舞台の紹介
Hello, Len.
Boo.
I was like, oh no, another technical difficulty.
No, no.
It was just Len.
It's just I was being spooky, right?
It's that spooky month.
So, well, so in line of spookiness, I guess I didn't
really think about this topic as spooky in particular, but it
is very sort of sinister.
I thought it was actually quite calming, but I mean, spooky
is okay.
Sinister and jarring are different.
Spooky.
Definitely kind of in line with the dark theme that that is
October.
I don't know, but that makes October sound sort of terrible,
I think, but I too know what you mean, right?
It's a spooky, horror, like, let's explore these things
month.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
So the other day I just got a text from my friend saying,
like, hey, I have this very last minute ticket that is
available if you are free tomorrow night kind of thing.
Yeah.
Actually, not even tomorrow night.
It was like tonight.
I think it was tonight.
It's like, hey, are you awake?
Tonight.
Yeah.
And of course, I was.
And I'm not the person who sort of, like, you know, thinks
of these theater performance going as, like, a big deal
where I need to have, like, a two hour get ready session.
Like, no, I was, like, out and I was like, okay, well, instead
of going home and eating dinner, I'll just go see a show.
Yeah, there you go.
That's what I decided to do.
And I am so, so, so glad that I did see this one.
So this one is it was performed at the Setagaya Public
Theater titled Triptych by the company Peeping Tom.
They are quite famous dance theater company.
Most of the performance is nonverbal, but they do make
sound sometimes that kind of thing.
Okay.
And they're very theatrical.
So if you think about dance performance as, like, mostly
dancers dancing around on stage, this is quite very different.
It has very, very involved sort of like set design and a
lighting and all these other things, props and stuff that
would kind of take this outside of normal dance performance.
So I think the description dance theater makes sense.
And they had this performance, Triptych, which is called
Triptych because it's a sort of collage of three pieces,
like three dance pieces, missing door, lost room and
hitting floor.
And they were all originally created for Netherlands Dance
Theater, which is another famous contemporary dance art
company.
And they are one of my all time favorites as far as
contemporary dance performance art company goes.
They are phenomenal, and they do really interesting
choreography themes.
But most of all, their dancers are insanely trained.
Like they all come.
It's really hard to kind of gauge what is a good contemporary
performance, a good contemporary dance and what is not.
Much in a way how it's difficult to judge what is a good
contemporary art other than like I like it or not.
You know, but these you don't need to understand a thing
about dance or dance technique.
You see it and you're like, holy shit, I cannot do that to
save my life.
And they're so precise in their execution and everything.
So they're really, really well trained dancers that have
access to really great choreographic pieces.
I just love everything the NDTs do.
And so these works that were originally created for NDT was
sort of given the opportunity to be performed by another
company called Peeping Tom.
And they were performing at Setagaya Public Theater.
And it's really hard to describe what this was about.
Yeah, I was going to ask.
I feel like I've got a vibe to some extent and we'll share
links, right?
The setting is here.
The setting of like sort of the premise, the visual cues that
I get from seeing the stage is that we're in some kind of
ship. I don't know if it's a ship on a shipwreck, but we're
some kind of cabin.
舞台の設定と構成
We're in like a ship cabin situation.
All right, all right.
And you see a lot of these understanding from the set design,
but as well as props and kind of the people that are in there.
So they're sort of travelers and also some kind of like maids
and servant type costume people.
They're the staff of this cabin and it's very wet.
The entire stage is like there are a lot of wet elements on
it. So these are how you gather that this is like some kind
of cabin situation.
I'm with you.
I'm not sure how the wetness leads to spookiness yet, but.
Oh, it gets very wet very quickly.
But this is.
All right, so they're in a cabin and the first piece, Missing
Door, is about again, there's no sort of easy description about
these works, but you understand the concept of Missing Door
because there are people in the cabin.
They exist in different time space.
