JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY IS THE TOPIC OF A LECTURE-DEMONSTRATION AT BARD COLLEGE ON TUESDAY, MARCH 5
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.?The Japanese program at Bard College is offering a lecture-demonstration on the subject of Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) on Tuesday, March 5. The program will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building and is free and open to the public.
Gustav Heldt, Henry R. Luce Jr. Professor of Asian Studies and assistant professor of Japanese at Bard, will provide an introduction about the history and significance of the ceremony. Michiko Suzuki Baribeau, Japanese language tutor at Bard, and one of her colleagues, Hideko Coon, will then provide a demonstration of the ceremony without narrative, followed by a presentation to three Bard students, with explanation for the audience.
The tea ceremony is an aesthetic discipline that elevates the mundane activity of drinking tea to a spiritual discipline. This ceremony has been intertwined with the practice of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Each act of preparation and drinking of the powdered green tea, known as matcha, has a ceremonial aspect, with the goal to purify one's soul and become one with nature. All aspects?the location and decoration of the room, utensils, and the presentation?are reflective of this aesthetic.
Baribeau has been a teacher of Japanese in the Hudson Valley for several years and is a licensed instructor in the tea ceremony and ikebana. Several of her tanka poems (the classical Japanese 31-syllable verse form) were recently published last October.
For further information, call 845-758-6822.
# # #
(2.4.02)