What happaned in Oregon?

Boy I seriously pooped out on blogging my trip to Oregon. Mostly because I was working the whole time and didn't have a whole lot of tangible activity to report. Here's our beautifully sunlit room in which we spent most of day 2 & 3. There were many beautiful meals, because Emilya always makes sure that we are extremely well fed...
And there were several shows we caught at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the highlight of which was Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, which Juan was in. I'd forgotten how great Miller is, and was surprised at how Shakespearean in tragedy this play is

Theatrical collaboration, especially with people who you don't know very well, and with different backgrounds can be extremely challenging... ESPECIALLY when there is no designation of each person's role in the process and no hierarchy of decision-making in place. I feel fortunate that the two people I'm working with on the U.S. team of Ifdentity are very intelligent, imaginative, reasonable, resourceful and, basically, game.

I regret that we may have spent too much of our time talking about ideas and structures, and not enough time on our feet, figuring out the details of arc and what actually works (and doesn't work). Although we came out of the weekend (and are going into our trip to Spain next week) without a definite structure to our "piece", we do have strong scene-ideas and elements.

A bit I particularly liked was a sequence we made with the 10 yards of ivory muslin. The fabric is light and sturdy enough that we can mask our faces with it, drag each other across the floor on it, wrap ourselves and each other in it.

And then there were these masks...

working it out

Grey, mostly overcast day today, considerably colder than it was yesterday.We were back in our first working day today, refreshing our memories and throwing out a lot of new ideas. During our last work session in April, our exploration of "identity" led us to these thoughts:

Identity is a construct that is fluid and changes based on context. In other words, in the absence of relationship (whether with another individual or with any other entity) identity is moot. One identifies him/herself IN RELATION to an‘other’ -- the ‘other‘ is essential for the process of definition. The other can be an individual, a culture, the state, an institution, God, any other entity; anything that exists outside the self.

Identity functions on several levels – the personal, the socio-political, and the virtual. Identity may be forced upon an individual from the outside, or can be internally generated by the individual. The act of imposing identity begins with the impulse, whether external or internal, to examine , define, or label the individual. The process of constructing an identity to interface with the ‘other’ eventually becomes a process of compartmentalization, categorization and ultimately, fragmentation. The constructed identity (or avatar) can never be/represent the whole that is the person.

American Identity

As “Americans” we are citizens of a nation of immigrants. The mythology of the American Dream is founded on the belief in the freedom to succeed through hard work, without the constraints imposed by class, caste, race, or ethnicity. The reality is that we are essentially a nation of “others” attempting to establish a community and stake claim to our piece of the American Pie. The question of cultural/ethnic/racial identity becomes an imperative which sparks great anxiety, segregation, pride, confusion, contention and dissension. Name, race, facial and physical features are not definitive markers but become elusive signifiers of identification. The question that is repeatedly asked of us is: Where are you from? As if the subject cannot be a person of native origin or does not belong here. As Americans, displacement seems to be part of the given circumstances. Within that, hierarchies and power struggles emerge.

From here, we were filtering through some other ideas -- What is the theatrical identity, theatrical tradition in the U.S., and how do we as artists set ourselves in relation to these?
We shared a bunch of classic American movie clips with each other, since the tradition of cinema, we felt, was one of the strongest performance traditions in this country. Here are some highlights:






We also had this amazing swath of creme colored gauze fabric, which we were playing around with, veiling/unveiling, imprisoning, dragging each other's bodies across the floor with.

In the evening we got to see Our Town in the Globe Theater. It was very chilly in the evening, but beautiful. One of my favorite plays, actually, and one of my favorite playwrights. In fact the production of The Skin of Our Teeth that we put on in high school may have been one of the reasons I continued to pursue theater. Anyway, in the Globe, during the black outs, you could see the stars filling out the sky. Beautiful.