So some people are existing in one time space and the other
person is existing in a different time space and they kind of
go through back and forth of these cabin doors.
There are multiple cabin doors, right?
Like in a corridor situation and they go in and out and sometimes
they don't come back the right way.
And that's the kind of confusion like that's sort of there in
the captured on stage.
And so that's the first piece.
And then the second piece, Lost Room, happens in a similar
setting where the first one was like a basement cabin for basic
passengers.
The second one looks like a more luxurious suite and you see
different kind of human interactions going on there.
Lots of really interesting set design choices as well here.
We're looking at the stage and be like, what, how, what?
What is going on?
All right.
Again, it's like the urgency, like the sort of sense of being
trapped, sense of not being able to go places is kind of also
like a common theme from the first piece.
And then the last piece, Hidden Floor, is set in what looks
like a dining room part of the ship.
So there's tables, there are chairs and like people eating
like cutleries and stuff like that.
Also weird shit happens there.
And at the end, it definitely feels like the ship is sinking
very wet at the end.
These are like, it is a spoiler, but not a spoiler at all in
that there's so much else that happens other than what I just
described.
If they really explore kind of like a primal anxiety of being
trapped all throughout, but also not just like you're
spatially trapped, but like you feel trapped and entangled in
relationship with other humans like that or you feel like
you're trapped in fate of like living.
Because if you live, that means you're going to die at some
point. And that kind of like fatalistic urgency is consistent
throughout the entire show.
And they really play well with the tension of finding
connection between the humans as like sort of like a solace,
as an escape from this kind of trapping claustrophobic feeling.
But at the same time, kind of like play back and forth
between that like connection, safe space and like trapped
feeling of claustrophobic feeling.
They really go back and forth with it.
And it's not just about the physical space that's being
trapped, but like the relational space that's being trapped.
And at the end of the day, I think after watching the entire
show, I would say like 50% of me was like, what the fuck just
happened? And then 50% of me was like, wow, I think I saw
something really special and I need to digest what was sort
of performed on stage.
And yeah, it's one of those things where you really had to
be there to like feel the magic of this show.
And I can't believe that there were only maybe like six or
seven casts on the show, because at some point it felt like
舞台のデザインと演出
there were like 30 people on stage.
And then at other points, it felt like there was like one
person on stage, even though there were like five other
people on the stage doing something else.
And it's crazy what they did, what they managed to do.
Major kudos to the lighting design and the set designer,
because they were really intricate.
So as like part of the sort of theatrics of it, there are
lots of motion of like people opening the doors and closing
the doors and making it look like every time they open and
close the door, they're like entering into different
liminal spaces.
Again, as a dancer, I find high prop content choreography
to be really nervous because it's like it's one thing to
get your choreography right and like your stage directions
right.
But it's like it adds another complexity if you need to open
a door at a certain timing so that you let someone in or
close the door at some specific timing.
There's a lot of things going on that if you or if like one
of them makes a mistake, all of the other error cascades
into chaos.
So kudos to everyone who is like managing to do that.
Yeah.
Who's apparently obviously perhaps maybe like hyper
practiced, but also they've got to be adaptive, right?
There's got to be something right within those moments
that, like, no matter how it goes, the cast understands
the feeling enough, right?
That they will deliver it right in a way.
Right.
Like, who knows?
Maybe they did make a mistake on stage, but I was completely
entranced in their world that I didn't have to question
like, oh, something went right.
Right.
And but there were definitely some parts where it would
have been very obvious if they got it wrong.
I don't know how they managed to do that, which is insane.
Like, not to mention their dancing and skills and a lot
of these like a lot of partnering happens as well between
dancers.
And yeah, again, mind boggling how they managed to be present
on stage for 120 minutes or so doing all of that.
And also one of the more sort of interesting things about
this production was that in between these three dances,
there's a little bit of set changes.
Right.
Like I said, the first one is in the cabin.
The second one is in a suite.
And the third one is like a dining hall and they don't
close the curtains.
