Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company
Tue. 20 September 2022, 19.00
On 20th September the show will be followed by a discussion with the director hosted by Nikodem Karolak, the director of InlanDimensions International Arts Festival
The Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre
Tickets:
Languages: Japanese with Polish captions
In Sartre’s drama Lizzie moves to the south of the United States. She is on a train when four white men harass her. Two black men defend her, and a fight ensues. In the fight, Thomas kills the black man that was with The Negro. He is arrested. He is a nephew of the rich Senator Clarke. The Negro escapes, and the other white men spread the rumor that he had raped Lizzie, so that Thomas shooting the other black man would become acceptable. Kim Sujin transforms the original text and adapts it to current situation in Korea and Japan. Sahel Rosa, an Iranian model and actress working in Japan, plays the lead role. Sahel was orphaned in the Iran-Iraq War at age four, then adopted and moved to Japan with her adopted mother.
Kim Sujin
Kim Sujin (1954) and his Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company attest to the variety of styles employed in recent works by resident Korean artists in Japanese literature and theatre. The appearance of his plays and films is connected to the changing identities of resident Koreans, especially since the 1980s. Kim makes use of political theatre performances of the earlier period to magnify and to remake into art the experiences of resident Koreans in Japan. As such, his works mobilize the legacy of his antecedents in Japanese theatre as well as the past experiences of resident Koreans. Instead of enacting an essential Korean ethnicity or culture onstage or through films, Kim inclines toward denoting migration, hybridity and being situated as betwixt and between. By doing so, his works depict the distinct niche occupied by resident Koreans in Japan, which distinguishes them from both the Koreans on the mainland and the Japanese.
Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company
Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company is a Tokyo-based ensemble renowned throughout Japan and internationally for its tent-theatre performances, large-scale, elaborate mis-en-scene, acute comedy and unique stylistic brush-strokes. The company was established in 1987 and is led by charismatic director and actor, Kim Sujin. By the reinterpretation of The Situation Theatre coined by the legendary Tokyo playwright Kara Jūrō, their adaptations of Kara's work have delighted audiences with its complex and surreal tragicomedy and farce. Kara's theatre draws on Kabuki - the garish cousin of classical Noh theatre; employing poor-theatre stage and costume transformation. His plots and manner of story-telling fall into the theatre of absurd genre – hair of a dead sister pulled from the brother's abdomen (Cry From the City of Virgins), lovers descending to Hades populated by Kamikaze pilots (Matasaburō of the Wind), or reincarnating prostitutes murdered for gold teeth by Japanese soldiers during the Manchuria invasion (John Silver: The Beggar of Love). Kara has blazed a trail through the political minefield of Japanese nationalist politics, producing a theatre at once subversive and celebrating the culture of Japan. Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company continues to perform Kara's plays – just recently the 70th production Bengal Tiger was premiered in their tent at Hanazono Shrine. In Kara's topsy-turvy travesty of Takeyama Michio’s novel, together with a whole platoon of Japanese soldiers, private Mizushima strums Home Sweet Home on the Burmese harp as they collect the remains of their fallen dead in wicker trunks. Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company also has a long history of producing politically delicate historical dramas. For instance, Toraji, based on Oh Tae-suk’s play about rebellion within Korea leads up to a Japanese invasion at the turn of the twentieth century. The Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku’s adaptation toured to Korea in 2011, at the Doosan Arts Centre, Seoul and Jeongju, and was seen as a step to mend the long troubled relation between Japan and Korea. It's an indication of the vital role that Kim Sujin plays in fostering good relations between the countries. He is zainichi,meaning Korean living in Japan. Thus, his mixed roots have provided a platform for theatre culture to flow between the two nations. Shinjuku Ryōzanpaku Theatre Company has received awards from the Japanese Agency of Culture, and toured USA (NY), Canada, Germany, France (Festival D’Avignon), China, Taiwan and Korea, Australia (Japan Australia Year of Exchange 2006) and Brazil (Cultural Exchange Festival). In 2002, it collaborated with companies in Korea to create the original performance The Space Between for the Japan/Korea World Cup Arts Festival. In 2007 they toured the original play King Yebi (a collaboration with Theatre 1980), to the Seoul Nazan Arts Centre and the Ishou International Theatre Festival. In 2010 they ventured into the liminal world of The Little Prince, an interpretation employing all of director Sujin Kim and his company member's considerable staging magic - the production is a collaboration with Theatre 1980, a Kichijōji Project. His adaptation of King Lear, titled King Yebi was presented at the 25th Shakespeare International Theatre Festival in Gdansk in 2021.
Credits
Kim Sujin
Jean Paula-Sartre’a
Otsuka Satoshi
Sahel Rosa, Satō Masayuki, Fujita Yoshiaki, Shimamoto Kazuto, Akahi Mariko, Miyazawa Hisashi, Matsuhima Kenta, Honma Misa
Onuki Takashi
Izumi Tsuguo, Takase Yūsuke
Okawa Taeko
Pae So
Nikodem Karolak
100 min
The Respectful Prostitute is performed in Poland thanks to the financial support of:
