Guest blog: The Water Station: ‘Living Human Silence’ by Phillip Zarrilli

‘On 28 September 2015 director Phillip Zarilli published a feature in Exeunt on the links between his performance of Ota Shogo’s “Slow Theatre” play currently touring Norway and the European refugee crisis. It is with great pleasure I reproduce this here, with thanks to Exeunt magazine: www.exeuntmagazine.com

Ota Shogo’s The Water Station: Living Human Silence.                              By Phillip Zarrilli

Hilde Stensland (Norway) and Jeungsook Yoo (Korea) in ‘The Water Station’ by Ota Shogo. Nordland teater September 2015

 

Three years ago when Birgitte Strid, Artistic Director at Nordland Teater, invited me to direct the first major production of The Water Station with an international cast since the 2004 production I directed in Singapore, we had no idea that at this specific moment in time there would be thousands of people on the move around the perimeter of the Mediterranean and across Europe.

The Water Station has a very simple structure: in nine scenes a series of refugees/migrants/travellers are on the move coming from a far distant place, and are continuing on the still longer journey toward some place beyond. Some are individuals traveling alone such as The Girl, or Woman with a Parasol; others are in pairs Two Men, or Husband and Wife with Baby Carriage; or in a group: The Caravan. They appear along a pathway. Just behind the pathway is a huge heap of discarded ’junk’—objects left by those on this long journey. Once they appear along the pathway, each individual, pair or group encounters and interacts with a constantly running stream of water flowing from a broken water faucet into a pool of water in a catchment area. Each of the travellers encounters the water in their own way. Some observe or encounter another traveler. All eventually continue their journey toward whatever lies beyond. From the audience’s perspective, where these travellers have come from and where they are going we do not know. They eventually pass out of view…heading somewhere.

Navtej Johar (India), Rune S. Loding (Norway), Leammuid Biret Ravndna (Sami community/Norway)

First created and performed in Tokyo in 1981 by Ōta Shōgo and his theatre company–Theatre of Transformation (Tenkei Gekijo), the production subsequently toured central Europe and the US in the mid-1980s. Ōta and his company were searching for a way to stage “living human silence”—how to turn down the volume or “noise” in our everyday lives in order to be present to the realities of our immediate environment. In that moment of quiet the audience become ‘witnesses’ to what is before us today in the immediate present…people on the move toward somewhere else.

In London on Thursday, 17 September 2015 Chinese artist Ai WeiWei and British artist Anish Kapoor initiated an eight mile London Walk as an artistic act on behalf of the refugee crisis in Europe. Both have major exhibitions currently open in London. Speaking to The Guardian, Kapoor explained how “This is a walk of compassion, a walk together as if we were walking to the studio…Peaceful. Quiet. Creative…It is important that artists are not outside the equation, we don’t stand on the sidelines. Artists are part of the story of a response, we cannot stand aside and let others make the response.”

Nordland Teatre’s production of The Water Station is inevitably “part of the [current] equation”. The Water Station is an artistic response to the age-old realities for peoples across the world of migration–those seeking refuge, fleeing persecution, and/or those returning ‘home’ after long-term conflicts. The Water Station reflects Ōta’s childhood experience. Along with other Japanese ex-colonists in China at the end of World War II, as a six-year-old Ōta and his family had to undertake an extremely long and exhausting two month journey of repatriation from China back to Japan. Along with the other Japanese being repatriated, he and his family walked almost endlessly for miles and miles, living in tents, and occasionally travelling by freight train as well by boat. The same experience of course was happening in many locations throughout the world with movements of other people at the end of World War II. In China, the Japanese had been permitted to take what belongings they were able to carry; however, during their long trek, many people on their long road of return discarded what they could no longer carry. As one biographer notes,

‘The themes, scenography and style of [Ōta’s] theatre can be related to these childhood memories. His intense concern with the ontology of human existence can be traced back to the need for sheer survival in his early childhood. A sense of the hardship of living and of the proximity of death characterizes his plays. Wide, bare landscapes through which characters travel, carrying their scanty belongings, provide the setting of all…of his Station plays written between 1981 and 1998 …The weak, disabled, and unwanted are featured in many of his plays.’

