Capturing the theatre of the here and now

Playwright, director and Rikkyo University professor Masataka Matsuda invites four emerging theatre artists and groups to present new work exploring experimentation and dialogue about what he calls the “theatre of incidents.”

The participants are all artists in their twenties consciously using, dismantling and reconstructing the rules of a theatre space. Each will create a new work of up to 60 minutes, which are performed in pairs alongside discussions with guest speakers.

The program aims to stage the phenomena or incidents that appear in a certain time and place, as opposed merely to recreating the words of a script. This will unravel and reconsider the apparently ordinary act of writing and staging a play. How can the dynamics of the various elements that comprise theatre, from language to the body, space, and audience, be utilized to create incidents? The search for new perceptions and ideas between audiences and artists starts from here.

Running Time: 135 min. (with 15-minute interval) (TBC) / Discussion: 60 min. (TBC)
Language: Performed in Japanese

Declaration of the Theatre of Incidents

A theatre performance is not confined to the imitation of incidents in reality but becomes the generation of new meaning. We call this the theatre of incidents.

In that space, what occurs is not accidents or unimaginable happenings where the body or things suffer deformation. Instead, the link between language and the invisible alters, creating our enigmatic lives. These lives display the continuation of unknown aspects, but are born out of the rigorous imagination that is theatre and never descend into disorder or chaos.

The theatre of incidents disowns itself from the technique of actors or the re-enactment of a play script. The theatre space is not somewhere for showing the techniques of actors or the relationships written in a script. The walls of the stage and the bodies that are there are the materials and body language for producing a power that is not reduced to technique or textual representation.

This life and power remakes language and the visible in theatre for the dimension of incidents. And it is at this point that, like water flowing over stones, the past and present intersect and the theatre of time makes its appearance.

Masataka Matsuda