On 19 April 2023, for the occasion of Milan’s Salone del Mobile, Edra’s guests were welcomed into the Teatro alla Scala Opera House for an evening dedicated to Masanori Umeda and his Flowers Collection. Art projects are born of the heart, of encounters, of dreams and of visions. This is how it is with music and dance, and so it is with certain objects: these gifts given by artists to their public. For Edra this is how it was with Masanori Umeda’s Flowers Collection. In 1990 the Master took great care to bring the company two small maquette models, delicate flower-shaped armchairs, one a lily and one a rose, containing all the enchantment of his garden at home in Japan, on the night of a full moon. Edra fell in love with them, and soon after the Rose Chair and Getsuen (Japanese for “garden under a full moon”) were born. The evening dedicated to Masanori was therefore a homage both to nature and to human culture, an opportunity to be immersed in the essence of these worlds through the beauty of the encounter between flowers, musical notes and bodies in movement, in a sequence of musical scores, choreographies and backdrops, creating a synergic dialogue between the classical and the contemporary. Protagonists of the evening were the young students of La Scala Academy Dance School and Orchestra, under the direction of David Coleman, all with talents to cultivate and grow like precious flowers. The evening’s program, curated for the occasion by Teatro alla Scala, opened on a fresh note with a divertissement from La fille mal gardée, a ballet authored by Director of the academy’s dance department Frédéric Olivieri with a score by Peter Ludwig Hertel, for students of the School. It is a comique ballet, a pantomime, belonging to a genre that arose during the French Revolution, and that tells of a love story set in the countryside in a series of unexpected but decisive events that are also highly entertaining. With the second piece we moved into the contemporary in Largo: garden with a full moon from a concept by Matteo Levaggi created to the notes of Suite n. 1 in G major for solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach and performed by Sofia Bellettini. The evocative scenery was the work of artist Samantha Stella. Levaggi explains how the “Largo is divided into three different moments that highlight the forms and movements of contemporary feeling while making use of classical dance vocabulary.” In homage to Masanori Umeda an essential and abstract visual installation on-stage recreated the “garden with full moon” to great effect. Getsuen seating in the form of a lily was included in a long line of Rose Chair armchairs standing out against their grey background, and forming, as Stella describes, “an ancient arcade of columns watched over by modern Vestals. The dancers move sinuously to the notes of Bach and ancestral rhythm of the cello. The Vestals stand motionless, adorned with elements symbolising the history of La Scala, and weaving a timeless painting.

We are bathed in the moon’s intense white light. Rite comes to fulfilment”. The performance ended with the dreamlike atmosphere of one of the best-known pieces in the Russian Romantic repertoire, The Nutcracker Suite. The ballet was choreographed for students of the Academy’s dance school by Frédéric Olivieri in 2011 to the music of Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij. The folk tale’s enchantment was recreated on stage in the delicate, elegant choreography, not without technical and interpretative complexities that highlighted the skill of gifted young dancers in the Pas de deux of act one and act two’s renowned Waltz of the Flowers. Fairy-tale costumes by Roberta Guidi di Bagno completed the atmosphere. Masanori’s daughter Nanaé was the evening’s guest of honour, and took the stage to represent her father. Dressed in a beautiful kimono, with the delicacy that distinguishes the people of the Rising Sun, she read the words of Masanori Umeda.

To be unique. To give birth to things so they might have value forever.

After many years, having met Monica and Valerio, I discovered that we had an immediate and shared understanding almost never expressed in so many words. Before 1990 no one believed in my Flowers Collection. It was my destiny to meet Valerio and Monica, who chose immediately to create the Getsuen and the Rose Chair, and these, over the years, have become truly great classics. Every time I met the Mazzeis, was like standing before figures who stepped from a painting, their faces from antiquity, their bearing, their rhythms, that I have never seen elsewhere. The story of the Mazzei and Edra is like a story from the Renaissance. A story of seductive wide-winged protagonists, anacondas, and white bears, of glittering grottos and water springs and many women with Italian names. I like to think that my Flowers are part of this scenic backdrop. I believe that in the story of Edra, to be an author is only a small role in the midst of the entire theatre. The theatre curtain opens thanks to all of those who realise the project, give it a voice, and make it known, so that many people in the world may experience it and appreciate it with pleasure. To all of them.

Thank you from my heart.

Masanori Umeda