Ikebana Experience: A New Workshop

The Power of Japanese Flowers: Your Ikebana Experience

Duration: 2 Hours

Fee: $135 / $240 for Pair

Booking for a single ticket

Booking for a single or a pair ticket

Our popular one-hour Ikebana Introduction Workshop is a wonderful way to discover the basics of ikebana. This extended workshop, however, gives you more time to slow down, explore, and experience the mindful side of ikebana.

What Will You Gain from the Workshop?

1. Calm & Re-energise
Step away from busy days and slow down in a tranquil garden. Enjoy a calming, mindful experience that helps you relax, reset and reconnect with yourself.

2. Discover Your Creativity
Learn the simple principles of Ikebana and Japanese aesthetics—balance, space, asymmetry and natural beauty—and use them to inspire your own creative practice.

3. See Nature in a New Way
Learn to look at nature through the eyes of an Ikebana artist. Notice the beauty, shape, movement and character of natural materials, and discover how connecting with nature can bring a sense of wellbeing.

No experience is needed. You’ll create your own unique Ikebana artwork to take home, along with a new way of seeing nature and creativity.

Learn from Dr Shoso Shimbo, an award-winning Ikebana artist and sculptor, highly rated by participants with 4.9/5 from 83 ClassBento reviews.

Your Ikebana Experience

Tucked away on a quiet suburban street just 20 minutes from the city, lies a hidden Japanese garden—an enchanting private sanctuary featured on ABC Gardening Australia.

Inspired by the mountain landscapes of his hometown in Niigata, Japan, award-winning contemporary ikebana artist Dr Shoso Shimbo, CEO of Melbourne Ikebana Festival, has created a garden and studio where nature becomes a source of contemplation, creativity and connection.

Your Ikebana Experience begins with a welcome drink and time to explore this tranquil garden before entering Shoso’s private studio—an intimate space and an opportunity rarely available to the public.

Shoso will introduce you to the history, philosophy and aesthetic principles of ikebana, revealing how simple flowers, branches and natural materials can be transformed into expressive works of art.

You will also learn about the Four Ikebana Principles, which provide practical design strategies for creating harmony in an arrangement. Shoso formalised these principles during his nine years teaching a Japanese Aesthetics Short Course at RMIT and later developed the Online Ikebana Aesthetics Course at Ikebana Dojo.

You’ll then create your own arrangement, selecting from a beautiful range of seasonal materials and discovering how to use form, balance, space and movement to express your own individual style.

As you work, you’ll experience the quiet mindfulness at the heart of ikebana: an invitation to slow down, observe nature and find beauty in simplicity.

At the end of the experience, you’ll take home your own unique ikebana creation, along with a deeper appreciation of Japanese culture, design and the relationship between nature and art.

Before you leave, take a final stroll through the garden and photograph your arrangement in this beautiful and unexpected setting.

The Program

Welcome | 15 minutes

Arrive and enjoy a welcome drink before taking time to wander through the Japanese garden and settle into the experience.

Introduction to Ikebana | 10 minutes

Join Shoso in his private studio for an introduction to the history, philosophy and fundamental principles of ikebana.

Demonstration | 20 minutes

Watch as Shoso creates a seasonal arrangement, demonstrating key ikebana principles and sharing the thinking behind his creative choices.

Gathering Materials | 15 minutes

Explore a selection of seasonal flowers, branches and natural materials, choosing the elements that inspire you and speak to your own creative vision.

Creation | 45 minutes

Create your own individual ikebana arrangement, incorporating some of the principles introduced during Shoso’s demonstration while developing your own personal expression.

Show & Tell | 15 minutes

If you wish, share your creation with the group and talk about the principles, ideas or inspiration behind your arrangement.

Closing

Photograph your finished work in the studio or find your favourite setting in the garden for a memorable final image.

Seasonal Themes

Each experience explores a distinct seasonal theme, inspired by the ever-changing character of nature throughout the year. Across the series, four principles of Ikebana and four fundamental elements—line, form, colour, and space—are introduced progressively, both individually and in combination.

2026

Spring — Balance

2027

Summer — Contrast

Autumn — Movement

Winter — Pattern

Spring — Balance X Line

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Review of Distilling Nature

Review by ClassikOn

Distilling Nature - unusual, intriguing and unexpectedly transporting

Jessica Aszodi, Jacob Abela & Shoso Shimbo | Distilling Nature

29 August 2026, Melbourne Recital Centre, VIC

Part of the Melbourne Ikebana Festival 2026

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A Concert? An Installation? Something Else Entirely?

Alerted to this extraordinary event at the very last minute, I arrived at the Melbourne Recital Centre rushed, late and considerably more anxious than one would normally expect before an evening promising the combined pleasures of piano, voice, Japanese ikebana and fragrance.

Perhaps that was the perfect preparation. Because Distilling Nature turned out to be one of the most unusual, intriguing and unexpectedly transporting performances I have encountered for some time.

This was emphatically not a conventional recital or opera. Instead, Jessica Aszodi’s extraordinary voice, Jacob Abela’s exploratory piano, Dr Shoso Shimbo’s evolving ikebana and Yen Huynh’s fragrance combined to create something closer to immersive performance art — an artwork experienced simultaneously through sight, sound, scent, space and movement.

