The Seven Streams of the River Ota

The Seven Streams of the River Ota The Seven Streams of the River Ota. By Robert Lepage and Ex Machina, Québec. Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York. 14 December 1996.

In 1994, Robert Lepage and his Québec-based company, Ex Machina, set out to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The result has been touring international festivals since August 1994, when a three-hour version debuted at Edinburgh. The complete (if changing) eight-hour version of the The Seven Streams of the River Ota arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December. As an epic and epochal theatre work, The Seven Streams of the River Ota can be compared with Nicholas Nickleby, Angels in America, The Mahabharata, and Einstein on the Beach. In terms of its commercial appeal, its resort to narrative, its provocation to thought, and its visual conception, The River Ota belongs somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

The Seven Streams of the River Ota begins with a brief ritual. Jana Capek, a Czech Jew who survived a Nazi concentration camp, has given up a career as a renowned avant-garde photographer to enter a Zen monastery in Hiroshima. Samurai sword in hand, head shaved, she intones, "The only adversary is yourself. To cut the ego with the sword is the ultimate combat" (The Seven Streams of the River Ota [London: Metheun, 1996], 1). The other adversary in Lepage's mesmerizing magnum opus is history-specifically, the history and holocausts of the last half-century. Hiroshima, where the seven streams of the River Ota meet, comes to represent a place of healing; it is a city of death and destruction transformed into one of rebirth and survival. Its spirit rising from the ashes is explicitly symbolized by a magnificent white wedding kimono emblazoned with a brilliant golden phoenix. It is both the figure and, in one stunning sequence near the end, the ground of transformation.

The kimono first appears in the first act, "Moving Pictures," when Nozomi Yamashita, a disfigured survivor of the atom bomb, is visited shortly after the war by an American GI photographer named Luke O'Connor. His mission is to document the bomb damage to buildings and property in the now occupied Japan. When she asks him to turn his camera...