Artist Interview アーティストインタビュー

投影された文字と俳優が絡む
メール世代の新演劇
play
A new type of e-mail/texting generation theater
Actors interact with projected words
Suguru Yamamoto (playwright, theatre director)
Suguru Yamamoto is a rising playwright and director born in 1987. While a student at Japan’s Oberlin University in 2007, he started a theater company named Hanchu-Yuei. In, 2010, Kazuki Takakura, a graduate of Tokyo Zokei University, joined the group as art director and helped create productions with a pop and ironical flavor. In 2013, he presented the group’s representative play
Yojo X
(Girl X)
, staged with a screen on which the words spoken by unseen characters like the voice of god appear in text superimposed on the screen and interacting with the actors. This play won the attention of people in the theater world as a form of expression symbolic of the e-mail/texting generation that communicates through text messages and images via their cell phones. In 2014, Yamamoto and his group were invited to perform this play in Malaysia and Thailand, where it was well received and won the Best Play and Best Script awards at the Bangkok Theater Festival 2014. In this interview we speak with Yamamoto about how he arrived at this new form of expression using projected words and the challenges he is undertaking in theater.
Interviewer: Masashi Nomura [producer / dramaturg]