Interview with Toshiki Okada

THE CREATION PROCESS

Could you tell me more about how Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Farewell Speech came about? I believe you started from an existing play, Air Conditioner (2004), and later added two new pieces so that the three sections together came to form one performance.

Last year, the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin organised a Japan-themed festival to which chelfitsch was also invited. The theatre proposed we would present Air Conditioner but it is a very short play. So we decided to create an extended version of Air Conditioner. Hence the performance was made for a particular occasion.

Air Conditioner is also the play that made the dance world take notice of your work, whereas until then chelfitsch had mainly been active in the field of theatre. It is about a female employee telling a male colleague that the air conditioning is set too high. There is no real (developing) story. Instead it introduces a specific situation and investigates how text and movement develop from this situation. I think that the idea to develop this play into a performance with a story is in and of itself very unusual.

It is true that the story of Air Conditioner does not evolve. However, I thought the piece did have the potential to present as a narrative, even by simply adding sections before and after that depict people who find themselves in different circumstances than the characters in Air Conditioner. In other words, I figured that even if I wouldn’t touch Air Conditioner it would still be capable of carrying part of the story. Consequently, I wasn’t really thinking about the continuity or consistency of the narrative. In addition, I added subtle variations in terms of the form used in each of the three sections. I wanted to create a performance that could also be seen as presenting three different approaches to the relationship between music and the body. I made this performance thinking that if I could successfully pull off these two objectives, this would open up new directions for my work, and that it would be great if this happened.

ADOPTING THE STRUCTURE OF THE MUSIC

In all three sections of the performance, you play the respective music tracks used in their entirety, from the beginning to the end. In Hot Pepper you use John Cage, in Air Conditioner Stereolab and Tortoise, and in The Farewell Speech John Coltrane. The music selection really reflects your personality. Did you decide from the very beginning that you would play the songs in their entirety?

I personally like playing complete tracks. Also, stopping a piece of music in the middle doesn’t seem quite right. It feels like an impolite way to use music. In addition, every piece of music has its own structure and I wanted to use that structure. Borrowing it as it is in a way makes things easy. In other words, it suffices to lean on the structure of the music. For instance, one can write a text that corresponds to the length of the music. I would just come in with a text of an appropriate length for a specific track and then have the actors perform it. If it turned out shorter than the music, I would just write some more; if it turned out longer than the music, I’d cut some. That’s how we proceeded with the rehearsals. In this performance, it is essential that the end of the song and the end of the text coincide. For the actors this is quite challenging. Not only do they have to talk while moving, they also have to listen to the music and synchronise the text to the music. We use monitor speakers so the actors can hear the music. Normally these aren’t used in theatre. In any case, it makes a difference whether you use complete tracks or use the music in another way; or whether you follow the structure of the music or apply your own structure and use the music to support this structure. That’s a very big difference, don’t you think?

Yes. In general, the latter is the case, isn’t it?

Probably. However, it is a fact that something interesting happens when you decide to follow the structure of the music. There are things that do not surface when you make work based on your own ideas.

That is the most important characteristic of this performance. In the first section you use contemporary/experimental music, in the second post-rock, and in the third free jazz. The musical quality of each of the compositions and the atmosphere of the different sections fit together perfectly, I think. This might naturally be the case, as the performance follows the structure of the music, but I felt that in Hot Pepper the movements of the actors really reflected the scattered and dissociated dispersal of sounds in Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes For Prepared Piano. In Air Conditioner, the common element between Stereolab and Tortoise is repetition. In this section, the movements of the dancers are also the most minimal, aren’t they? And the same gestures and lines are repeated. And in The Farewell Speech the exaltation of the long speech and the extraordinary climax in Coltrane’s composition come together to form the perfect culmination for the performance. There is a real sense of a conclusion.

There is, isn’t there? But when you think about why you have that feeling, it is because the music ends. That’s really all it is. On the level of the text, there’s nothing more to it then “the speech is over, well done.” Without the music, there wouldn’t be much to it.

CHOREOGRAPHY

I would also like to ask you about the stage direction. As I mentioned earlier, Air Conditioner was very well received as a dance performance as well. All three sections of this play as well contain a story and are theatre plays, but they can also be regarded as dance. I am interested in how you developed the actors’ movements for this performance specifically.