Time is Round

My friend Steve Kang and I, in college, used to sit around and talk about how time was not linear but parabolic. I can't remember what kind of proof we came up with in our Jack Daniels stupor, but it's an idea I've always thought about. When I was working on pictures of the drowned, the actors were talking about what they feared the most about the idea of death. I remember what Dario said, his fear was that death was a state of being perpetually stuck in whatever the final moment of your life was. So in other words, no matter how happy and wonderful a life you had, if the very moment of your death is of utter terror, that you would carry that state into the next place. This just made me think more about the linearity of time as a false perception... I'm just going to leave this thought at that because I don't know if I can really go any farther with it and be understood...

This morning I had a final meeting with Okada, his Company Manager Akane Nakamura, and their frequent Stage Manager So Ozaki. Under discussion were the subtitles for their upcoming U.S. tours, which I am preparing. They had toured to Singapore with my first draft translation, but found that the colloquialisms native to the U.S. were not comprehensible to audiences in Singapore, and hence the discussion about neutralizing the English -- or really, whether that would be a possible task, considering the super-colloquial tone of Okada's original language. Also, because in the Japanese the subject of a sentence is assumed and because Okada uses that to perpetuate an ambiguity (and ambivalence) in his mono/dialogues, how to handle this in translation into languages which cannot function without a specified subject? All fascinating linguistic issues -- to me anyway. Here is So -- he's from Kyoto.

And Akane with Okada. So cute.

After the meeting, So was actually just upstairs in the Opera City building working on an installation for an exhibition opening tomorrow. It was pretty awesome, actually, a dozen or so artists of different nationalities. There was an American artist with a video installation. Check out this photo.

That's me.
A few moments later...

The guy in the red is not a reaｌ person. Basically you walk into this room that have four little window monitors that are showing a live camera feed taken from the opposite side of the room. So if you are looking into one of these windows, you will be looking at yourself from behind, e.g. your butt. But then these other people show up in the frame, making noise and all, but if you turn to look back at them, in the room, you see that they are not there at all. It's like seeing a ghost. Eerie.

On Facebook, I got an e-mail from a friend of mine from high school, someone I hadn`t seen essentially since we graduated, over 15 years ago. And he lives in Tokyo. We decided to met up today -- it was lovely to catch up with Binzee.

He also was diagnosed 6 months ago with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was in between chemo sessions. I actually went to school with Binzee for seven years or something -- he was a class above me so we weren't super close. I just remember him as one of the most wholesome students -- student body president, tennis and soccer player, smart, handsome, liked by everyone. He has maintained an incredible optimism and strength through the last several months, I think. A beautiful & inspiring thing. His son Tyga is just over one year old.

The New National & Dan's last day

Thanks to last night's red wine (and the thicker curtain on my window which I hadn't used til now) I was able to sleep in this morning -- until 7.30AM!

I met up with Dan at 10.30AM because we had an appointment with Mamoru Ota, Producing Director, Drama Division of the New National Theatre, Tokyo. We made this appointment so that we could take a look at the actual theater that Enjoy was presented. And although Okada has been rehearsing in the studio at the New National all week, for some reason it took all this coordination and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo for us to just look at the Pit, the smallest theater in the complex. In fact, we almost backed out on the idea of trying to see the theater because, in reality it bears the least amount of actual inspiration or helpfulness for our purposes -- and besides, we'd seen the space on the DVD, how different can it be?

We waited under the watchful and doubtful gaze of the guards until Ota came to pick us up. The Pit is a humble modular blackbox, seating up to 300. OK I am being utterly facetious when I say humble. Really, it's like way better than St. Ann's Warehouse. I mean, it's huge, lots of height, a gajillion lighting instruments, totally flexible... I guess I'm not used to seeing legit like regional theater spaces or whatever, but I was very impressed. From the DVD the space looked kind of like a lecture hall and much smaller.




