Tokyo Workshop Day One

Slightly nervous feel this aftrenoon, as the nine new actors assemble in the workshop venue - a converted elementary school in West Shinjuku.

We had a good writer's meeting in the morning, finally having straightforward Japanese to English translation, which gave us the chance to get into more detail about the way we are all thinking. There is a growing consensus around some aspects of the play. The feeling seems to be that our story may be set in some near future, perhaps in a generic urban future which allows us to show a world which is in some way broken. Again the discussion came back round to the image of the construction site...the appeal is growing after the exercise in Seoul, and it seems to have certain qualities to it....the feeling that there was something there before it was a building site [maybe a grandmother has told stories of what was there], the fact that it is the future that is being constructed there on top of the past, the fact that both digging and constructing are fundamental child activities, the metal creatures involved in construction, and the literal fact that the site is fenced and blocked from view, a dangerous forbidden and secret place from the point of view of children......

In Japan, if you dig deep you will emerge in Brazil, rather than Australia, by the way!

We also talked about the way children's play had emerged in Seoul as such an important part of the 'wisdom' which we were exploring...making games from problems, lateral thinking to solve those problems, playing to establish relationships, and to overcome communication problems... It seems certain that this will form a part of the play.

Time ran out on our meeting, and the actors arrived. There is a nice mixture of gender and age, with most of the actors part of Toyoko's Asibina company, except for Keiko who is an actor currently studying in the UK. We did a long repeat of our introductory signing in exercise, a fascinating lesson in the culture of Japan and Korea in itself, with each of us writing our name, and giving an account of it. The shared use of Chinese characters for names gave common ground to the Korean and Japanese actors, and the thinking and meaning behind names spoke eloquently about aspects of the different cultures. New to me was the story of the missing letters, characters banned by the government in a drive to simplify Japanese writing, which left people with forbidden letters in their names....

After the lengthy introductions, the group got to its feet and we began to see the creative energy that will drive this week. We repeated versions of the North South East and West exercise that we had done in school, and then another exchange of games from the three countries. Pig Sumo, where you shuffle on your bum and attempt to knock everyone else over, and Shoving the Sweet, another game involving bottoms and pushing..... We finished with short wordless scenes of childhood experiences, and the range of ideas, the approach and the energy all bode well for the week. There was a moving account of a boy's struggle to brave crossing a river on a water-pipe; the other boy driven to climbing to the second floor to get to watch TV, so that he could talk about the programmes with his friends; the child who was afraid of the steeplechase jump, but got over it when it finally came to the race, and the others who stole the name poles from the cemetery and were taken by their mum to see the monk in shame.....

The pattern for tomorrow is the same, with the writers meeting in the morning, and the race is on to get as much as we can in place during our crucial week here.