Toshiki Okada: euphoria after Fukushima

In Time's journey through a room Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada revisits the fleeting state of euphoria which he and many other Japanese experienced after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

Brussels and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts were among the first to invite the now internationally acclaimed Toshiki Okada outside of Japan. In 2013, Okada and his troupe held the world première of Ground and floor here in Brussels. This year, we'll have the European première of Time's journey through a room. "Both plays address the way Japanese people are still struggling with the consequences of the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011," Okada explains. "Moreover, they both feature a character that is, in fact, a ghost. In a movie, you'd have to add special effects, make the character transparent. In theater, you just put an actor on scene saying that he's a ghost. By the way: both actors and ghosts only exist when they are seen by somebody else."

Okada needs the ghost to tell his story. "I wanted to go back tot the moment of euphoria which people had after Fukushima. It may seem odd, but I experienced that feeling myself after that terrible disaster. The crisis seemed to entail that our problematic society would change. Unfortunately, the feeling and the momentum quickly subsided. Thanks to the ghost character, I can bring it back. A woman who died shortly after the earthquake still has that euphoric feeling and disturbs her husband's thoughts with it.'

OBJECT CHOREOGRAPHY

Okada connects each of his three actors with a specific object on stage. "We thought of a way to make the actor and the object collaborate. For the actors, this was the most demanding production I've ever staged." The action is confined to a limited space, a huis clos, "because ghosts have to stay in the place where they once lived, the room that contains their memories." The actors perform their texts with the eccentric body movements that are characteristic for Okada's work. "Consider it a choreography made by the actors. I never tell them how to move. They create images in their minds based on the texts, and those images determine how they move."

TIME'S JOURNEY THROUGH A ROOM
May 6 to 12, in Japanese (Dutch and French surtitles), Beursschouwburg, www.kunstenfestivaldesarts.be