Castle of Dreams
potudo-ru [Japan]
Text, Direction: Daisuke Miura [Japan]
November 15 (Thu) - November 25 (Sun) Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Theatre West
FESTIVAL/TOKYO
Performing Arts Festival launching from Tokyo
About
With its graphic, dense portrait of the workings of humanity, Daisuke Miuraʼs potudo-ru has become known for the importance it places on situations and emotions sculpted through non-linguistic communication, through a gaze or a body movement. The height of this style was reached with the play first performed after Miura won the Kishida Kunio Drama Award for "Loveʼs Whirlpool", the sensational "Castle of Dreams". This wordless play painted a portrait of the inert and animalized young, shocking its first audiences. Since then it has been performed all over Europe and now at F/T makes its triumphant homecoming to Tokyo for the first time in 6 years.
Miura has stated he has a fundamental mistrust of language and words. The actors in his plays open up their inner selves, sharing with the audience what happens in the performances and the space itself. Within daily life in contemporary society, most people do not converse using words but rather they read between the lines, they "read the air" (kuki o yomu). Miura believes that playwrights too must write this "air" that exists behind language, that theatre is most interesting when it is revealed through a situation rather through dialogue.
In a single-room apartment live 8 men and women. Futon, clothes, food, magazines and garbage are scattered over the floor, leaving no place to step. The inhabitants never speak; they only sleep, wake up, eat, fight and have sex. Given over only to their instincts, more than a glimpse into the life of humanity, the audience feels like observers of an animal eco-system. Without exchanging words with each other, the inhabitants of the room live engulfed in their desires. This is a shut-off community that has expunged others in order to behave only for selfish means - but also one that lurks inside our own "proper" lives.
6 years on from its debut, Japanese society has changed into something that feels reality to a greater extent today. This enclosed microcosm will surely now not only retain its power to affect audiences, but will do so in wholly new ways.
"Castle of Dreams" performance history
In July 2010 potudo-ru was invited to Essen, Germany, to stage "Castle of Dreams" for the first time overseas. Since then the play has been performed in total in 4 countries, at the the Theater der Welt 2010 (Essen), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna) and at the Festival Transamériques (Montreal).