They don't close the curtains in between.
They just start changing the scenes.
Staff starts coming in.
People start rolling off the floor and things like that.
They also kind of show you the mechanics of what's happening
behind the scene in between.
So these are moments where you kind of get pulled back and
be like, oh, yeah, I was in this world and now I realized
that this was a setup.
Right.
But then they somehow sustain the same kind of help us
suspend the disbelief sort of enough so that we go
seamlessly from one piece to another.
Right.
And there's no awkward.
It's more just like a meta visual, you know, in between
that happens.
Yeah.
And I wonder how much of that is intentionally to give the
audience a breather.
It definitely is 100% intentional, right?
Because that's like it adds to the surrealness of it all.
Okay.
All right.
But again, I think it's really hard to pull that off in a way
because in a way that the scene swapping also becomes part
of the performance, which means that if something goes wrong,
then people would know.
But they, again, did it splendidly.
That was very interesting.
I've seen many dance shows and dance performances, and this
is definitely one to remember for sure.
It certainly sounds like it.
I feel like, yeah, maybe as I've received the explanation
and sort of your experience from you, most of it was the
舞台の感情的体験
awe of seeing what's these performers and what the whole
sort of crew and setup was able to do and to create that
feeling of how did you put it?
That sort of extreme fear, that sort of mortality fear, that
fear or anxiety about being trapped within spaces, either
within your own body, right?
Your life or with other people.
And that's a powerful type of feeling to put onto an audience
and then sort of leave them with at the end.
Yeah.
And it kind of burns down in the end.
There is a cathartic release to all of this build up.
But again, it doesn't make sense without that tension building
up. And sometimes these type of contemporary art performances
asks you a lot to suspend your disbelief or asks you a lot to
kind of hold off your judgment, like kind of have to buy into
the world.
But this one, I didn't feel like I was forced in any way.
Like I would just like put in there and like within seconds
of them performing, I was like sucked in.
It was like very, I was kind of trapped with them in that
space.
Yeah, like I felt anxious, like most of the time watching it.
Which is the intention.
It's why one might have gone.
Wow.
It's a whole like, it's a constant play of like, what's going
on? And also wanting to kind of enjoy, like there's a little bit
of like fight in my head was like me wanting to figure out
what they're trying to do, but also me wanting to surrender
into this atmosphere that they're creating.
So that was super interesting.
And yeah, it's like things like that, that you just really
cannot capture in videos and footage, even though I'm sure
they have great dance films on this pieces.
Sure.
I yeah, it's just like you really need to physically be there
as a part of the audience and share the physical space, which
is probably what I like about performing arts in general,
whether that's live music or like dance performance.
Or I don't do a whole lot of musical or theaters, but I think
that's like a similar kind of experience as this in that you
really not kind of need to be there.
And it's just really different from consuming sort of video
experience or like a second hand experience.
Right.
Yeah.
I just from your description, right?
I can tell that the overall experience was a lot more intense
than I mentioned just before we started.
I found their little trailer on the website, right?
And the trailer looked intense, wasn't it?
The trailer itself is intense, and it gave me a good like
visual and like auditory sense for what you were describing.
But it's still very like one to two steps removed from the
actual experience, right?
I had to bring my own anxiety into the space to be like, okay,
this is probably what that feels like.
But you were kind of enmeshed within it while being part of
the audience, which is different.
Yeah.
Well, that's quite the experience to have.
Yeah.
I also have a thought about this, but we should probably talk
on the other episode.
Sure.
Let's say we'll do another one.
This one was the introduction to Triptych.
It was at the Setagaya Public Theater.
But if I'm correct, it looks like it was only going for about
a weekend, and that was a few weeks ago.
Is that correct?
It was already done.
You can't catch it.
But what you can do, I guess, is to follow them on whatever
social media they may or may not have and kind of keep an eye
on what's going on with their performance schedule.
See if you can find anything.
All right.
Bye.
Bye.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
