Riots, Cherry Blossoms and Wheelchairs

Abstract

Director Yukio Ninagawa established Saitama Gold Theatre, a company for actors over the age of 55, in 2006 when he became artistic director of Saitama Arts Theatre. The company is closely connected to the anxieties of contemporary hyper-ageing Japanese society, besides addressing the role that the arts can play in such a society and the possibilities for ‘creative ageing’. This paper examines the performance history of Saitama Gold Theatre, taking three productions as case studies: Ravens, We Shall Load Bullets by Kunio Shimizu (first performed in 2006), Shakespeare’s Richard II (2015/16) and the post-Ninagawa production of The Mass of Pale Pink by Ryō Iwamatsu. This article concludes that in his work with older age actors Ninagawa created a new form of theatre dependent on the life experiences of the actors themselves, one that produces a rupture between the text and the bodies of the actors and questions the performance of age.

Notes

1 The World Gold Theater Kick Off! was a symposium and a series of workshops held at Saitama Arts Theater in September 2017, corresponding to the opening performance of The Mass of Pale Pink. Practitioners from Britain (Company of Elders, Sadler’s Wells; Entelechy Arts; Gavin Barlow, artistic director of The Albany) presented alongside Seiji Nozoe, director of The 10000 Gold Theater.

2 The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will also include a programme of cultural events prior to and during the Olympics themselves, inspired in part by the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad.

3 Ninagawa was one of the members of the underground theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as was director Tadashi Suzuki (known for his experimental productions such as The Trojan Women, 1974 and King Lear, 1984). Ninagawa founded Gendaijin Gekijo (Contemporary People’s Theatre) in 1967, working regularly with playwright Kunio Shimizu. The company disbanded in 1971, but in 1972 he established Sakura-sha (Cherry Blossom Company).

4 Hikinuki is a technique used in kabuki to instantly change a character’s costume, generally in front of the audience’s eyes, whereby one costume is pulled off by stage-hands to reveal another underneath.

5 Other notable examples include theatre company Marebito’s Fukushima o joen suru (Performing Fukushima) (2016–), Ryō Iwamatsu’s other Fukushima play Shōjo Miu (The Girl Miu) (2017), Kein Licht I and Kein Licht II by Elfriede Jelinek (2012) and Port B’s Referendum Project (2012).