In 2017 and 2018 I was part of a creative process, symposium and two different performance runs of the play Elements by Shogo Ota. Peter Lichtenfels directed Shogo Ota’s Elements with an amazing cast for an intercultural symposium at UC Davis. The production was invited to Teatro Vreve-Proyecto Teatral in Bogotá for a run in September 2018.
Cast: Melissa Cuhna, Regina Gutierrez, Alvaro Hernandez, Peter Lichtenfels, Heather Nolan, Caro Novella, Kevin O’Connor, John Zibell and Victor Viviescas of Teatro Vreve.
The performers in this production come from many different traditions of theatre and dance, in many different countries. While the main languages are English and Spanish, the performance training varies from Contact, to Noh, to Decroux, to Sills Improvisation, to a range of theatre and dance practices from Euroamerican, Asian, and indigenous traditions.
The production:
Shogo Ota (died 2007) was a revolutionary leader of Japan’s ‘new’ theatre from the 1960s to his death. This strange and wonderful play follows a group of ordinary working people acting out their lives on a bed of constantly-shifting sand/soil on which they work to keep going. The production asks the audience to imagine walking on sand in their daily life, and to experience it as a material that slows us down so we do everyday things in extraordinary ways – living life at ‘sand-speed’.
The following is writing on the process:
TRANSNATIONAL THEATRE: BRINGING SHOGO OTA’S ELEMENTS TO LIFE
Two years ago, a DHI-Network Collaboration grant supported Professor of Theatre & Dance Lynette Hunter as she set up contacts with universities in Bogota, Colombia. This transnational collaborative effort helped bring Shoga Ota’s play Elements to a Bogota stage earlier this year.
Hunter views cross-national collaboration as a strength, as evinced by her involvement in the co-creation of a PhD program comprised of French, Colombian and Davis scholars and graduate students. Alvaro Hernandez was doing a PhD at Davis, and Hunter received an invitation to his university in Bogota to present a talk on practice as research; Davis at the time was the only university in the US with that strand of study at the PhD level. Hunter established the Performance Studies Graduate Group at Davis about nine years ago with the two strands–practice as research and the mainstream PhD that does not involve practice. Last year, she joined a group comprised of scholars from Bogota, Davis and Toulouse to create the curriculum for the PhD program. She will return to Bogota to deliver the introductory second-year courses in August 2019.
It is no surprise, then, that Hunter values transnational collaboration when it comes to performances as well, and the production of Elements demonstrates this. It began with someone from the National University in Bogota receiving an invitation to put on a production in Davis, then one of the theatres in Bogota asked for a Davis production to be shown in Colombia. This production, Elements, was staged in May 2017, as part of a larger intercultural conference on performance techniques focused on embodiment. The producers raised money to bring the play to the stage, including support from the DHI, Global Affairs, various small donors on kickstarter, the Freie University in Berlin, and personal resources. Elements ran for two weeks, from September 5th through 20th after five or six days of rehearsal.
The late Shogo Ota, Hunter explains, was “one of most important Japanese playwrights at the end of the twentieth century.” He wrote many plays about silence, and people could bridge the linguistic divide and tour his plays because the performances had few or no words. While Elements does have words, it is unique in that it is a found play: Ota used words he found in many different media from newspapers to books to television.
The September production included seven actors, six with professional backgrounds who are enrolled in the Performance Studies program as graduate students, and one recent Davis alumna currently in an MA program at UC Santa Cruz. The actors came from different backgrounds, including two Colombians, two from the US, one Canadian, one Spaniard, and the director, Professor Peter Lichtenfels, who is German-Canadian. The diverse backgrounds and experiences of the cast–who also collaborated as the crew–contributed to a successful production and “an incredible experience.”
The set was a sixteen-inch deep sand pit with tables and chairs as props, but these get broken up and buried in the first scene. Most of the time, the setting was just sand, creating a unique canvas on which the actors performed. The last scene, however, was in the air, something the production could not do in Davis because of the danger involved. In Bogota, the crew was able to fly seven nets into which the actors climbed, ending the play “as if they are looking down over the world.” Three of the actors then came down to unbury everything that had been destroyed at the beginning. Try as they might, they cannot rebuild everything perfectly– “but that’s life,” Hunter states.
One of the Colombian actors, who is also a stunt actress, was able to build much of the equipment, while one Canadian actor is a vertical choreographer, so he knew the mechanics of ropes and pulleys: the deliberate transnational collaborative approach led to a fruitful amalgamation of varying talents, which in turn made Elements possible. For example, one crew member sourced an ecologically-friendly coyote pelt, personally built it a skeleton and stuffed it. In one scene, the stuffed “dog” fell out of the sky; dogs are a very important symbol because in Japanese mythology, people are descended from dogs. The inclusion of the dog demonstrated the crews’ commitment to honoring Japanese culture.
Elements had an unusual rehearsal process. The play has a written script, but there is so much about which the audience needs to know that happens without words. Lichtenfels elected to use video of Ota’s production as a visual script–a method anathema to theatre actors, who find it constraining to see what other actors have done. “In this case, we were treating it as a gestural script,” Hunter explained. “Having the written and visual script operating alongside each other was fundamentally experimental and challenging to the actors.” Director Lichtenfels wanted to get it right, especially because of his past work with Ota in the 1990s: “Peter has an incredible respect for this playwright, and was trying to work with the way the body moves as a scripted gift.” From start to finish, the cast honored the embodied and written performance and respected the culture from which the play originated. It is no wonder, then, that there is significant interest in Elements going to an international festival within the next year.