KAMOME-ZA (Japan)
Satō Makoto
Saitō Shigeo
Shima Takeshi
Iina Naoto
Imamura Azusa
Suzuki Akitomo
E-RUN
Fueda Uichirō, Shimizu Kanji, Nishimura Takao, Sun Jing, Tang Qin
83 minutes (part 1), 76 minutes (part 2)
About the performance
The scars of the past hundred years of history – to the hope of a hundred years in the future.
This is the second year of the three-year project that began in 2011 to explore the possibilities of arts and culture from the present to the future through tradition among Japanese and Chinese theater artists and researchers. Danny Yung (Hong Kong), one of the leading directors of contemporary theater in Japan and China, and Satō Makoto (Artistic Director of ZA Koenji) have been working together with Nō and Kunqu opera performers on the Spirits Play by Kuo Pao Kun (Singapore), a playwright who casts a look at “reconciliation and symbiosis” in Asia’s recent past. As a culmination of this process, the play will be performed in Singapore and Japan this year, the 10th anniversary of Kuo Pao Kun’s death. A chaotic world of spirits, where the tangible and the intangible intermingle. Five souls (a general, a mother, a soldier, a daughter, and a poet) who lost their lives in a war far from home and are still wandering in the land gather to discuss their harsh past and their longing for home. The other four spirits, who blame the general for leading the war, eventually reveal that they are also part of the war. Through interviews with victims of the Pacific War in Japan, this work was born out of the artist’s activities in the last years of his life, in which he tried to reexamine the atrocities of war as an issue of the roots of humanity, beyond the image of victims and perpetrators.
KAMOME-ZA
Theater company KAMOME-ZA is a private theater company led by Satō Makoto, a convinced and eternally dissatisfied theater maker. Since its establishment in 1990, it has consistently continued its modest small-theater activities, advocating “ultra-private theatre,” in order to leave small traces of fingernail scratches in the theatrical environment that I would like to call “Tokyo theatre”.
Satō Makoto
He is a playwright, theater director, tepresentative of Wakabacho Wharf. He has been one of the central figures in the Japanese small theater movement since the mid-1960s. In addition to directing a wide range of stage productions, he has been actively involved in discussions and practice concerning the boundaries between theater and society. In recent years, he has been devoting himself to the formation of alternative networks in the performing arts with neighboring Asian cities. He is currently the representative of Wakabacho Wharf and artistic director of ZA-KŌENJI (Suginami Art Hall).
Kuo Pao Kun
A leading playwright and director in contemporary Asia. Born in China in 1939, he moved to Singapore in 1949 and was educated in Mandarin and English. He studied at the National Theatre School in Sydney from 1963, and founded the Practice Performing Arts School in Singapore in 1965. As a theater educator, he has trained many of Singapore’s talented young theater artists, and has also been actively involved in producing many outstanding stage productions, including one by which he was imprisoned for depicting social themes. His plays, written in Chinese and English, have been widely introduced in Asia, Australia, and Europe, and have received high acclaim. His representative works include The Coffin Won’t Fit (1984), No Parking on Odd Days (1986), Strange Girl and Funny Old Tree (1989), and Descendants of Admiral Eunuch (1995). He passed away in 2002.