So today was Dan's last day in Japan. His brother Jason (aka the Magical Prince) had taken off to Hokkaido (from where he sent Dan a photo of a RIDICULOUS uni bowl -- most heinous food porn EVER) and Hinako had gone hiking somewhere, so we went on our own excursion: to Chofu. A suburb of Tokyo, there is a temple called Jindaiji there with an area famous for its soba noodles. Below, a sign in the restaurant detailing the cross section of a buckwheat grain, and how the noodles in this restaurant does not use the outer layer of the grain, which produces a lot of scum. Soba noodles, as commonly known, are purplish in color, but the soba here was white, and shaped like fettuccine.

Here is Dan looking mighty doubtful about his slimy nameko mshrooms.

After hitting the Yukari hot springs (which I will blog about another time) and the soba, we wandered through the Jindaiji Temple grounds,

then back towards the Parco Department store in front of the station. Danger!! I didn't realize Dan would be such a shopper. I think it must have been because of the "last day" syndrome that he had very little self-control in spending. He bought a bunch of stuff at Muji, a super-cute green messenger bag, ten pairs of socks at the Paul Frank store. He almost bought a pair of glasses at a store called "FAMOUSCRAP." The use of English here never ceases to amuse.

For our last dinner together we went back to the yakitori place he liked so much. We had the same waitress, who recognized us and was so sweet.
Some highlights:
Pork belly!
From left to right, two skewers of standard negima (chicken and green onion) and quail eggs;
Enoki wrapped in pork belly (which Dan claims he is going to be the first to introduce to Philly);Mozzarella Cheese wrapped in shiso seaweed -- hmmmm I understand what you're going for, but really, not so much -- plus that's not mozzarella cheese!?We had ice cream from a convenience store, and it was time to turn in. This was goodbye! Wow it's hard to imagine -- spending a week in Tokyo with someone you don't know very well, working and playing together, could have easily been a terrible disaster, but spending this time with Dan was truly a pleasure from beginning to end. Safe trip home!

Revelations and Reversals

I was determined today, to try to correct my sleep cycle. So although I did wake up at 5AM, I did not go back to sleep after breakfast, as is my body's inclination. Instead I lid a wet towel down on the nasty carpet, did a yoga practice, and worked until our 11AM meeting with Okada.

Okada wanted to take us to the restaurant where a young couple at the end of the play go to on their date, to eat stuffed cabbage, but the restaurant was closed for no specified reason, so instead we walked 10 minutes to an eel place. It was very good.
(Sorry I had already taken a few bites before I remembered to take a photo... Is that gross?)
Over lunch we started to review the script and some question points we had. Since sentences in Japanese do not need to specify a subject (most of the time the subject must be assumed from the context) it can lead to many misunderstandings. Okada also depends on the ingrained ambiguity of his mother language to communicate a sense of elusiveness (indecisiveness, for example) in his characters. We only had 90 minutes together before Okada has to go to rehearsal, which was not enough time to get really into the details.

After lunch, or in fact the whole morning I'd been feeling kind of shitty. Like woozy in the stomach, and just... kind of sick of being here (here in Tokyo, here in the hotel) dealing with this environment that asks something quite different of a person than New York or California. Kind of feeling squashed. And also hearing during the day about a bus-jacking that occurred in Aichi prefecture -- some 14 year old boy tried to jack a bus with two knives. WTF? I worked for a few hours alone on the script and then met up with Dan. He was particularly chipper today, or maybe it just seemed that way because he was wearing a lime green polo shirt. Over tea and juice and a fresh enormous delicious peach we went over many of our questions in the script and also laid out a casting schema for the play, and then walked over to the New National. Here is the Koushukaido highway you have to walk along to get there.
Huge, concrete.
I really wanted to walk through the water thing at the New National. I thought I might get arrested of something, but Dan encouraged me to do it.