With its slowed down everyday movement, this non-verbal performance lasts 100 minutes and creates a completely different experience for an audience from narratively driven, text-based theatre. In his theatre aesthetic, Ōta developed a process of ‘divestiture’–discarding or paring away of anything unnecessary including spoken language so that actors and audience alike are taken out of their everyday world in order to focus on the irreducible elements of our shared human existence—what Ōta calls “the ‘unparaphrasable realm of experience”. The script for The Water Station is a sparse 20 page document—a simple record of the basic staging and images Ōta and his company devised from a diverse set of source materials. Although this is a non-verbal performance, as Ōta explains, “there are words here…you simply can’t hear them.”

Florencia Cordeu (Argentina) and Bjorn Ole Odegard (Norway)

Given the current refugee crisis, The Water Station has tremendous immediate resonance for all of us within the EU and throughout the world. This production has been planned around an internationally/ethnically diverse cast of ten including Jing Hong Okorn-Kuo (Chinese Singaporean), Jeungsook Yoo (Korea), Navtej Johar (India), Florencia Cordeu (Argentina/Chile), and six actors from Norway including Leammuid Biret Ravndna from the local Sami community, as well as Bjorn Ole Odegard, Ivar Furre Aam, Rune Loding, Stein Hiller Elvestad, and Hilde Stensland. The international cast reflects on-stage the historical, world-wide nature of issue of those seeking refuge during and after conflicts whether either of the two world wars, the horrific period of post World War II Indian partition, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, or the current Syrian conflict. Each has produced its own massive ‘refugee crisis’.
But according to Ōta, The Water Station is located not in any single one of the above specific historical instances of migration due to conflicts, but rather “anywhere and everywhere, [in] a place out of time.” One critic described The Water Station as a “quiet chamber piece that speaks in the rich language of silence to the neglected part of the soul”. Writing in The Straits Times, Clarissa Oon described the 2004 Singapore production of The Water Station I directed with an international cast from eleven different countries as

“…a wordless…tone poem whose silent chords struck notes of exile, loss and fraying endurance…[T]he water station [is] an oasis of sorts for thirsty sojourners…[E]ach sequence…told its own story through stillness and the most distilled of movement…[E]ach performer shed his name, cultural marker, and actorly ego. Voices silenced, their bodies were subsumed into the chamber piece, which in turn became an exercise in quietude…the emotions felt frighteningly raw.”

After the premiere run at Nordland Teatre in Mo I Rana, ten miles south of the Arctic Circle, the production tours the district of Nordland with performances in far-flung locations above and just below the Arctic Circle–Sandnessjoen, Mosjoen, Bodo, Svolvaer, Sortland, Stokmarkness, Narvik, Hamaroy, and Bronnoysund.

If we look back far enough, all of us will discover migration in our family histories. I am an Italian-American who migrated to Wales sixteen years ago. My paternal grandfather migrated to the US from southern Italy at the end of the nineteenth century seeking religious freedom. My paternal grandmother’s family migrated to the US from Oxfordshire several centuries ago. Viewing the current production of The Water Station today is equally an act of witnessing, and an opportunity for reflection on what one witnesses both within and beyond the theatre. The roads of Ota Shogo’s play lead through contemporary Europe, to far-flung locations around the world, to traverse our own stories.

Read more about Phillip Zarrilli’s work on his website here

Finding the plot

“I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

Narrative, character, motivation and action have been my lodestars of late. I’ve been developing a treatment for an independent television production company, and returning to the basics has been both a struggle and a joy. It feels like a very long time since I considered story arcs and chronological throughlines and even consequential action… The past few projects I’ve worked on in live performance have been using either non-western structures (Told by the Wind and Japanese Aesthetics of Quietude) or post-dramatic dramaturgies (Playing the Maids). It always takes time to shift between media and adjust to their different demands when you work, as I do, across genre, style, and form. I feel like I need to acclimatise, or pass through a decompression chamber, so varied are the atmospheres and their related demands.

So after spending months considering Yugen, the untranslatable Japanese aesthetic principle which means something akin to ‘the hint’, or ‘what lies beneath the surface’, I now have to make the components which create the drama visible, tangible, concrete. It goes against every fibre in my body. I’ve spent months invisibly structuring, and denying narrative closure to create what Ota Shogo described as ‘Passivity in art’ (no ‘meaning’ or narrative is foisted upon the audience – rather, they are invited to participate in the creation of it). As a warm-up I attend a Pitch Your Film workshop led by the very excellent Angela Graham. If anyone can shake me from my current aversion to formulaic structure and GOAL MOTIVATION CONFLICT, Angela can.

