In recent years, with books published in English by Steven C. Ridgely and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, among others. Though academic interest in the post-2000 generation has been more limited so far, Angura remains highly attractive, perhaps precise because it is quite “European” in its experimentation and influences. Terayama also featured in the BFI’s “Shinjuku Diaries” programme of films last summer.

Shuji Terayama's 'Emperor Tomato Ketchup'

It’s a slight pity there do not seem to be any talk events scheduled and the emphasis is on screenings of film works. Terayama was a polymath and the films were just one way he expressed himself, alongside poetry, books and of course theatre, including the Shigaigeki “city theatre” of Knock and so on.

“This love of dropping out is not going to be possible in every era,” said Terayama. That was in 1967 and it certainly rings true for the post-Bubble generation of prolonged economic uncertainty and cultural malaise.

You can also read the curator’s essay on Emperor Tomato Ketchup online here.

Oriza Hirata

Playwright, director, university professor and founder of Seinendan, Hirata is responsible for the Contemporary Colloquial Theatre in the Nineties, which launched the current generation of performers and artists familiar and confident to use the vernacular and idiosyncratic modes of speech (sounds straightforward enough but this methodology was quite a breakthrough at the time). Seinendan continues to nurture young actors, directors, playwrights and stage managers from its home, the Komaba Agora Theater. Japan lacks specialist drama schools, with most people receiving their training on university programs, so Seinendan plays the role of an on-the-job skills centre. It holds regular mini conferences and showcases, and many successful writer-directors started off as performers attached to the company, such as Shu Matsui.

Hirata is not content to rest on the laurels of success just yet. Though arguably a rather establishment figure — he has even been employed by the government — he continues to work with international collaborations and stage his own work. Perhaps his “Quiet Theatre” realist output has rather lost its original edge in the wake of chelfitsch and Potudo-ru, but he is still producing new innovations, including the Robot-Human Theater project, a short play involving a robotic performer and a human one.

Hidenori Inoue

Whatever your feelings on the super octane quasi-kabuki extravaganzas that Inoue creates under the auspices of Gekidan Shinkansen (a play on the name for the bullet train, though with the characters meaning “new feeling”), it is one of the few groups that can turn a profit without a regular home (i.e. Shiki Theatre Company, Takarazuka et al). Imagine three high-speed hours of massive casts, mic’ed singing, rock music and dancing, fake sword fighting, audio effects galore, and audiences clapping along to the soundtrack… and you are now somewhere on the way to understanding the bizarre, popularist atmosphere that Inoue creates. Even if Japan had proper mainstream media culture reviews Gekidan Shinkansen would be critic-proof.

Hiromi Maruoka

Maruoka and her team run TPAM (Tokyo Performing Arts Market), the main theatre industry trade fair, conference and symposium program that happens in annually. Despite its name it now takes place in Yokohama in the winter, and is the top event to meet reps from key venues and certain touring artists and companies. Many Asian artists and producers also participate, and there are showcases of fringe theatre and dance so that visitors can catch examples of people’s work. TPAM’s move to Yokohama and the opening of KAAT signalled the establishment of the city as a serious cultural host.

Koki Mitani

Few playwrights and directors are as prolific as Mitani, can move seamlessly between film and theatre, and even enjoy celebrity in their own right. His work aims “only” at entertainment but there’s nothing wrong with creating crowd-pleasing hits, especially when he brings out the best in Japan’s most famous performers, proving that even the ubiquitous can act when given decent scripts. He favours ensemble pieces and his success has brought him the authority to bring together performers from different generations, backgrounds and talent agencies, not an easy task in the mainstream Japanese entertainment world.

Satoshi Miyagi

Miyagi runs SPAC, the leading regional performing arts centre in Shizuoka that regularly invites international artists, and commissions new work from the likes Kuro Tanino and Norimizu Ameya, as well as hosts Japanese stagings of playwrights such as Sarah Kane. Miyagi took over SPAC in 2007 after it was founded in 1997 by Tadashi Suzuki as the first European-style public venue in Japan to develop, produce and stage its own theatre work.

