Description
Playwright, novelist and theatre director Okada Toshiki is one of the most important voices of the current generation of Japanese contemporary theatre makers. He founded his globally influential theatre company chelfitsch in 1997. Using a unique style and a distinctive language, his plays address issues such as social inequity, life in Japan after the 3/11 Earthquake, and posthuman society. Okada is a theatrical visionary showing undercurrents in everyday moments and the strangeness of being alive in our time.
In Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre, Okada’s work and its importance to the development of contemporary performance in Japan and around the world is explored. Gathered here for the first time in English is a comprehensive selection of essays, interviews and translations of three of Okada’s plays by leading scholars and translators. Okada’s writing on theatre is also included, accompanied by an extensive array of images from his performances.
The phenomenal success of Okada Toshiki’s global productions has galvanized international critics into forming intriguing theoretical perspectives on his theatre. Acknowledging Okada’s affinity to Japan’s lost generation, Brechtian distantiation and Noh aesthetics, these critics have applied new conceptual frames such as the poetics of disarticulation, the poesis of liminality and slow dramaturgy to elucidate the deep structure of his performances. Mari Boyd, Professor Emeritus, Sophia University, Japan.
Cover image credit: chelfitsch and Kaneuji Teppei Eraser Forest, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa), 2020. Photo Kioku Keizō.
CONTENTS
SECTION ONE: OKADA’S DRAMATURGY
Okada Toshiki’s Narrative Method
Cody Poulton
The ‘Hyper-Real’ and the Shadow of Noh
Stanca Scholz-Cionca
Making Time Material: On Okada Toshiki’s Time’s Journey Through a Room (2016)
Sara Jansen
Translating Okada Toshiki
Andreas Regelsberger
Fuzzy Boundaries, Foggy Pictures: Okada Toshiki’s poesies of liminality
Iwaki Kyōko
Ruptures, Gravity, Dwelling. Reflections on Okada Toshiki’s movement aesthetic
Holger Hartung
SECTION TWO: ART, SOCIETY AND GLOBALITY
Seen From Close-up in the Distance: Shibuya as a bubble downtown
Noda Manabu
Simultaneous Turns in Globality: Performative and social turns in the new millennium, or theorizing/historicizing Okada Toshiki’s welcome to European festival cultures
Uchino Tadashi
Reflections on Precarity and Emotional Fulfillment in Everyday Life in the Theatre of Okada Toshiki
Barbara Geilhorn
‘Who Knows We Want To Be An International Artist?’ Producing Okada Toshiki’s theatre and the international scene
Yokobori Masahiko
Okada Toshiki’s Dramaturgy in the Post-global Condition
Peter Eckersall
Foreign Assembly: Okada’s Time’s Journey through a Room in the United States
Carol Martin
SECTION THREE: DOCUMENTS, INTERVIEW AND PLAYS
An Interview with Okada Toshiki
Iwaki Kyōko
Reflux: A protean theatre theory
By Okada Toshiki. English translation by Iwaki Kyōko
Sounding like a Typical Post-Corona Theory of Theatre
By Okada Toshiki. English translation by Cody Poulton
THREE PLAY TRANSLATIONS
Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Farewell Speech
By Okada Toshiki. English translation by Aya Ogawa
The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise
By Okada Toshiki. English translation by Aya Ogawa
Ground and Floor
By Okada Toshiki. English translation by Aya Ogawa