And she does, with great aplomb. I love her directness, her clear instructions and thorough understanding of shaping material for the particular medium of film. She cuts through my froth and resistance, giving me clear directions in what I need to do to mould this material for the specific medium and for the activity at hand: a Pitch.

I’ve always loathed ‘loglines’ (‘Jaws in space’ – Alien), and I resist the highly codified and formulaic structures required to give the essence of the drama, even whilst understanding the need of these for such an expensive and commercial enterprise. After much struggling the penny drops – a pitch is told in a three act structure – and with some satisfaction I find my own way to supply what’s required without ‘compromising’ on my writing style and storyline too much.

If that sounds snobbish, I certainly don’t mean it to be. It’s simply a description of this particular writer’s struggle across and between media and form and what each demands. After working as a dramaturg with collaborators on a co-created piece of live performance, it takes a while to activate and then strengthen certain creative muscles which haven’t been used for a while. My character-driven naturalistic action/reaction and then and then and then narrative skills had become flabby. It hurt to flex them, and it was immensely difficult to motivate myself into using my imagination in this way after such an absence – especially when I knew it was well-honed and strong from working in other ways. After Angela’s work-out and then some very serious activity alone, the muscle sprang back surprisingly quickly, and I again started to enjoy working this way. It’s all stuff I know and have encountered as a reader, as a student, as a writer, as a maker, it simply takes a while to re-remember it, to re-enter this particular atmosphere, and with all the equipment needed to breathe and prosper there.

 

 

 

Night Flight to Tokyo: aesthetics of quietude

I’m writing this on the night flight to Tokyo. All around me people are sleeping, tucked up in airline blankets, some with surgical masks over their mouths. We fly over the frozen plains and mountains of Siberia – extraordinary terrain, the likes of which I’ve never seen, before. It is the topography of another planet – one colder and more hostile than the one I have inhabited recently.

The past days have been filled with strangers in the north of England telling me stories – or, rather, members of various audiences reading symbolism, interpreting subtext and telling me what narratives were suggested by watching a performance of The Llanarth Group’s ‘Told by the Wind.’

Jo Shapland, Ace McCarron, Phillip Zarrilli and I travelled to Huddersfield University last week to be part of a conference organised by the Centre for Psychophysical Performance. We presented three performances of ‘Told by the Wind’ as part of the conference as well as for the general public. In anticipation for this tour to Tokyo, I shakily took over running the show from Ace, ably supported by Hannah and Tom, two student technicians from the University.

Jo, Phillip and I co-created ‘Told by the Wind’ almost four years ago, working with artistic advisor Mari Boyd, an academic and translator of the late great Japanese playwright  Ota Shogo. Mari’s highly recommended book, ‘The Aesthetics of Quietude’ was influential in our thinking when creating the performance, which uses embodied silences, spare text and slowed down motion. The following, from Mari’s book, is something we quote often in programme notes and ‘Talk backs’ after the performances.

“The underlying principle of quietude is what the Japanese [playwright] Ota Shogo terms ‘the power of passivity’. Passivity in art refers to the making of aesthetic distance. Instead of trying to aggressively transmit meaning to the audience, passivity exercises a spirit of ‘self reliance’…that compels the audience to attend, focus and participate imaginatively in the pursuit of signification, meaning, and pleasure. Passivity thus paradoxically engages the audience in a dynamic exchange of energy.” The Aesthetics of Quietude by Mari Boyd.

In our desire not to ‘fix’ or promote one particular narrative in the work, we have prompted members of the audience to make their own – hence the different stories and versions of our work I have been told by audience members this week.

It was Mari who, at the 2010 premiere at Chapter arts centre in Cardiff , suggested we try and bring this work to Tokyo. She was interested in how the work was informed by Japanese aesthetics but didn’t attempt to replicate them. I was influenced by Noh dramaturgy when structuring the piece – an influence Mari felt was discernible to those, like her, familiar with the form – and yet we clearly were not attempting to make Noh theatre, but a contemporary, Western piece inspired by it.

And so here it is – happening. We are on our way to Tokyo to present the work and begin a cultural exchange with Ami Theatre, whose new performance ‘Silent Rain in the Neander Forest’ by Yojiro Okamura we shall see tomorrow. It is the start of an extraordinary journey – and one I shall document here over the next three weeks.