At rehearsal, I was surprised to find that Okada had the actors working at the table. He must have realized it would be practically impossible to get these actors (unfamiliar with his work and methods) to speak and move in the way he wanted them to, so he was just focusing on their speaking. The direction remained the same -- to deliver the text with a singular intention that embodies what drive the whole sentence/phrase, without changing that intention through the course of saying it, without being swept into the dynamics of the words. Which in essence is to tell actors NOT TO ACT. He would make them repeat sentences three times until the meaning of the words were no longer being "performed" so that the words had to carry meaning by themselves, without the lilting of the voice or the support of emotional fluidity. Or sometime he would make them break up a sentence into three breaths.

Dan thought the actors looked extremely unhappy. It's hard for me to read Japanese people, honestly, but I thought they had no idea what Okada was talking about. Later Dan asked Okada if he liked any of these actors (the actors were selected by the theater -- Okada had never met them before) and Okada, after umming for a few moments, said no, not really. lol.

We went out for Chinese food for our first dinner -- this was the final meeting Okada and Dan would have together, because Okada is not available on Thursday. We went through our textual questions and schema. I think I forgot to mention this, but pretty early on this week, Okada had told Dan that, because Dan is a creator himself (as opposed to just a director), he felt that Dan should feel free to diverge from the specifics of the play text -- in order to realize the script more fully. I think this statement from Okada, is not only generous and trusting, but also indicates that he truly has his eye on the art, and NOT that he is attached to this or that detail, this turning of the phrase, that particular transition. It's a great great thing to have this liberty and to be able to give this liberty -- in my opinion a gift that makes this project a collaboration.

I was enormously tired after translating this conversation, but Dan's friend Hinako had invited Dan and me, and Dan's younger brother Jason, a photographer who arranged to be in Japan for some interviews, to the only Argentinian restaurant in Tokyo, EL CAMINITO run by Hinako's "second father".
It was a lovely evening and awesome food (I am sorry it was just too dark in the restaurant to take photos) and I learned so many things about Dan that surprised me.

1. He hates Woody Allen and the Coen Brother. (Um, WHAT?!)
2. But at least the original Star Wars (esp SW & Empire) were formative influences
3. He went to Collegiate (a fact that somehow he really did not want me to blog about -- but which was interesting to me because I came to be friends with many people who went there)

Jason was another kind of element entirely, from Dan, and it was so funny to see them together. The dynamic of family...
The restaurant was in Azabu, near the Tokyo Tower. I honestly don't think I'd seen the Tower since I was like 4 years old. It was really beautiful at night. I felt much better after the day.

5AM thoughts

I'm awake again at 5AM. I should probably do some yoga or something but the carpet in here is kind of nasty.

Some random thoughts upon waking:

I forgot to talk about a very interesting conversation Dan and I had yesterday. Dan, Okada and I are all 34 years old (!!!). So Okada's plays are really about our generation. Okada of course has two kids (an infant and a 4 year-old) but Dan and I, although we are in serious relationships, are SINGLE and have been living that artist's single life. It was surprising to me how common our experiences are in terms of this "generation" thing. Dan talked about how at the 5 year college reunion, when some people showed up with kids, the general attitude towards them was like "oooooh, what happened there?" but at the 10 year reunion, when some people showed up without kids, the general attitude towards the childless was "Ooooh, what went wrong there?" Dan said he thought that now the trend is moving backwards now, that younger people (in their 20s) are actually having kids in their 20s (and I would guess this is true, since Connie's younger brother is having a kid now) and while that idea sounds preposterous to us (and I'm sure to many of my friends my age) these younger people are like, "OK, I see you and your generation and how you've basically wasted your 20s on internships or whatever, and now, in your 30s you have nothing to show for it -- and yes it's hard to have kids, but I might as well do it NOW while I have the energy to do it," like they are way more focused and clear-headed (?). I mean... it's tricky, right? I feel like proud of the way I spent my 20s, being independent and not focusing on "building financial stability" or anything, but it's true, now I'm kind of like, wait a sec. I AM old, or getting older, and if I do want a family, I've got to buckle down and "get serious" or something (?)? Waaaaaa!