Amon Miyamoto

The first Asian to stage a work on Broadway, Miyamoto is known for his musicals and so was a slightly surprising choice in many ways to be appointed as the inaugural artistic director of the Kanagawa Arts Theatre. His first season opened with a production packed with male actors popular with young girls, and inevitably was an immediate sell-out (in more ways than one). Other choices in the programming so far have been bolder, with slots for Rimini Protokoll, chiten, chelfitsch, Hitoshi Sugimoto and many more.

Keiko Miyata

Miyata is the current theatre artistic director for the New National Theatre, a controversial post that saw its last incumbent, Hitoshi Uyama, ignominiously sacked and replaced with the more mainstream Miyata. The brouhaha over her selection and Uyama’s departure in 2008 led to protests from figures such as Hisashi Inoue, Yukio Ninagawa, Yoji Sakate, and Ai Nagai. Since then, however, the programme for the NNTT has been its usual blend of revivals of western and postwar Japanese plays, and some new work. (The dance and opera are handled by separate artistic directors.)

Miyata was born in 1957 and is known for her award-winning work in the commercial theatre. A rare woman director in a land run by men, she took over from Uyama in 2010.

Akane Nakamura

Nakamura runs precog, the production company that has adroitly handled the mainstream success of artists and groups in their twenties and thirties. Founded in 2003 and targeting the same demographic as its rostra of dancers and directors, Nakamura has been instrumental in creating such events as the festival Spectacle in the Farm in Nasu, Tochigi, and an annual showcase, Azumabashi Dance Crossing, both of which focus on introducing fringe or up-and-coming talent to broad, younger audiences. She often tours with precog’s artists and deserves some of the credit for pushing chelfitsch into the critical darling status limelight it enjoys today, for better or worse.

Yukio Ninagawa

Love him or hate him, Ninagawa knows how to stage spectacle and despite his advancing years, has revealed no apparent desire to slow down, let alone even retire from his formidable workload. He also dips his foot into film (for example, in one effort recently he made a star out of a then unknown Yuriko Yoshitaka) and his juggernaut travels overseas occasionally, though London reviews are typically hostile to his takes on Shakespeare. Find the Ninagawa army typically bivouacking at Bunkamura or the Saitama Arts Theatre.

Hideki Noda

It is an unusual and perhaps worrying trend that commercial writers and directors have started to be appointed as heads of public theatres in Japan. Whether or not these are merely PR stunts remains to be seen, though huge amounts of fanfare accompanied Noda’s promotion to be the first Artistic Director of the Metropolitan Art Space, a position strangely that had not existed at the venue before. (There were even peculiar Cult of the Leader-style banners adorning the inside of the theatre for weeks.)

Noda already has enough status as a writer and director these days to command celebrity actors in appear in his plays, and also has the support of cultural foundations to take his work to London (so far, without much critical accolades). Now Noda is in the bizarre position of being able to commission his own work to appear at the Metropolitan Art Space. Still, he remains committed to new writing, through the Geigeki Eyes program showcasing up-and-coming fringe companies.

Toshiki Okada

The playwright, director and novelist shot to stardom with his rightfully acclaimed Free Time and Fives Days in March. Sadly, since then he has done little further innovation, preferring to play the same fiddle on a few variations. However, Five Days in March has toured around the world under the auspices of the Japan Foundation and shows no signs of abating. There are few local idiosyncratic (and at times almost obscurantist) writers and directors under forty who can snap their fingers and receive commissions from public theatres based primarily on their reputation, but Okada is one.

Chiaki Soma

In an industry wholly dominated by male directors and artists, woman tend to populate the ranks of the production team. Chiaki Soma, however, stands out as the first appointed artistic director of Festival/Tokyo, Japan’s leading performing arts event. Trained in France, Soma hopes to establish F/T not just as the best performing arts festival in Asia but also as a portal for building the agencies of criticism that currently most countries in the continent, not least of all Japan, lack.

Akira Takayama

Trained in Germany and de facto Festival/Tokyo director in residence, Takayama is not afraid to tackle the controversial or delicate subjects that many Tokyoites or bureaucrats would prefer to turn a blind eye to: the rising numbers of working poor, internet cafe refugees, nuclear power, minorities, aging population, war crimes… He works using site-specific and interactive performance methodologies, and with customized teams of collaborators for each project. He has taken his work to Austria to great success and is arguably the most sincere theatre artist working in Japan today.

