become...