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THE WATER STATION. By Ota Shogo, directed by Sankar Venkateswaran. Kyoto Art Theater Shunjuza, Japan. 12-13 November 2016.
Indian director Sankar Venkateswaran's contemporary rendering of Ota Shogo's The Water Station is riveting and has compelled me to write again about Ota's masterpiece (Fig. 1). I will give a brief description of Venkateswaran's program in Japan, a contextualization of the Water Station, and the significance of silence and pyschophysicality in his pursuit of an aesthetic of quietude.
Venkateswaran's Japan Program
The first part was his Theatre Roots & wings production of the Water Station, held at the Kyoto Art Theater Shunjuza in November 2016, as part of the Kyoto Experiment: Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival 2016 Autumn. The second half, held in Tokyo on 17 November, was "Sankar Venkateswaran-Short Piece & Symposium", with a workshop demo and "Snow Station" performance, organized by the University of Tokyo Graduate School Program for Leading Graduate Schools Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (IHS). The symposium included Japanese speakers: professor Uchino Tadashi (University of Tokyo), actor Ando Tomoko (formerly of Ota's Tenkei Theatre; now at Theater Company Arica), and playwright-director Nishio Kaori (Torikoen Theatre Company) (https://theatrerawjimdo.com/, accessed 15 December 2016).
Water Stations
Ota's original Water Station is the first of six non-verbal Station plays spanning 1981 to 1998. Eighteen travellers, alone or with others, avail themselves of water trickling from a broken faucet standing in a catchment basin. Besides acts of drinking and washing, the water triggers some engagement among the travellers, but no new relations are formed. Their pace is decelerated to a walk of two metres progress in five minutes.
Ota aims to convey "living human silence", to capture the 90 percent of human life that, he believes, is conducted in silence, not the 10 percent of word-centred social exchange in text-based theatre.
In making the Water Station, Ota had in mind a specific journey- the repatriation of the Japanese colonial community from China at the end of World War II supervised by the Chinese military-a long, traumatic march from Beijing to Tianjin when he was six years old. A junk pile upstage left indicates the belongings they discarded in their travels (Fig. 2). Many critics have correctly inferred that the figures are fleeing in silent horror...