And for quite some time, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was experiencing.

An Unpredictable Musical Landscape

Abela sat at the Steinway, while Shimbo began constructing an elaborate floral sculpture behind him — one stem, one branch, one bloom at a time.

Then came Aszodi – Her voice could be ethereal one moment, ghostly the next; phrases appeared, disappeared and hovered without necessarily resolving where conventional musical instinct told us they should.

The programme was gloriously eclectic: Morton Feldman, John Cage and Brian Eno; Charles Ivesand Liza Lim; Giulio Caccini and Meredith Monk; Australian experimentalist Keith Humble; Björkand Stephen Sondheim.

On paper, it looked almost wilfully disparate. In performance, however, the unexpected juxtapositions became the point. Cage’s silences and sparse textures flowed into Eno’s ambient world; Ives brought nature and memory into sharper focus; Caccini suddenly transported us back to the beginnings of opera; Meredith Monk and Liza Lim pushed the voice into theatrical and experimental territory. There was no reassuring formula. And gradually, that became strangely liberating.

When the Spell Took Hold

The first great jolt of recognition came with Björk’s Jóga. A familiar song suddenly sounded entirely different in this environment — its emotional urgency magnified by Aszodi’s extraordinary vocal presence, Abela’s restless piano and the slowly developing landscape of flowers.

But it was Stephen Sondheim’s Every Day a Little Death that truly broke through – I didn’t know the song well, yet it felt strangely familiar. Aszodi sang it with such emotional intensity that the distinction between “performer” and “character” seemed to disappear. Abela did not merely accompany her. His piano seemed to circle, question and breathe around the voice, creating an almost symbiotic musical relationship. And something unexpected happened…

I stopped analysing.

I stopped wondering what the piece was supposed to mean.

I simply listened.

I almost cried.

The audience applauded — only the second spontaneous eruption of applause that evening. Until then, there had been an almost unspoken agreement that applause might break the spell.

Flowers Become Performance

Meanwhile, Shimbo’s ikebana had been quietly transforming the space. This was not floral decoration. It was performance in its own right. What began as a relatively sparse arrangement gradually became an enormous sculptural environment of pinks, whites, greens and yellows, with branches and sweeping forms reaching around the performers.

The fascinating question was whether we were watching three separate art forms — music, voice and ikebana — occupying the same space, or witnessing one artwork expressed through three different languages. There were moments when my attention moved from singer to pianist to florist almost instinctively. That shifting focus was part of the experience.

The addition of Huynh’s fragrance completed the sensory equation. Distilling Nature asked us not merely to listen, but to look, smell, feel and imagine.

The Audience Becomes Part of It

The intimate Salon setting was crucial. We were close enough to watch Shimbo physically construct the work, while Aszodi and Abela performed only metres away. At times the combination of sound, colour, scent and stillness became almost meditative. I found myself wondering whether every person in the room was experiencing the same performance at all — or whether each of us was constructing a private version of it.

Then, inevitably, reality intervened. A man in the row ahead suddenly sneezed loudly, jolting me spectacularly out of my reverie. Perhaps that was useful too. It reminded me that this was not an escape from reality, but an invitation to experience reality differently.

From Performance to Installation

By the finale, Yuki no hana, the floral creation had fully blossomed around the musicians. And then the ritual changed. The audience was invited to photograph the installation, and the contemplative gathering instantly became a cheerful scrum of phones, selfies and group photographs.

It was an amusing contradiction: an ephemeral artwork designed to be experienced in the moment had immediately inspired everyone to preserve evidence of it. The artists stayed behind, mingling with the audience. The boundary between performer, artwork and spectator effectively disappeared.

The Final Measure

I arrived at Distilling Nature anxious, rushed and determined to work out what I was supposed to be reviewing. I left remarkably tranquil. That, ultimately, may be the most compelling measure of its success.

The music had stopped. The fragrance was fading. The great floral construction would soon disappear. Yet something remained — a lingering sensation that was difficult to define but impossible to dismiss.

Distilling Nature may not fit comfortably into the categories of concert, opera, installation or performance art. Perhaps that is precisely why it works. It asks us to abandon expectation, surrender our senses and simply experience the moment. And for an hour or so, in the heart of the Melbourne Recital Centre, that was exactly what happened.

Written by Warren Wills with George Stamkoski

• Björk, Humble, Ives, Jessica Aszodi, John Cage, Liza Lim; Giulio Caccini, Melbourne Recital Centre, Meredith Monk, Morton Feldman, Sondheim,  Jacob Abela

Warren Wills

Australian-born, former Mount Scopus boy, Warren Wills has been based in London for 35 years, where he has worked tirelessly as a pianist, composer, music director, arranger, educationalist, working in both commercial and community theatre. He is a multi award winning talent and has composed with and for Woody Allen, Royal Shakespeare Company, Margaret Atwood, Pamela Anderson, Sheila Ferguson, the Drifters and many others. Warren hosts London Beat on J AIR 88FM each week.

https://www.shoso.com.au https://www.facebook.com/ikebanaaustralia

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