Dreamed Japan
Images of the Floating World
A creation Danny Rose - L. Frigola, C. Péri, S. Carrubba, P. Ciucci
From July 7 to August 30, 2025
‘Dreamed Japan, Images of the Floating World’ offers visitors a journey into the Japan of the collective imagination—the Japan of the geishas, samurai warriors, and spirits. This production was inspired by the Japanese prints that began to circulate in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, when trade opened up between the West and Japan.
The discovery of Japanese art had a profound effect on Western art: the painting of the Impressionists and the avant-garde artists, and also the decorative arts, music, and dance. Among them, van Gogh gave free reign to his interest in japonisme. This production by the Danny Rose Studio, which highlights van Gogh’s fascination with Japan, is a contemplative and audio journey into the environment of the masters of Japanese prints.
The ephemeral beauty of the cherry blossoms is replaced by a magical and mysterious forest inhabited by the ‘yokai’, the spirits of Japanese folklore, and then by the sea: Hokusai’s iconic great wave submerges the Atelier des Lumières accompanied by music by Claude Debussy
The faces of the charming geishas, dressed in their kimonos decorated with elegant and colourful motifs, emerge from behind the rice paper screens as in nature, where everything is about contrasts; after all this ethereal beauty, visitors are captivated by a samurai warrior dance and eventually brought back down and carried away by the wind, among the lanterns floating in the night sky.