Which is exactly what Enjoy is about -- the rift between our generation and the younger generation -- and it is a symptom of a larger socio-economic problem that plays itself out on a personal level. I mean, it may not be exactly the same in Japan as it is elsewhere, but I definitely see the parallels.

wiped out

I can't kick the jetlag, in fact I almost feel like it's getting worse. Waking up totally lucid at 5am, eating breakfast at 7am, crashing out again til 11am, getting unbelievably sleepy around 9pm... Feel like I've been away from NY for weeks!

Breakfast this morning at the Chinese restaurant. Shiumai, crystal shrimp dumpling, congee, scrambled eggs and ham (?), shredded chicken salad... Not bad at all, but not my favorite breakfast of the last few days.
I took Dan to a Russian restaurant in the basement of the Subaru building -- I've been reading up on good lunches in Shinjuku on a few Japanese blogs. Not bad. The plan for today was for me & Dan to camp out at the manga cafe and work on stuff, read through the play, watch the DVD of the original production. This was a good plan, but the thing about the manga cafe is that it is poorly ventilated AND people are smoking like chimneys. Pretty disgusting.

I have to tell you, or try to tell you, how fucking difficult it is to translate Okada's work. I mean, putting aside his directorial methods for the moment -- just as a writer, he has the actors slide in and out of character, in and out of addressing the audience directly, talking about an event then slipping into the event, and jumping through a million loopholes in circuitous logic. Most of the text is monologue, and an actor can be talking for 3 pages, without a period(.). It's like if everything you said AND your inner monologue are both hurtling out of your mouth and contradicting each other and never ending. (I think I felt an earthquake just now...)

Here's a sample from the opening of the play:

ACTOR 1: We’ll start with Act One... This guy named Kato, was riding the subway the other day, riding the Keio line but, there was an encounter, then, when he sat next to... There were these two women who were talking, but... Kato had no intention of eavesdropping at all, of course but, while he was listening, honestly, he... in the end, from the middle of the conversation, it did turn completely into eavesdropping but... you know how for text messaging they have those screen stickers that you put on your phone to keep your screen invisible to the person standing next to you, well there aren’t such things for voices, so in a way, it’s a little that’s just the way it is, maybe, which is like totally an excuse for this but.... but with that conversation, it was a little like no matter how you look at it, their voices were, clearly above and beyond what is a standard volume, I mean come on, was the way it seemed and that was because... on top of that the content of the conversation itself was also like, grabbed my attention in this...

ACTOR 1: but, never mind, that story, I mean we’ll get into it later, so let’s just put it aside for now, so I have to tell the story about before he got on the train, when he went into the bathroom at the station, I mean it’s not like I have to but do you mind?

Waaaaaaa!
So my translation of the play is in very rough shape -- of 4 acts, the first is in decent shape but the other three I've only pounded out a very rough "for the sake of plot" translation, so I've been working on refining that. It's really crazy, I can get stuck on one line of text for 20 minutes, trying to figure out where the action verb is... It doesn't help that Japanese has a completely different (and I'd even venture to say incomparable) grammatical and syntactical structure than English.

But we had a good productive day.

Oh, some things that Dan and I have in common:

1. We love to eat.
2. We both refer to Bob Saietta (aka Bobby Silverman) as our nemesis.
3. We are bad tourists,
4. We watch Battle Star Galactica ("Frak")
5. We like video games.

I showed him a bit of my Super Mario Bros. playing...
After our afternoon work session we went out in search of a snack, and wandered into a video game arcade for a moment. It wasn't that huge, as far as those kind of places go, only 3 stories high. Here is Dan getting his ass kicked on some kind of Street Fighter type game.OK but the AWESOME game in the whole place was...

THE TYPING OF THE DEAD

It is basically your typical zombie game, but instead of a joystick or a gun, you are armed with... a KEYBOARD (qwerty, not dvorak, sorry). When the Zombies come to attack you, they have words stuck on them and you have to type out the word as quickly as you can (and accurately of course) in order to blow them up. How nerdy can you get?!?!?! I have to get Irwin to play this. Fucking hysterical.

