All this Ballroom talk's got me all reminiscent.
Twenty three and working in Japan at the beginning of my Corporate Clown period.
The year was [mumble-mumble]. The first major undersea cables had gone online linking Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. With great clarity it was named the H-J-K submarine cable system.
To celebrate, the most famous and largest Ballroom in Japan was rented. The Peacock Ballroom at the Ginza Tokyo Imperial Hotel.
The Imperial Hotel was founded in 1890, then redesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1915 and 1923, and reimagined again in the period 1968–1970s.
The Imperial Hotel, Ginza, Tokyo
It's like if opulent and swanky had a baby and force-fed it superfluity.
[today's word on my education channel]
With stilts over my shoulder, I walked in through the front door.
I asked for a clown-nose in the lobby in my rider.
The Peacock Ballroom
The hotel's flagship event space is the Peacock Ballroom — Kujaku Hall.
The full room runs to about 2,400 m², subdivisible into West, East, and South blocks, each with ceilings around 6.2 m high.
Banquet or standing, it seats several hundred or subsumes over 3,000.
The Peacock Ballroom, full configuration
Two of the three subdivisions — same room
Performance · The Brief
- Representing Hong Kong.
- A short raised platform, roughly 12 ft / 3 metres square — contained, observable, safe.
- Three such platforms in three corners of the room, each presenting a celebratory exhibit for one of each nation.
- One-metre peg stilts. Height: somewhere between 11 and 12 feet.
- White face. American WW2 flying helmet.
- Dancing with unselfconscious abandon to Iggy Pop.
- Two or three twenty-minute sets.
I knew it was incongruous. I was surrounded by titans of industry in the highest-status ballroom in the country, dancing to music I enjoyed — because much like Hong Kong and undersea cables, I too was the future.
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