Okada: I think that creating movements in correspondence with words actually spoken on stage is quite different from dance choreography. I believe words play a part in most choreographic practice. To provide an image for a movement, a choreographer gives his dancers words to work with. But in my approach there is a distance to the words; it relies on the image an actor uses to speak these words and the point from which this image originates. I don’t match the movements to the music, nor do they correspond strictly to the words spoken. It is fine as long as the movements originate from the image used at the time. By using images in this way, the actor does not have to be concerned with how to move his body himself. He is liberated, as it were, from the position of the operator, the one responsible for the actions of his own body. As a result, he becomes extremely free.

You mean that he doesn’t have to do it himself? Even though he is the one doing it.

That’s right. He has the sense that something outside of himself is doing it for him, and that he is just following.

LOST GENERATION

When looking back at chelfitsch’s oeuvre so far, it becomes clear that many of your plays depict young Japanese workers. This is true for Air Conditioner, Five Days in March, Enjoy, and Freetime. After seeing The Farewell Speech through to the end, I felt that all sections are very much connected thematically.

Why am I so stuck on this subject? I am not sure. But for some reason it has become the foundation of my work. For instance, when I started working on Enjoy I was making a living as a part-timer myself. But even so, I was commissioned to create a new play by the prestigious New National Theatre. That’s why I felt quite strongly about writing something that I was able to write precisely because I had been a part-time worker. I thought that this issue had moved to the background by now, but apparently that isn’t the case.

Watching the performance, I sensed that work-related problems in contemporary Japanese society, including irregular employment, are part of your own reality and an essential aspect of your work.

As a child I could never have imagined that Japan would fall to such depths economically. After all, in our social studies schoolbooks, all we saw was industrialisation, GNP, and graphs with rising curves. But when I actually reached the age to enter the workforce, conditions had changed dramatically. So I have the feeling that I was forced to change my perception of things. This feeling might be unique to our generation. I think our experience is different from that of those who are a bit younger and stepped out into the world when things had already changed, as well as from that of those who are slightly older and for whom things changed some time after they entered the workforce. This feeling, the sense that one gets the ladder pulled out from under one’s feet somewhere half-way through, is likely a very “local” thing. I think it is a problem particular to the generation born after 1970 in the specific, local space that is Japan. This local confusion is probably what I am always giving shape to. In any case, I am confused now. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got it all wrong (laughter).

To this so-called Lost Generation, employment is the most pressing concern, but it doesn’t stop there. It is often pointed out that young people also feel a very strong sense of misfortune. However, in your work, and this is the case already in Five Days in March, even if such concerns are ever-present, the way in which they are transformed into a performance is not straightforward, and I mean this in a positive way. It is presented in a form that includes a proper critical interpretation.

I think that is probably because I always somehow want to acknowledge the situation I find myself in. Even if it is something that cannot be acknowledged at all, whatever one turns this material into (in my case a play), the result should be interesting. I always strive to achieve that kind of acknowledgment. I cannot take on a more active position and actually change those things. I don’t have the ability or the courage to do that.

PRESENTING LOCAL TOPICS INTERNATIONALLY

This piece deals with topics that could be considered specific to Japan, such as disagreements about the temperature of the air conditioning in an office, and the free magazine Hot Pepper. People abroad must wonder what Hot Pepper is, don’t you think? What are your thoughts on using domestic themes and contexts that audiences abroad are perhaps not familiar with?

Making a play called Hot Pepper is strange anyway. Why would a free magazine filled with discount coupons for local bars even be called Hot Pepper? Probably in a few decades, the Japanese too won’t understand anymore what Hot Pepper means. I don’t think this magazine will last very long either. But the absurdity of the play’s content, a discussion about where to throw a farewell party for a fellow temp who has been fired, will still resonate, I think. Therefore, I don’t think it makes sense to cut out local topics just because they won’t come across abroad. Of course there is also no use in deliberately forcing such topics onto an audience that doesn’t share the same context. When we started to perform more often in Europe, I became concerned about getting caught up in exoticism. I think that there was even a time when I didn’t know how to keep the right distance and things got a bit confused. But with this play, I feel that I was able to escape such concerns. I succeeded in making an honest performance, one that does not play the exotic card nor is too alienating.

In that sense one could then call this performance a turning point for chelfitsch. I’m looking forward to seeing your future work.

Interview by Atsushi Sasaki

March 2010