SPRING 2007 progams

SPOTLIGHT JAPAN

Segal Center Japanese Playwright Project

The Japan Playwrights Project at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY, is presenting new works in translation by four aesthetically and socially provocative Japanese playwrights: Masataka Matsuda, Akio Miyazawa, Toshiki Okada and Mikuni Yanaihara. A panel of New York-based theatre professionals, academics and the Segal Center chose New York directors and their theatre companies to collaborate with the Japanese playwrights and present readings during the PRELDUE festival. The New York Theatre artits are: Josh Fox/International WOW Company; Dan Safer/Witness Relocation; Jay Scheib; and The Play Company. The translators are John K. Gillespie, Aya Ogawa and Kameron Steele.

Made possible by the generous support of the Japan Foundation, PAJ Performing Arts Japan Program. Additional suport: Saison Foundation, Tokyo.

Curator Japan: Uchino Tadashi is Professor of Performance Studies at the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. His publications includes The Melodramatic Revenge: Theatre of the Private in the 1980s (in Japanese, 1996), From Melodrama to Performance: The Twentieth Century American Theatre (in Japanese, 2001) and Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (2007, forthcoming).

Advisory Board:
Polly Carl, Playwrights Center, Minneapolis; Vallejo Gantner, Artistic Director, Performance Space 122; Daniel Gerould, Professor of Theatre, CUNY-Executive Director, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center; John K. Gillespie, Translator, New York; Frank Hentschker, Director of Programs, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center; Andy Horwitz, Producer, Performance Space 122; John Jesurun, Theatre Artist, New York; Samuel Leiter, Professor of Theatre, CUNY; Kate Loewald, Founding Producer, The Play Company; Mariko Mori, Producer, Japan; Carol Martin, Professor of Theatre, New York University; Kenji Matsumoto, Assistant Director, The Japan Foundation, New York; Charles Mee, Playwright, New York; Aya Ogawa, Program Officer, Japan Society; Claudia Orenstein, Professor of Theatre, CUNY; Shoshana Polanco, Producer, New York; Geoffrey Scott, Literary Associate, New York Theatre Workshop; Kameron Steele, Artistic Director, The South Wing; Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center; Tadashi Uchino, Professor of Theatre, The University of Tokyo; Ruth Juliet Wikler-Luker, Consultant for Project Development, New York; Michael Wolk, Producer, Gorgeous Entertainment.

Production:
Project Director: Fank Hentschker, Director of Programs, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Project Coordinator in Japan: Mariko Mori, Producer, Japan. Project Coordinator in New York: Kameron Steele, Artistic Director, The South Wing and Mayuha Kunisue, Georgeous Entertainment.

Matasaka Matsuda and Josh Fox / International WOW Company (Japan, USA)

Josh Fox and his International WOW Company will present a staged reading with excerpts from Masataka Matsuda’s Auto-Da-Fe. Translated by Kameron Steele.

In Auto-Da-Fe Odysseus A decides to return, after a life of exile, to the land of his birth. The country, however, is undergoing massive nationwide archeological excavations at various sites as per the Emperor's orders. The order was issued so long ago that people don't even remember that there was such an order in the first place. Considering the impending arrival of the messenger, Odysseus A must face the immediate issue of time, both with regard to the wasted histories discovered in the dig, as well as the many spirits of the dead that have accumulated there with nowhere to go.

Masataka Matsuda started his career in drama while a student at Ritsumeikan University. He formed Jiku Gekijo theatre company in Kyoto in 1990, and wrote and directed all the works for the company until it was disbanded in 1997. He is known for his ability to apply everyday setting and unflinching language to depict the unconscious fetters hidden in the human unconscious. He has received numerous awards, including OMS Drama Award 1994 for Saka no Uenoie (The house on the hill), OMS Drama Award and KISHIDA Kunio Drama Award in 1996 for Umi to Higasa (Sea and Parasol), Yomiuri Drama Award for Tsuki no Misaki (Moon Cape), Yomiuri Literature Award in 1998 for Natsu no Sunanoue (On the sand of the Summer) and Kyoto Cultural Encouragement Prize in 2000. He is a guest professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design.

Josh Fox founded the International WOW Company in 1996, a theatre group with membership of over 100 actors, dancers, musicians, technical, and visual artists spanning 30 countries on 4 continents. With the International WOW Company he has conceived, written, directed, and/or produced over 30 productions in Thailand, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan and the U.S. Additional reading at Center for the Arts, College of Staten Island. Thursday, Sept. 27 6:30 p.m.

2:00 p.m., Saturday, September 29, 2007 Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!

Toshiki Okada and The Play Company (Japan, USA)

The Play Company, New York, will present a staged reading with excerpts from Toshiki Okada’s new work Enjoy as their contribution to the Segal Center's Japanese Playwrights Project. Translated by Aya Ogawa.

Enjoy follows the lifestyle and romantic adventures of part-time jobbers in a Manga Cafe in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Enjoy focuses on typical workers in a Japan in which socio-economic disparities are increasingly visible, depicting their lifestyles and attitudes toward their jobs, romantic love and other aspects of their everyday lives. Japan's part-time-workers face problems similar to those faced by non-regular employees in other countries around the world—as evidenced by the thousands who recently staged labor protests in French cities.

