This article was originally published in the Japan Times newspaper on February 20 2018. How do you make a thousand-year-old story resonate with an audience in Osaka today? Tell them that you plan to radically modernize one of the most famous literary works ever to come out of Japan to fit present concerns. The centerpiece…
Category: Newspaper Articles
Profile on Berlin-based visual and performance artist, Naoko Tanaka
This article was originally published in the Japan Times newspaper on January 13 2018. A spotlight shines on a miniature primary school chair. Its steel frame is crumpled like a child’s body cowering in fear. Soon, other chairs of differing sizes come into view, lit by a solitary woman, who crawls among them with a…
Profile on Melbourne-based Butoh Dancer and Performance Artist, Yumi Umiumare
This article was originally published in the Japan Times Newspaper on October 21, 2017. At a certain level, the act of resettling overseas unsettles the idea of home itself. It ruptures the narrative of belonging that we construct through attachments to people and places. For the immigrant, home is no longer an immutable fact, but…
Profile on New York-based Dancer, Choreographer and Educator, Eiko Otake
This article was originally published in the Japan Times newspaper on June 18 2017. ‘Move to rest, sleep, and dream. Move to pass time, bloom, and linger.” These are the opening lines of Eiko Otake’s “Delicious Movement Manifesto.” Otake is a multi-award winning, New York-based Asian-American performance artist whose passion for dance began almost 50 years ago…
The Ventriloquists Convention
This article was originally published in the Japan Times Newspaper on April 27 2017. Franco-Austrian choreographer and director Gisele Vienne is fascinated by puppets and brings a group of nine ventriloquists and their marionettes to the stage in her latest piece, “The Ventriloquists Convention.” The play is part of the World Theatre Festival Shizuoka run…
Tokyo Theater Commons and Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting
This article was originally published in the Japan Times Newspaper on January 24, 2017. A bonanza is brewing in Tokyo and Yokohama for lovers of cross-cultural contemporary theater. That’s because, from Jan. 25 to Feb. 5, the capital’s Minato Ward hosts a new performance and workshop program named Theater Commons Tokyo. Meanwhile Yokohama’s Naka Ward…
Kyoto Experiment Autumn 2016
This article was originally published in the Japan Times Newspaper on October 25 2016. “Good fences make good neighbors” is an often-quoted line from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” about two farmers united in their effort to rebuild a wall that divides their land. Less well known is the poem’s central query: “Why do good fences make…
On Ishinha’s Final Show: “Amahara”
This article was originally published in the Japan Times Newspaper on September 27 2016. Performing on deserted beaches and in villages, temples, dockland warehouses and urban railyards, few theater companies can have traversed the range of landscapes and settings that have inspired Osaka-based Ishinha. Yet though journeys real and imagined have been key themes in…
Kyoto Experiment #6
This article was originally published in the Japan Times newspaper on February 23 2016. “It may be wrong to mix different wines, but old and new wisdom make an excellent mixture.” So claims The Singer in Bertolt Brecht’s 1944 play, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” If so, there are few places where tradition and the avant-garde…
Ishinha performs ‘Twilight’ in rural Soni Village, Kyoto
This article was originally published in the Japan Times newspaper on August 25 2015. Tokyo may be Japan’s performing-arts hub, but a growing number of artists are swapping the strictures of its cultural marketplace for the creative and lifestyle benefits of life outside the capital. For the Osaka-based Ishinha theater company, however, there’s nothing new…
Andrew Eglinton 