Japanese Tea Ceremony Demonstrations in The Ringlings

Join us for a demonstration of a Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) in the Urasenke tradition. The Nancy L. Ellis and George R. Ellis Tea House will be open to visitors.

This program is free for all Members and included with Bayfront Gardens Admission or Museum Admission. Demonstrations will begin at 1:00 pm and 2:00 pm under the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Art.

Rebecca Corbett is a historian of chanoyu (Japanese tea culture, or tea ceremony) and a practitioner in the Urasenke School of Tea. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney (2009), was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2013-2015), and now works at the University of Southern California. Her book Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018) analyses privately circulated and commercially published texts to show how chanoyu tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Her current projects include a study of the Buddhist nun and artist Tagami Kikusha (1753-1826) and the transmission of her work in modern Japan, and a study of early Western involvement in chanoyu tea practice during the Meiji period (1868-1912).