Hon menshes

Tamiya Kuriyama: leading freelance commercial director, former head of the New National Theatre

Yukako Ogura: director of the AI HALL in Osaka

Katsuhiro Ohira: director of the ST Spot, Yokohama

Kuro Tanino: playwright, director, designer, painter, psychiatrist and polymath

The 2007 play finally won Maeda the Kishida Kunio Award in 2008 after many nominations, and was revived in 2009 in a double-bill with its sequel, Ikiteru mono ka (Are we alive?). It famously depicts a university campus where the students start inexplicably (and comically) to die, one by one. (The follow-up was, literally, a play in reverse, with the dead rising and then going through their scenes backwards.)

(Confusing, the Japan Foundation’s website uses a different English title, No One alive here?, though the official one agreed by Maeda is Isn’t anyone alive?.)

It will be particularly interesting to see if the absurdity of the original — which is highly theatrical — translates well. The trailer seems to suggest the film will be wider than the play’s setting, with scenes of ominous empty trains and (CGI) planes dropping dramatically out of the sky. Hopefully it hasn’t been turned into a zombie film!

The Empty Space readings series, part of F/T11, invited participating artists from the previous Festival/Tokyo events to contribute text-readings at free gatherings around the city. The themes have mostly echoed those of the main festival, that of taking theatre out into the urban community and looking at how we can respond to the March catastrophe.

In a park in Ikebukuro Itoh enters stridently, stands atop of mini podium and then delivers his reading, actually a twenty minute performance called “Speech Meeting”, in the style of a politician’s speech to voters. However, inverting expectations of a “reading”, in fact there are no real words read out at all.

As with much of the Establishment’s response to the crisis, the blatant incompetence and vacuous charade is brilliantly presented as a politician who believes he is giving the speech of a lifetime, and yet his words are muffled or garbled, becoming nothing more than ridiculous gesticulation. Following a similar parade of TEPCO and government press conferences all seeking to reassure a worried and increasingly distrusting public, Itoh suggests that the mandarins and statesmen are essentially merely full of hot air and not much else. But that he muffles his own words, covering his own mouth, is as chilling as much as it is comic, revealing that the leader here is flawed by his own volition.

Picking up the slogan of F/T11 — What can we say? — looking at Itoh’s presentation, it is distressingly implying that even those in power are little more than demagogic buffoons unable to say anything. Watching the performance, live or online, we are then forced to address the question towards ourselves: Well, what can you say then?

Politicians in campaigns in Japan cannot canvas door-to-door due to election rules, and so are limited to making pompous, clamorous speeches in public places, often on top of vans and often to no one in particular except a handful of aficionados. There they harangue the populous with their names on election ribbons worn proudly over their shoulders. It is a spectacle ripe for satire.

However, satire is a rare thing in Japan; like so much, comedy works in different ways here. Certainly mainstream comics and Manzai lean to the slapstick in tone, with gags often loud, physical or rooted in the shock of an insult. Exceptions include esoteric personalities like Torihada Minoru, though they are fringe figures.

Kim Itoh is a dancer and choreographer, trained in Ankoku Butoh and known for his cross-over work, who has also performed all over the world and won many awards.

In the words of the author:

The eight playwrights and directors featured in this collection of interviews are the leading Tokyo contemporary theatre practitioners, who are now all being frequently invited to international theatre festivals. Here they discuss their backgrounds, core conceptual ideas, rehearsal techniques, and key works, in conversation with a journalist with over ten years’ experience covering the Japanese performing arts scene.

Fully bilingual in English and Japanese, this is the first book published in years to introduce the Japanese contemporary theatre scene to the foreign readers. It is an essential text for understanding Tokyo’s emerging theatre talent as well as important recent cultural trends in Japan.

There are interviews with: Akira Takayama (Port B), Shu Matsui (Sample), Toshiki Okada (chelfitsch), Hideto Iwai (Hi-bye), Tomohiro Maekawa (Ikiume), Daisuke Miura (potudo-ru), Kuro Tanino (Niwa Gekidan Penino), and Shiro Maeda (Gotanndadan).

The book will be available on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.jp, at NADiff a/p/a/r/t branches and other major booksellers in Tokyo, and is set to be sold in independent art bookstores in Europe from December.

[Full disclosure: I assisted with the English translations!]

A two-star review from the Guardian says:

The evening is oddly pitched and extended, as the characters take to amateur dramatics and start acting out a whimsical Japanese fairytale about a Red Ogre and his friendship with a Blue Ogre. The play’s message, about shifting identity in the face of the pressures of urban life, is rammed home repeatedly, with little finesse. It doesn’t help that the heavy-handed comedy is often predicated on outmoded attitudes to gay sexuality and mental illness.

Another poor notice from the Independent highlights that “the piece furnishes few insights into those morbid internet forums which encourage the lonely and depressed to form suicide pacts with strangers.” The cast and translation are praised as valiant in the face of a “backward production”.

The choice of sitcom-esque comedy to deal with a subject matter is particularly targeted. Engaging with tough social problems through comedy is a difficult taboo to break, and only with finesse is it likely to succeed. The Independent gives Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular as an example of a play “that intensif[ies] our sense of the mental anguish of would-be suicides through riotous laughter”. Judging by the British press Kokami fell into the also-rans camp. At least one blogger also notes the “heavy-handed” style of the play.

In the risk of sounding like an indulger in the art of Schadenfreude, it must be said that much the same thing happened with Kokami’s Trance at the Bush a few years back, and also with a lot of Hideki Noda’s productions in London, even when he has Colin Teevan lending a helping hand.

In a related development, Sadler’s Wells has also been staging Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s TeZuKa , a multi-media, interdisciplinary homage to Osamu Tezuka and met a similar baffled response.

In a review that praised the elaborate projections and Nitin Sawhney’s score, The Telegraph criticized the length and the general mayhem and clutter of the piece:

With dancers, martial-artists, musicians and even a calligrapher all on stage, there is often so much going on (not only contrasting clusters of movement … but also text, speech and elaborate projections) that you find your eyes darting hither and thither across the stage, unsure of what to focus on.

One wonders how Yukio Ninagawa will fare in the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival with his production of Cymbeline. Judging by how his Lear and other Bard stagings have been greeted in the past, I’m not holding my breath just yet.

Here is what F/T says:

English surtitles will be provided for some or all performances of: “Hemispherical Red and Black” (OKAZAKI ARTS THEATRE), “Oil Pressure Vibrator” (Geumhyung Jeong), “The Unending Warmth of a Bedwetting Bog” (Bird Park), “the acting motivation” (Pijin Neji) and “BANANAGAKU★☆Super Spunky Sports Autumn Grand Tournament!!!!!”. “Resurrection” by Peachum Company will also feature English commentary at some performances.

Ka Fai Choy’s meditation on digital media and dance, “Notion: Dance Fiction”, will be completely in English.

There are also a number of productions and performances that are mostly visual and/or without dialogue. These include the outdoor performances Romeo Castellucci’s “The Phenomenon Called I” and Norimizu Ameya’s “ground”, and Ishinha’s “Landscape – Tokyo, Ikebukuro”.

Needless to say, the dance piece “still life” by F/T regular Tsuyoshi Shirai will be universally understood, as will the contribution to the Emerging Artists Program from Modern Table. Jerome Bel’s “The Show Must Go On” originated in France but is in fact made of famous (English language) pop songs.

French- and German-speakers will also be able to enjoy some of the satellite programs in the Theatrotheque, not to mention René Pollesch’s epic “Cinecittà Aperta”.

Performance literature, pamphlets, announcements and other important information are all available bilingually (English and Japanese), and there will be staff at the box office and reception who can speak English and answer your questions.

If trying to watch a performance and deal with surtitles at the same time is not your cup of tea, the performance by Ka Fai Choy is the only genuinely “English” production. (Ka Fai Choy is originally from Singapore but has studied in London.) Definitely the Ameya, Castellucci and Ishinha productions will also be easy to appreciate no matter what language you speak, as well as the Tsuyoshi Shirai dance work.

And, although it won’t feature English surtitles, those familiar with the original Tony Kushner text for Angels in America may want to catch the KUNIO staging as part of the Emerging Artists Program, to see what a fringe Kyoto company does with the colossal American Nineties play.

Coming off the back of several previous multi-lingual productions over the last few years, he is now building up an international ensemble to start what he hopes will be a “theatre revolution” in the region.

