Cubist theater?

After cubist painting (Picasso and Braque) and cubist writing (Gertrude Stein), does a thirty-something Japanese playwright and director hold the key to cubist theater? Toshiki Okada does not claim to be under the influence of any artistic revolutionaries, but his deliberate separation of the spoken word and body language opens up new ways of imagining theater’s representational possibilities.

If Stein believed that cubism was more real than reality, Okada agrees that the repetitious, disarticulated movements his actors make are a heightened form of naturalism. This is particularly true in his trilogy of short plays, “Hot Pepper”, “Air Conditioner” and “The Farewell Speech”, which finishes a brief run at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers as part of the Festival d’Automne. While engaging in utterly banal and codified conversations about the workplace (a theme familiar from Okada’s “Freetime” in 2008), the trilogy’s characters inexplicably engage in unexpected, socially “inappropriate” gestures that find them shaking their legs at uncomfortable angles, jumping stiffly, holding fans on their heads and wiping their mouths with their ties, among many other surprises.

That their actions bear no relationship to their words is visibly jarring, and the most recognizable feature of the work of Okada and his company known as “chelfitsch” (“selfish” pronounced with a Japanese accent). Repeated over time, however, their gestures and words are imbued with new meaning, in the same way a cubist portrait proposes nearly indistinguishable cubes of color that demand careful attention to perceive the subject, or much like Stein’s prose experimentations create “insistencies” that require closer reading at every encounter. Emotions and impressions, however fleeting or imperceptible, are given liberty to express themselves in these awkward stretches, steps and struts, and a more complete understanding of the speaker is arrived at as he or she comes to inhabit a larger space and time than that of the discourse required in the environment of an office break-room or reception area.

Okada’s preoccupations also involve the use of a Japanese slang spoken in Tokyo, an argot he attempts to de-ghettoize by bringing it into the theater. While this aspect of his work is regrettably lost in translation, to the extent that his physical work is an extension of these concerns, the vitality of this slang seems to take on tangible, visible strength. In the even more abstract second play Okada presents this month, “We Are the Undamaged Others”, he explores how to break with the “nearly irresistible representative power of language” and the “meaningful processes” it shares with gesture.

Stein argued in favor of art that existed free from the business of living and representations of these, a vision that Okada seems to further, with the style and concerns of contemporary Japan.

“We Are the Undamaged Others”, Oct. 7-10, Théâtre de Gennevilliers, 41 avenue des Grésillons, Mº Gabriel Péri, 11-22 euros, tel: 01.41.32.26.26, or Festival d'Automne: 01.53.45.17.17.


Photo Credit: Dieter Hartwig