Toshiki Okada was born in Yokohama in 1973, where he formed the theatre company chelfitsch in 1997. His use of Japanese slang and his unique choreography became his trademark. In 2005, Five Days in March (2004) won the 49th Kishida Drama Award and Okada also won Yokohama Cultural Award/Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement. As the representative of his country, he took part in “Stuecke'06/International Literature project in the course of the Football World Cup 2006.” In December of the same year, he produced Enjoy at New National Theatre, Tokyo. He has also served as the director for 2006-2007 Summit, an annual drama festival hosted by the Komaba Agora Theatre. chelfitsch recently toured Days in March to the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels.

The Play Company is an Obie-winning, international theatre company that develops and produces adventurous new plays by writers from all over the world. The company invites the New York City community of artists and audiences to engage with ideas and stories from other countries and cultures, and to experience American work in relation to what is being created in other parts of the world.

2:00 p.m., Saturday, September 29, 2007, Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!

Mikuni Yanaihara and Dan Safer/Witness Relocation (Japan, USA)

New York director Dan Safer/Witness Relocation will present a staged reading with excerpts from Mikuni Yanaihara’s The Blue Bird. Translated by Kameron Steele.

Mikuni Yanaihara is a choreographer and director of Nibroll, a company which she created in 1997. Since high school, when she began to dance, Yanaihara has won numerous awards for her work, including the NHK Award at a national high school dance competition. After graduating from university with a degree in dance, Yanaihara turned her sights on film and enrolled in film school. Yanaihara has taken Nibroll to a range of festivals including the Oregon Dance Festival, the San Francisco Butoh Festival, and the Berlin Fusion Festival.

The Blue Bird takes place in an unknown place somewhere deep in the forest. Seven scholars received a mission to search and breed the last fowl, “The Blue Bird,” from their country. They set off to the forest to find the Blue Bird. They gradually become convinced of the bird’s extinction and develop their own explanation why that happened. One day, during “Blue Hour,” they seem to see the bird. Inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 play The Blue Bird: a Fairy Play in Six Acts and a Japanese cartoon/anime Maeterlinck's Blue Bird (1980).

Dan Safer is the Artistic Director of Witness Relocation, based in New York City. He has presented his work across the US, Bangkok, Thailand, Danmark, and others. Dan's work has also been seen at Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Patravadi Theatre (Bangkok), Baltimore Theatre Project, The DanceNow Festival, Swarthmore College, NYU, The Pyramid Club, and other places, including the Classic Stage Company. He has performed with Hong Kong choreographer Dick Wong, Ridge Theater, Jane Comfort & Company, Mabou Mines, the Blacklips Performance Cult, and was once a go-go dancer. He founded and directed the Bangkok Performance Boot Camp, is part of the faculty at NYU. He is a recipient of the Six Points Fellowship from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

2:00 p.m., Saturday, September 29, 2007, Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!

Akio Miyazawa and Jay Scheib (Japan, USA)

Join us for the final presentation of the Segal Center's Japanese Playwright Project. American Director Jay Scheib will present a reading with excerpts from Akio Miyazawa’s At the Entrance of New Town (Japanese premiere: October 2007). Translated by John K. Gillespie.

At the Entrance of New Town deals with the vast suburbia, developed in the postwar years in Japan, around big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The space is now considered to be a kind of mythic urban space, where desires and hopes of the middle-class are reflected, refracted or buried. The play also has a connection to the Middle East, referring to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Akio Miyazawa, born 1956, is a novelist, playwright, director and filmmaker. Miyazawa is one of the leading little theatre figures since the 1990s in Japan. His Yuenchi Saisei Jigyo-dan, a theatre unit that began with the production of Yuenchi Saisei (Regenerating Amusement Park, 1990), kept producing idiosyncratic but basically well-made theatrical works such as Hinemi (’92), which was awarded the prestigious Kishida Playwright’s Award, Chikaku no Niwa (The Garden of Perception, ’95), and Juyonsai no Kuni (The Country of the Fourteen-Year-Old, ’98), and stopped its activity temporarily in 1999, with Suna ni Shizumu Tsuki (The Moon Drowning under the Sand). Miyazawa wrote and directed Tokyo Body (2002-2003). After his ground-breaking experimental work Tokyo/Absence/Hamlet(2005), Miyazawa created Motorcycle Don Quixote, the noh-inspired Nue and At the Entrance of New Town.

Jay Scheib’s recent works include last year's staging of Argentinean author Daniel Veronese's Women Dreamt Horses, first presented as a work in progress at the Prelude Festival in New York City followed by its critically acclaimed premier at Performance Space 122 as part of BAiT–Buenos Aires in Translation Festival. He directs in Italy, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia. A recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for directors, Jay Scheib is currently Associate Professor of Music and Theatre Arts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum Institute für Regie und Schauspiel in Salzburg Austria. Special thanks to Shoshana Polanco, producer of Jay Scheib’s work.

6:30 p.m., Monday, November 19, 2007, Martin E. Segal Theatre. Free!