MISSION
Matchaparty aims to provide the highest quality tea experience in the world. This requires:
STORY
Matchaparty is a ritual that brings the finest tea in the world into a setting for its complete enjoyment as a vehicle for self and interpersonal healing. With roots in the Japanese tea ceremony and corresponding American forms of aesthetic refinement, it is a cipher of performance art, social, and virtual reality exploration that resonates within a real time data system of health and wellness.
Matchaparty has come about through intense artistic collaboration on tea, ritual, and mindfulness since 2006:
JIMUCHA 自無茶
A Manual of Hospitality
Tameel Marshall and Alan Waxman
2006 - Akira Takemoto, Yabunouchi Tea Master, takes Alan Waxman to the tea hut Koan (篁庵/ Bamboo Thicket Lodge) within the Institute of Three Darknesses, Sangen'in Temple (三玄院) in Daitokuji (大徳寺/ Monastery of Great Virtue) in northern Kyoto. In a moment, while sitting in the darkness of the small hut, the master suddenly throws open a small window and a piercing beam of palpable light illuminates the reed mats and earthen walls. The room is transformed. In this light, Waxman decides to begin to study the way of tea.
2006 - Takemoto brings Waxman to share tea and sweets at the Yabunouchi tea palace (薮内 / Inside the Stirred Thicket) in southern Kyoto situated exactly half way between the massive monastic temples of Nishi Hongwanji and Higashi Hongwanji (西本願寺 and 東本願寺 / The Eastern and Western Root of Hope Temples).
2006 - Waxman begins study in Yabunouchi style tea ceremony under Takemoto-sensei.
"The master suddenly throws
open a small window"
2007 - While living in Osaka, Waxman begins study under Yabe Tsuneko, the high teacher of Yabunouchi. Every Thursday night he wanders the dark alleys of southern Kyoto to find the quiet and largely defunct Shimabara arts district. There he enters the half abandoned mansion of "Pure Gold" to join an exclusive group of tea masters and visiting students from across the Yabunouchi tea world.
"he enters the half abandoned mansion of "Pure Gold" to join an exclusive group of tea masters"
2008 - In Oregon, Waxman begins to contemplate an American tea ceremony and considers the role of interpersonal vehicles in allowing people to materialize fantasy with various outcomes. He reckons that whereas the Japanese tea hut and similar American ritual huts allow for transportation in collective imagination, scale, and time; the automobile, the great vehicle of American fantasy, manifests it in Cartesian distance at the cost of fossil fuels. He creates a carbon calculator that is widely used at that time. He begins to think critically about American parks and their access by automobile.
2009 - Waxman studies landscape architecture and zen in the top Rinzai Zen Monastery of Myoshinji (妙心寺/ The Monastery of the Wondrous Heart) in the Temple of the Great Heart, Daishin'in (大心院) under Ron Lovinger, Daisuke Yoshimura, and Taka Kawakami in Kyoto.
"whereas the Japanese tea hut allows for transportation in collective imagination, scale, and time; the automobile, the great vehicle of American fantasy, manifests it in Cartesian distance at the cost of fossil fuels"
2009 - Waxman moves to the Shimabara Art District in Kyoto, which has begun to become revitalized by Kojiro Adachi who has re-opened the famous Kinse Ryokan. Adachi sponsors Waxman to learn Yabunouchi tea ceremony and Sogetsu style Flower arrangement under Yabe-sensei in exchange for his teaching English lessons for neighborhood residents in the gilded rooms of Kinse.
2009 - Takasago Great Lord, an elite Shimabara geisha, the former "Queen Bee," befriend's Waxman and introduces him to her apprentices and clients at rituals in Kyoto.
2010 - "By the Crawl-through Gate Shimabara Sketchbook," a collection of portraits by Waxman of Shimabara artists, paired with their unique poetry, is exhibited in Kinse.
"Takasago Great Lord, an elite Shimabara geisha, the former 'Queen Bee,' befriends Waxman"
2011 - At healing rituals in the Pacific Northwest, Waxman is introduced to the intrinsically social and dynamic nature of landscape and health under tutelage of healers Eddie Five Crows, Gerry Miller, Thomas Morningowl, Tootsie Danzuka, Miles Miller, Buffy Tillequots and Dana Miller, an effort that began in 2005.
2012 - Waxman and Bojic build the Sinking Gardens with China Academy of Art. It is a landscape memorial for displaced people removed in the process of Hangzhou's "green" gentrification. The work is featured on the cover of Susan Herrington's 2017 book Landscape Theory in Design.
"At healing rituals in the Pacific Northwest Waxman is introduced to the intrinsically social and dynamic nature of landscape and health"
2013 - Waxman, Bojic, and Cho develop Real Time Health Mapping, a platform for integrating health data to empower neighborhoods towards chronic disease prevention.
2014 - Waxman cohosts the Health Equity and Leadership Conference at the Harvard Kennedy School with the Harvard School of Public Health and the Graduate School of Design.
2014 - Waxman graduates the Harvard Graduate School of Design in landscape architecture and moves to Brownsville, Brooklyn, NYC's location with highest concentration of violence and chronic disease since its construction in the 1880s. There, he begins to work with the Brownsville Community Justice Center and other nonprofits to develop an art based violence and chronic disease prevention program. This work he calls "Ecosocial Design."
2015 - Urban Rhythms studios are begun with the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brownsville Community Justice Center as a methodology for performance based violence and chronic disease prevention and therapy with gang members and high risk participants.
2015 - Waxman begins teaching urban design with Myoshinji zen temple and the University of Oregon in Kyoto, with a focus on Shimabara and other urban ecotone conditions.
"Urban Rhythms studios are begun as a methodology for performance based violence and chronic disease prevention"
2015 - Matchaparty practice begins as an inspirational collaboration between Waxman, energy and dance healer Carl Belizaire, businesswoman Callie Wheeler, and artists Tameel Marshall and Sean Turner.
2016 - Collaboration begins with the Claus Meyer Melting Pot Foundation. Meyer who is famous for founding Noma in Denmark and Gustu in Bolivia, sponsors Marshall and Turner in his new culinary academy, and Waxman in research in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Waxman becomes Urban Design Forum inaugural Fellow for research in social and digital data in design.
"Matchaparty practice begins as an inspirational collaboration"
2016 - The team is sponsored by the Storefront For Art and Architecture and Brookdale Hospital to research wilderness and sanctuary. "Wilding" is identified as a technique for the creation of interpersonal sanctuary and transformation of landscape. The method is deployed in Matchaparty.
2017 - Combined with wearable technology and VR, the process will be exhibited at Brookdale Hospital as a NEW KIND OF HOSPITAL ROOM.
2017 - After 25+ Matchaparty rituals conducted with clients including UCBerkeley, The School of Visual Arts, the Melting Pot Foundation, Puerh Brooklyn, Matchabar, and others, the team decides to start importing the highest quality matcha directly from tea farms in the Kyoto area. Mindfulness design and ritual matchaparty programs continue to grow.