Do you see the "Type or Die" prompt at the bottom of the photo above? Too funny.

We also found a Rilakkuma stuffed animal which makes an appearance in Enjoy. Cuteness overload.

Finally got out of the time-and-money-suck of the arcade and found a pretty awesome yakitori place (which Irwin would love also).

I should have taken photos of the chicken breast, chicken liver, shishito peppers, mountain potato, pork belly and bacon-wrapped enoki, but by the time i got my camera out of my bag, all that was left were skewers...
OK going to try to stay awake for a few more hours so I don't wake up at 5am.

Manga Cafe

So if there wasn't enough explanation (and really that's the weird thing about blogs, like who is reading this anyway? i mean i can't completely shrug off responsibility and say this is my diary and i don't care about the reader -- or can i? i guess i am old school that way... hi irwin) I'm in Tokyo because The Play Company is producing the English language premiere American production of Toshiki Okada's Enjoy, which I am translating and Dan Rothenberg (of Pig Iron) is directing, and this trip is about Dan and I getting to know Okada and his world and his process better, as well as geting to understand the world of the play better etc.

A pretty intensive, productive day. Though I am all fucked up with the jetlag, waking up at 5AM starving, eating breakfast at 7AM and then napping from 9 - 11AM...
At 1PM Dan and I met up and went to one of my favorite restaurants from my childhood, Nakamuraya. Over lunch we read Act One out loud which was really fun.

Later we went over to the New National Theater where Okada was workshopping a play (a German play, actually, which he will direct at the New National next year) -- which also happens to be the theater which commissioned and premiered Enjoy. It's kind of like Lincoln Center in size and stature... There's this amazing water thing in the whole front part of the complex.
It was interesting to see him struggle/work with the actors today -- who were not in his company and had never worked with him before -- and who seemed like actors with a capital A if you know what I mean. (again, I didn't feel comfortable whipping out the camera in the middle of rehearsal...


Also Dan's friend Hinako joined us for this part -- she worked with Pig Iron (Dan's theater company) on several projects, and she happened to be back in Tokyo visiting her mom.



After rehearsal, the four of us (Okada, Dan, Hinako & me) went to the comic book cafe where Okada went to a lot as research for his play. Enjoy takes place in a comic book (manga) cafe (did I already say that?) so there we were at the source of the artistic inspiration. I am being facetious. It was fascinating, though -- the only manga cafe I'd been to in the past was more like a comfy library, where there was a big open room with a bunch of tables, sofas etc, and shelve with books -- and you paid for your drinks (there was a minimum drink or something) and you sat and read amongst other people. The one we went to today, you pay for a private space (a single or couple cubicle) equipped with internet, tv/dvd player, drinks were free, you grab the comic you want to read and curl up in your cubicle. Ours (we got two couple-sized cubicles) had beanbags but you could get ones with reclining chairs or other types of comfy furniture type things. Weird, perhaps? but SUPERFUN. It's like renting out your own private space in the middle of Times Square!



After that we went to a (regular) cafe, and Dan and Okada has a great great great conversation about Enjoy and how to deal with this translation/transposition of this play specific to Tokyo in way that would make sense in a real way in NY. I feel like this connection could not have gone better -- They are both very open and receptive and smart, and really focused on the intention of the art (as opposed to attachment to this or that detail in the text or whatever).

I need to say that I think Dan is pretty awesome. He a deep capacity for understanding things, especially things that are as elusive as cultural differences. I guess I say that because I know so many people (Americans, Japanese, and otherwise) who are so fixed in their perspective and identity, to be able to let that go and to try to truly connect with something outside what they know is just too much (too much insecurity, anxiety, too much giving up of power, whatever). But Dan is really great -- able to take in without feeling or actually compromising himself or his perspective, and find points of connection or parallels.

I am really tired.

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...