Artist Interview アーティストインタビュー

ままごとのように演劇を遊ぶ柴幸男の新発想
play
Playing theater like playing house The new approach of Yukio Shiba
Yukio Shiba (Mamagoto)
In February 2010, Yukio Shiba won Japan’s prestigious Kishida Drama Award for his play
Wagahoshi
(Our Planet), a rap musical played out on a bare stage with a white circle painted in the middle of the floor space to represent the Earth and telling the life story of a girl named Chii (= earth) who lives there. In his plays, Shiba has employed techniques from music such as sampling and looping and introduced a number of innovative new concepts and devices that transcend the conventions of traditional theater, such as having one actor play only one role, and with them he succeeds in creating everyday situations and characters that the audience can put themselves into and identify with. Among these works are
Hanpuku Katsu Renzoku
(Repetition and Continuation), in which a single actress performs multiple roles to act out a scene of a large family at breakfast, and
Ayumi
(Walking/Stepping/Progress), where a conversation between two girls is acted out by a group of ten actors while walking continuously. We spoke with Shiba about the new creative methods he pursues in each work in projecting kaleidoscopic images of the commonplace on the stage, and what he means by his theater concept of adults “playing house” (
mamagoto
).
Interviewer: Akihiko Senda