Through the wavy old glass, I could see into a garden that had been designed to draw my eyes up through the moss and trees to the “borrowed scenery” of the mountains that ringed the city. I didn’t understand what the kimono-clad woman sitting on the floor across from me was doing, but I gladly accepted the bowl of foamy green tea and the confections that looked like cherries, felt like marzipan, and tasted like sweet cream. I was seated upstairs in an exquisite room built in the early 20th century, whose architects had incorporated an exotic Western element-glass-into the traditional combination of shoji windows and tatami floors. I first saw a tea ceremony performed in 1998, at a teahouse in Kyoto. And, then as now, I loved tea: my college best friend and I held a tea every Friday afternoon, a practice I continue with massive annual tea parties in Central Park. How did you come to be interested in Japan and tea ceremony?Ī: If I had known that Japanese tea ceremony was a living art, I probably would have studied it in college: I grew up with my mother’s enthusiasm for Japan and majored in Performance Studies, a cross-cultural mix of anthropology, theater, and religion. A Conversation with Ellis Avery about The Teahouse Fire
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