▼Toshiki Okada

Christophe Slagmuylder, Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen, suggested that I make a “new music theatre” in collaboration with the composer Dai Fujikura. I thought this was a wonderful opportunity and resolved to take action with the audacious ambition to make a work of music theatre that would be funda- mentally new.
But in just what way would a “fundamentally new” kind of music theatre be new? Right from the initial stages of ideation, I had a tentative strategy, albeit in abstract terms. It consisted of reshaping the relationship between music and theatre and creating a work in which neither the music nor the theatre would dominate, that is, a work that would be a juxtaposition of music and theatre. I was convinced from the start that I could probably create such a work with Dai. This is because his music is very strong. The music that Dai composed for this production was not written for linking or connecting with the story told by the play, the bodies of the actors, or the souls and emotions of the characters they play. Instead, it is connected with the imaginary space created by the performances of the actors. The theatre works with the music as the component that is poured into the vessel of the space colored by the fiction arising with the performance. This is the new shape of the relationship between music and theatre attempted in this work.
To achieve such a relationship with the music with as much intensity as possible, the concept created to generate a theatrical fiction on the stage with the actors also underwent considerable innovation. In this production, our ultimate goal was not to cloak bodies in fiction; rather, it was to execute a fictional transformation of the space through the medium of these bodies, and then to turn this transformed space into a vessel into which the music is poured. I realise that this agenda is likely to sound abstract. Nevertheless, the actors working with me on this project had the ability to understand the abstractions in entirely concrete terms and to put that understanding into practice. We held repeated rehearsals with the aim of attaining a performance endowed with a new kind of flavor, one that could never be achieved without them.
This music theatre aimed at presenting a new type of relationship between music and theatre tells an extremely simple story. The all-too-common human (we could also say “anthropocentric”) interests of the characters are merci- lessly nullified. I created a new type of music theatre with a story of this nature for myself, above all. More than anything, I want to transform the human, anthropo- centric attitude I myself adopt when attempting to grasp the events occurring in this world and the phenomena in the universe. I hope to steadily accumulate little experiences to this end on a daily basis, like the habit of having a spoonful or two of yogurt every morning. And I hoped that this work could become one of these little experiences – another audacious ambition of mine! These were my thoughts in writing this text.

▼Dai Fujikura

Music theatre, or shall we say music and theatre? I have thus far written three operas, but this is the first time I have written a musical theatre piece. However, it is not the same as what is normally meant by the term ‘music theatre.‘ From the age of three until I was ten, I was in a theatre group where I learned about acting and made theatre with actors who ranged from children to adults. This happened every week and brought back a lot of memories for me when I was watching the rehearsals every day with the group of actors led by Okada. Needless to say, the actors involved in this music theatre are first-rate. Due to the pandemic, I was working from my home in London while the actors rehearsed in Tokyo.
We collaborated in such a way that I sometimes composed while watching the actors rehearse under Okada’s direction. Then, when they were going through the scene again, I could play that freshly composed demo from London via the internet, synchronising the music with the actors in Tokyo. The actors reacted to the music as they heard it for the first time. The music I sent from my room in London reached Tokyo in just 0.5 seconds with CD quality or even higher resolution.
Okada and I collaborated peacefully and creatively. I reacted to his script and his direction to the actors, and his script also reacted to the music I composed, reflecting his direction as well. This is the true meaning of 50/50 collaboration.