An Interview with TOSHIKI OKADA on 16th February 2008 (after the first run through rehearsal)

Your latest work, “Freetime,” is an international collaborative production with performance festivals in Brussels, Vienna and Paris. What was the response to “Five Days in March” during your European tour last year?

Okada: First of all, I think that, once the performance starts, even people who don’t understand Japanese will quickly realize that there is a lack of correlation between the actors’ gestures and speech. They are clearly not in tandem. The next step is to get the audience to extrapolate from that discovery and reflect on themselves like, “These performers on the stage seem to be making completely meaningless movements, but hey, if you think about it, don’t we make these same movements to some extent in our every lives?” As long as the audience can grasp that much, I think I have got the very basic meaning of our performance across to them. When we put on our show in Paris and Brussels last year, that basic part of the performance went off very well and we were well received, though it might well have been the case that we simply had translators who did an excellent job and an open-minded, welcoming audience. I don’t really know how pieces other than “Five Days in March” would fare, but I wouldn’t say anything’s impossible—I was able to confirm it for myself and the feedback was tremendous.

Building from that success, you now have the long-awaited production “Free Time.” I heard that you began working on it in October of last year.

Okada: That is right. I began by having a number of actors read the fragmentary text I wrote. We tried it out first in Kitakyushu, and did some tweaks based on that result, really focusing on the small details. If, from the beginning until the end, you can write a script that has a tight structure, then to some extent that structure will carry the work. But I went with a method that refused such a structure and wrote down fragments.

Is that tied into your basic intent for the production?

Okada: Since it is more interesting for various things to come out of rehearsal, I realized I wanted to make it with that kind of structure. But even if something interesting comes to light, if the structure is just a little too tight, then you just won’t have any room to fit it in. So I went with a text that doesn’t have any structure. It’s just that by doing it this way, you have to give yourself a lot of time.

The theme of your work, then, is “freedom.” Please tell us your prompt in choosing this theme?

Okada: Well, it basically comes down to my having created all kinds of works up until now. I thought that I wanted to continue with the things I had grappled with in “Enjoy” and so naturally freedom kind of became the theme. Also, performing the Beckett piece Cascando last year was a good experience. I thought about “politics” for example. When you speak of politics, you usually think of the word being used in a situation like, “What do you think about this or that problem?” Cascando is a piece written about what goes on in the head of a man who doesn’t do anything—and isn’t that in some way political?

By that are you saying that the life of someone who doesn’t do anything isn’t ever simply apolitical?

Okada: I’m saying that passivity isn’t apolitical. Passivity is different from abandoning politics, and doesn’t exactly stand out more than something that is active. In other words, it comes down to each of us living the hours of our lives—how do you decide, or not decide, or have it decided, or have it not decided? Since politics influences that, it influences each and every one of us in a big way. The world over, we are a society under surveillance. Capital seeps into every corner of our lives and we can’t run away. Things like this are being mentioned quite often. For example, it would be difficult even to pass your leisure time without a flood of advertisements. “Give us a break, that’s not leisure or free time at all,” I can hear some people protesting. Maybe they are right. But despite all that, I think there is freedom in this life. There’s a definite part of me that doesn’t want to lose touch with that.

So it’s not only about whether you have freedom; it’s also concerned with problems of degree—how big or how little your freedom is.

Okada: That’s right. Maybe you could say something like, “Only a bad loser pretends to derive what little satisfaction from some cheap imitation of freedom when there is actually little or none just so that s/he will be able to cope with the essentially unfree world.” That may well be the case, I sometimes wonder, but at the same time, I think it’s perfectly OK to call that freedom, and in fact, I believe, to a certain extent, that it would be wrong not to.

This time, Koizumi Atsuhiro of the instrumental band Sangatsu (March), whose song was used in your “Five Days in March,” will be in charge of music.

Okada: I really liked his first album, “March.” For sometime, I had a vague wish to deal with the Iraq War in my work. Without having settled on a title, I was listening to a track called “Five Days” from “March” and decided to create a story about going to a “love hotel” for five days spanning the beginning of the Iraq War on March 21st. I left the title just as it was (laughter).

I’m quite surprised to hear that you first had the music in mind and then came up with the play and the title, especially since the play’s setting fitted perfectly with the song, and the way you used the music didn’t seem contrived at all.

Okada: I was quite touched by the song so there really wasn’t any problem with it. Of course, getting Koizumi involved from the very start and creating the piece while working together like we are doing this time is much more fun.

What do you think of the role music plays in chelfitsch’s productions?

Okada: I think music is both necessary and effective in expanding space where words have little import. For me, simply superimposing sounds on an imagery when it is trying to expand through the words and physical movements of the actors is boring. It’s almost like dumping really strong sauce over something that’s already delicious. Using music like that is just a waste. Instead, I want several actors on stage all laying claim to that space on different levels, and beyond that, I want music to add yet another dimension. If you have some sort of incidental synchronization of sound that makes you feel a swell of emotion beyond the actors’ expanding imagery, then at that point something quite enchanting and ineffable will occur.

Also, a TORAFU-produced stage design is superb. Not just recreating a family restaurant, the set seems to trigger a series of interesting bodily movements on the part of the actors.

Okada: In my meeting with TORAFU, we talked about the things I’ve been thinking about lately, things like how in dramatic representation, no matter how you approach mimesis (imitation of reality), you end up not being able to create the perfect representation of an object; similarly, even if you try to defamiliarize that object and run as earnestly as you can away from mimesis, it is just as hopeless. And from that, we got the set you see. These guys are geniuses (laughter).

In your previous productions, you didn’t have what we would normally call “sets.” This one seems to depart from your works in the past. Does this reflect any change in your dramaturgy?

Okada: With “Five Days in March,” for example, we had a situation with no stage set where someone was saying something, and that in a sort of hearsay model—I created the work thinking that something would come out of all that. But “Free Time” was a little different. Even though there are tables and chairs, everything up to fifty centimeters from the ground is gone. What we have is an imperfect imitation of a family restaurant, but I just love that perfect degree of imperfection. We’ve created a mechanism where facile identification with the people in the family restaurant is absolutely impossible. It allows us to have an honest performance. It’s such a great set.

The set ingeniously makes it seem as if everything were suspended in the air, reinforcing that peculiar feeling we get when seeing the actors on your stage performing neither as narrators nor characters in the conventional senses of these terms.

Okada: If we are doing any serious thinking about anything in “Freetime,” we are asking a set of questions like, “What does it mean for an actor to play a role or identify with a given character?” or “How does one deal with a certain type of impossibility on stage?” You know, it gives the actors a lot of freedom when they are, from the very beginning, completely disillusioned about the possibility of perfect identification with their characters. It feels very liberating, even if that kind of freedom can sometimes be extremely exacting for the actors.

Your style seems to demonstrate that Stanislavskian (a style in which events are re-enacted) may well be part of Brechtian (a style in which events are narrated). Or perhaps, your style is evolving into something new that dialectically sublates these two seemingly opposite styles.

Okada: Actually, I now believe that’s totally possible. I know that talking about doing it is one thing and actually doing it is another. And, I have to admit I’m asking so much of the actors. But, you know, addressing the issue of representation is vital for any dramatist. If you have come up with a definite answer to this question, then you have pretty much figured out what the theatre is all about. Right now, I’m so excited to be writing and directing this play because, at least for me, doing this gives me a chance to tackle that very issue.