FESTIVAL/TOKYO

Our Tokyo lives today

Following his work in the late Eighties with the likes of Naoto Takenaka in theatre company RGS, Akio Miyazawa
has focused his activities on directing and writing for the stage, as well as writing essays and novels, and lecturing
at universities.

His company U-enchi Saisei Jigyodan suspended activities in 2000 but, in the wake of 9.11, Miyazawa held lengthy workshops with young actors and creative teams, leading to "Tokyo Body" in 2003, a non-visual theatre piece in
which the actors' performances were only seen through the footage shot by an on-stage cameraman.

Since then Miyazawa and U-enchi Saisei Jigyodan have emphasized a working process of readings and workshops, culminating in experimental works like "Tokyo/Absent/Pamphlet" (2005) and "Japanese Sleeping/The World's
Sleepiest Place" (2010), examining the specific language and form of contemporary Tokyo.

With this new work for Festival/Tokyo Miyazawa turns back 25 years from 2011 to 1986, when Japan was at the
height of its economic progress, and also the same year as the faraway Chernobyl incident. A man who commits a
crime in 1986 is sentenced to 25 years in prison and returns to society in 2011. There, a nuclear accident occurs
the same as that of 25 years before. The man seeks work and heads to the land now forbidden to enter.

Miyazawa will attempt to grasp anew the present in the frame of an intermittent theatrical time and space, divided
into two parallels of 2011 and 1986. As in previous works his cast will collect local voices out on the street through
interviews and use this as material for the creative process. The actors themselves are all young performers who
have participated in Miyazawa's workshops in recent years. These fragmentary voices of "someone" will become
the soundscape of present day Tokyo and reveal to the audiences the condition of our lives as we live under the
cloud of the continuing nuclear crisis.