Minnanotenohanashi

Waterman

Inclusive performance ‘Minnano Teno Hanashi’ which translates ‘1000 hands story’ in Japanese, gave opportunity for people to take part in collective creation of live poetry making. Taking the idea from method of co-drawing invented by surrealist in the 1920s called ‘cadavre exquis’, in which one will draw an image on a paper, fold the paper to conceal what is drawn and pass the paper to another to resume the drawing, the performance was a poetry version of ‘cadavre exquis’. Staged at department store in Tokyo, a week-long event brought in general public to take part in no-script unpredictable poetry creation by adding each of their own words and phrases to the ones that others have written. While the event was streamed online, tweets by online users from elsewhere also were passed onto the visitors on site to resume adding another words and phrases. The non-sense sentence making was creative way to mark how Waterman, pioneer in fountain pen creation, have built their identity not simply as a writing tool purveyor but as a creative brand.