Artist Interview アーティストインタビュー

高齢者と若者と共に民衆史のリアルに立ち向かう
蜷川幸雄の新たな船出
play
Yukio Ninagawa’s new theatrical venture
Confronting the realities the common people’s history together with the elderly and young people
Yukio Ninagawa is certainly one of Japan’s busiest theater directors today. A glance at the calendar of projects he is involved in from this year into next year shows that he is undertaking a succession of ambitious projects in his capacities as artistic director of the commercial-base Bunkamura Theater Cocoon and the public Sai-no-Kuni Saitama Arts Theater. In March he worked with playwright
Hisashi Inoue
, known for his works rich in humor and deep knowledge of his subjects, to present his new work
Musashi
. In May he presented a re-staging of the play
Ame no Natsu, Sanjunin no Juliet ga Kaette Kita
(Summer of Rain, the return of 30 Juliets) by
Kunio Shimizu
, a playwright with whom Ninagawa has worked for many years on Theater Cocoon productions, and in June he restaged his Kabuki-version Shakespeare play
NINAGAWA Twelfth Night
and gave London performances. In September he presented the nine-hour work
Coast of Utopia
by Tom Stoppard, and in November he presents
12 Angry Men
. For January of next year he will be directing a debut performance of
Chi wa Tattamama Nemutteiru
, the first play ever written by Shuji Terayama. In March he presents the 22nd sequel in the Saitama Arts Theater’s program to present the full works of Shakespeare, which features this time
Henry VI
(in a shortening of the original triptych into a diptych with a total stage time of six hours).
Another center of attention in Ninagawa’a activities is the two projects he has launched since assuming the position of artistic director at the Saitama Gold Theater in 2006. One is for unknown or amateur seniors over 55 years of age that is dedicated to “searching for a new form of theater based on personal histories” and nurturing professional stage actors. The other is called Saitama Next Theater and is dedicated to training and nurturing the next generation of young actors. This October, Saitama Next Theater presented its first production, a play titled
Sanada Fuunroku
by Yoshiyuki Fukuda, a playwright who would eventually have a strong influence on contemporary Japanese theater. This play stands as a masterpiece of Japan’s 1960s, a time when the country was shaken by student political revolt and a revolution in theater that brought a shift from the
Shingeki
(New Theater) movement to the avant-garde Small Theater movement. As a thespian of the era of student revolt, Ninagawa has taken up the task with his young actors of re-evaluating this and other works from that era of revolution and innovation. In this interview he speaks about this endeavor with Next Theater and its reflection of his personal views on theater, and about his activities with the elderly members of his Gold Theater in search of new forms of theater.
(Interviewer: Akihiko Senda; venue: Saitama Arts Theater, Sept. 28, 2009)