If you are serious about making live theatre, even if you don’t consider yourself a performer — in fact, in some ways especially if you don’t — Andrew and the YTC would like to hear from you. They are looking for actors, singers, dancers, designers, technicians, photographers…if you have a creative skill to bring to the table, you may be what the company needs.

To start, YTC is holding auditions on August 19th. See details here:
http://www.wazoo.jp/open/ytheatreauditions/

In a translation by Aya Ogawa and with a local British cast, here is how the creative team describe the play:

Examining the cult popularity of suicide websites in contemporary Japanese culture, the play looks at a decade where world conflicts are sensationally streamed on twenty-four hour rolling news channels using terms like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘human shields’. Even terrorist organisations boast about their achievements on YouTube, and chronic depression is catered for by the increase of ‘informative’ suicide websites. Are people becoming more jaded with their real existence? Has life lost sanctity and meaning?

Halcyon Days is a dark comedy that follows the story of three people and one ghost who meet on a suicide website. Will they become another statistic in an increasingly worrying trend or, beneath the will to die, can they find in each other a reason to survive.

So, pretty zeitgeist.

There seems quite a bit money behind this production, judging from all the high-profile sponsorship, and certainly enough for the team to pursue a PR campaign. It will likely get some London press coverage but hopefully better reviews than Trance at the Bush in 2007, which drew unfavorable comparisons to Elling and Blue/Orange (despite pre-dating both plays by many years).

The former is best revealed in the choice of a number of outdoor productions, including Ishinha, who will present a piece on the roof of the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro. Likewise F/T regulars Normizu Ameya and Romeo Castellucci have teamed up for a double-bill inspired by the poetry of Kenji Miyazawa. These will be performed together at Yumenoshima, a location implicit with the context of Japan’s post-war economic growth.

Visiting production Cinecittà Aperta by German giant René Pollesch is also happening outside, this time on a large vacant plot in Toyosu, and will involve a moving car and the audience partly following the action by screens.

Akira Takayama, fresh from success in Vienna, will tackle the current dilemmas of Japan in a project that manifests both of the Festival key ideas. His “Referendum” is comprised of a series of talks and discussions with experts and members of the public on how a plebiscite on nuclear power could be actually held in Japan. (The country has never had a referendum on any subject.) Following this period of research and interaction, polling booths will be set up at sites around Tokyo and people recommended to visit them to vote on how they feel about the topic. The results will then be counted and published.

There are also a number of satellite programs, including readings and talks, and a roaming F/T Station information centre this time (as opposed to a single large installation in front of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space as in previous years), that will take the Festival spirit around different parts of Tokyo.

Though not outdoor performances, new stagings by art unit CHAOS*LOUNGE, Yudai Kamisato and Akio Miyazawa all will deal with 3.11 and its resulting social effects. Other presentations in the main Festival include dancer Tsuyoshi Shirai and Jerome Bel’s globe-trotting The Show Must Go On.

F/T Emerging Artists Program

This worthy program looking to build up a platform of future talent has this year expanded into mainland Asia, and the Korean and Chinese participants look especially good. Many in fact are already quite established internationally — at least, compared to the Japanese artists — and especially Geumhyung Jeong, Modern Table and Ka Fai Choy are known names.

One wonders why Kunio Sugihara wants to stage Angels in America, which has been performed already in Japan and is a play so representative of America in the Nineties, but perhaps it will provide new learnings for locals.

However, contributions from the extraordinarily named Pure BANANA girls class and Peachum Company seem more consciously “Japanese”. Pure BANANA present frenetic pop culture-inspired celebrations of idol performances, while Peachum Company are drawing on the symbolism of Tokyo Tower as a modern day version of Christian church architecture that attempted to reach up, Babel-like, to the heavens. With the Sky Tree set to replace the aging Tokyo Tower, their outdoor staging will also form a kind of requiem for the landmark.

Co-Presentations

There are also some satellite productions happening simultaneously with the main Festival, including a new (currently untitled) work by Potudo-ru and another, ponderously titled, work Chelfitsch‘s Toshiki Okada. Others include Korean and French artists, plus the full Citizens of Seoul series from the briefly controversial Oriza Hirata.