In early October, I co-translated (with Mika Eglinton) a text called “Lynch (a Play)” which was performed at Kyoto Experiment 2024 from 25-27 October. Kyoto-based director and choreographer, Yasuko Yokoshi, created an adaptation of Yoshiro Yoda Hatori’s award-winning play “Lynch,” alongside co-performers Masaru Kakio, Alain Sinandja, and Nanako Komatsu.

Our translation was used for subtitles during the production run at Kyoto Experiment 2024. which won the 20th Aichi Arts Foundation Drama Award.

The original text by Yoda Hatori is well known in Japan (and beyond?) for its linguistic, thematic and structural complexity. In a narrow sense, it is a patchwork of references, overheard speech, and citations from critical theory, poetry and literature. But that would be to do it a great injustice.

The original text evades definition, categorization, genre, subject, and naming. It has been described as a play that is “impossible to perform.” It tiptoes on political shards, brings flashes of current crises into focus, screams in your face only to caress you with a feather. It is not “about” anything. As pretentious and frustrating as that may sound, it is a play that just somehow is. Something like a black hole.

Yasuko Yokoshi, and her three collaborators, wove their own stories, trajectories and feelings into the text. Each of the performers delivers different personal stories, from Yokoshi’s experience of hospitalization in the US, and Sinandja’s experience of living in Shinnagata, Kobe, to Kakio’s recollection of his mother and her forced mobilization during WW2.

These strands are fragmented and non-linear. This adaptation is what I would term a “shard play.” Shards of a broken mirror, interrelated yet separate, reflective of the world, yet only partially, broken and incomplete, and therefore in search of unity. It is part of a trend in new millennium theatre for the search of new ontologies, new beings, or states of being in the world.

Shard plays start with recognition of the world as a broken assemblage of things, always fusing together in order to break again. Lynch (a Play) brings choreography into this procedural landscape of textual unfolding, invoking the gestural grammar of bodies in space. The stage is empty, then filled with objects, then emptied again.

In terms of the translation, this was by far one of the most challenging texts we’ve taken on. The radical shifts in linguistic register and modality alone made it difficult, but on top of that, we had to find a way to communicate with Yoda Hatori’s original text “Lynch.” How do all these voices intersect? How do they communicate? How does English wire itself into this textual machine?

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Cover image: screenshot from the Kyoto Experiment YouTube video trailer for Lynch (a Play).