Our Planet

ext : Midori Goto

The evening of day one, we invited HOO, a group of two “landscape and food” female designers/performers, as special guests to perform a dinner and storytelling workshop at Yamanoko with a theme of “the tale of mountains and space”.
“Everything had started from a small speck in the sky” -as the tale of the beginning of space was told, dishes with distinctive titles such as “a speck in the beginning” and “soup of elementary particles” are served. It was a fresh and magical moment to experience the very beginning of this world with all our five senses at a dinner table.
The performance by HOO reminded me of Our Aspirations, one of them in which states “What we wish for…children with an awareness that they live on Earth”. By this we mean that we aspire to make children become humans with an awareness of the fact that they are a part of one big cycle of nature, rather than such images as so-called “global citizens”. As I sat at the table and relished one of the dishes called “stardust” that partied in my mouth like fragments of sparkling stars, I came to realise that we are also a part of many tales that are told in this land -just like how the history of outer space has always been from billions of years ago.
The other story that was told in the performance was “The fox and the pond snail visit Haguro”, the local folklore of Tsuruoka. I was happy to see many smiles of the participants to hear the tale told in Shonai dialect, mentioning many familiar names of places. After the folklore, a special “mountain” themed bento filled with local Shonai food was served as the final dish of the night.