My hotel, and visiting rehearsal

I am braindead. It's only 11pm.

Here are some pics from my hotel. The outside of the hotel actually looks pretty awesome. Gently rounded and egg-shaped, with perfectly symmetrical square windows, equidistant from one another. Reminiscent of a large cruise ship for aliens rather than a hotel. The inside not as cool as the outside.


Dan R and I visited a rehearsal led by Toshiki Okada. It was a sort of combination pick-up rehearsal for Five Days in March, but also a session for us to observe how he usually works with his actors. I spent most of the time with my head exploding from the weirdness... that I cannot articulate -- partially, like, why are these Japanese people so dead in their faces and sullen and silent, or why are they so self-involved, or why is he giving the same direction over and over without any observable outcome? It is hard to know what is normal when we are sitting there, Dan & I, "observing" outsiders -- totally not normal. Looking back on it now (and after 5 hours of sleep -- now it's 6am) I think it was just all the actors being polite and not being certain of who we were, and Okada really trying to get some work done. ANYWAYS...

Some ideas that came up (about Okada's work):

Root impetus is the IMAGE (this can be of an event, of a space, of a conversation) which results in two manifestations, one of which is the text, and the other, the movements of the body -- and neither are necessarily dependent or linked to one another. They are both born of (independently) the original image.

Something he said which I found interesting (and perhaps questionable): that Japanese people have a much less pronounced sense of "public" compared to westerners. His observation is that, for example, the train is a semi-private space. And that is why so many people are sleeping on the train. It's not that Japanese people are so tired. He thinks that if people had an awareness of how public riding the train is, they wouldn't fall asleep on the train no matter how tired they are.

The opening exercise he did with his actors is something he uses to audition people. It is an investigation into finding non-performative (non-demonstrative/non-indicative) movement. He has someone simply describe the layout of their living space. (for example: My house is part of our family-run shop, so there are the storefront shutters that make a lot of noise, and that's where we all go in and come out. Right when you get inside, there's the common area living space and then there's like this narrow hallway where...etc.) While he is describing the space, he will inevitably be using physical gestures to indicate some details of the space, but also using some gesture unconsciously. In other words, whether the gesture itself is abstracted or literal, the actors may be using it literally, or unconsciously -- and this unconscious use of gesture is what he is after. Once that actors is finished with his description, the next actor must describe to the best of his ability the last person's living space. This is not so much about imitating the last guy, or trying to mimic his gestural or vocal patterns, but it is about being able to strongly visualize and imagine a space you don't actually know first-hand and describing it as descriptively as possible. Then the actor describes his own living space and the chain goes on. So there is a gap, he claims, in how precise and detailed the description of your own house is, compared to the description of a house you've never been to. The aim is to heighten one's imagination and attention to detail to strengthen the image in one's mind, so that something you are only imagining is as detailed and strong of an image as something you actually know. Okada uses this exercise to seek out people who have a really strong sense of connection to that image (both in terms of text and physically -- but not in s performative way) and also to find people whose habitual physical movements he finds interesting.

OK I could say a lot in reaction to what I observed, but I will save it for another time to process. I wish I'd taken more pictures, but somehow the vibe wasn't right... Here people are getting ready to leave the rehearsal room during a break.

The space where he rehearses used to be a huge wedding banquet hall, back when people had these out of control humongoid weddings. That trend has since passed, and the city of Yokohama came into the disused space, which they turned into rehearsal space. How awesome is that? The particular room we were in had a shinto shrine embedded into the wall -- where couples used to get married. (you can see part of it in the above pic w Dan)

After rehearsal we went out to an izakaya. After 3 glasses of beer and very little to eat I was jetlagged and drunk -- and so too, apparently, was Dan. The actors warmed up to us a bit more in this informal setting. The food there was not enough so when Dan and I got back to the hotel we went out again to a donburi (rice bowl) place -- it was a 24 hour joint where you buy food coupons at the door. Not bad.

Schedule for today is: eat breakfast, work on script, meet up with Dan and do script work, go to the New National Theater to observe rehearsals, go out to a comic book cafe with Toshiki afterwards. Keep waking at 5am, which means zonked by 10pm...