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Theater without time or national borders

Tadashi Suzuki uses ancient Greek plays to speak to contemporary audiences. PHOTOS COURTESY OF CKS CULTURAL CENTER

Takashi Suzuki has a reputation for being merciless when training his actors. The founder and director of the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), a retreat in the forests outside Tokyo, produces some of the world's best actors.

But at a price.

In an interview with Anatoly Smeliansky, head of the Moscow Art Theater school, Anatoly Bely, an actor with the Moscow Art Theater, describes how immediately after landing in Japan following a long flight from Moscow, Suzuki brought the contingent of Russian actors through a two-hour training session that, "[was] so difficult that after 20 minutes, even the youngest, strongest men in our company started to collapse. Suzuki told us that we had to overcome this limit."

The severe method Suzuki uses to train his actors is in marked contrast to the man who arrived in Taiwan on Monday for the first time in his 40-year career to prepare for his production of Dionysus this weekend at the National Theater. Dressed casually and joking with reporters, the 68 year-old performance theorist, director and "Japanese treasure" showed no evidence of jet lag.

The Suzuki Method is principally concerned with overcoming perceived limitations of the human body and applying what they've learned to the stage. By doing so, the actors uncover their innate expressive abilities through movement.

Using a diverse array of physical disciplines drawn from ballet, Japanese Noh and Kabuki and Greek theater as well as martial arts, the Suzuki Method seeks to heighten the actor's emotional and physical power and commitment to reach the right moment on the stage.

Performance notes: What: Dionysus Where: National Theater, Taipei When: Today and tomorrow at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2:30pm Tickets: NT$400 to NT$2,400 and are available through NTCH ticketing

"The training is rigorous and many actors at first find it extremely difficult — if not impossible — to keep up. The Olympic athletes that come over have less problems with the training," Suzuki said.

As a performance theorist, Suzuki is often compared to Konstantin Stanislavsky. But where Stanislavski drew upon the actor's memory as a means of creating emotional and physical verisimilitude on the stage, the Suzuki Method begins with a system of exercises meant to tap into the expressive power of the body, or what Suzuki calls "animal energy."

"The body has its own physical grammar that the audience can follow," he said. "As such, we don't just need a verbal language to evoke meaning [on the stage]."

In addition to his work as a performance theorist, Suzuki is chairman of the Japan Performing Arts Foundation (JPAF), a lobby group for the performing arts in Japan. He has published 15 books about the theater in Japanese of which The Way of Acting: The Theater Writings of Tadashi Suzuki has been translated into English.

Together with Robert Wilson, Yuri Lyubimov and Wole Soyinka and a host of other internationally recognized theater artists he formed the International Committee of the Theatre Olympics in 1993, a yearly event that promotes the development of world theater.

Suzuki's internationalism is also evident in his expropriation of Greek drama for the stage. Works that he has adapted to the stage include Euripides' The Trojan Women and Clytemnestra, Sophocles' Electra and Aeschylus' Oresteia. By adapting Greek plays to a contemporary context, Suzuki seeks to overcome cultural and national barriers by universally based works.

Suzuki chose Dionysus for his Taipei production as he feels the relationship between politics and religion is relevant to contemporary society.

Dionysus is based on Euripides' Bacchae. In the original play, Euripides has Dionysus, the god of wine, appear on stage and speak as a character. Suzuki alters the work by making a group of priests speak the lines of Dionysus, thus transforming the god into cult.

This cult of priests, with its communal need for unity and desire to spiritually influence the masses creates what Suzuki calls, a "story called Dionysus." For Suzuki, the conflict between Dionysus and the young King Pentheus is not a battle between god and man, but an altercation between a religious sect and a political authority.

Suzuki says the Bacchae speaks to our contemporary condition because of the conflict between two communal value systems that exist on the same plane.

By adapting Greek theater to the contemporary stage, Suzuki manages to raise questions about our current political and social situation and done in a way that challenges the audience to look beyond national borders. It gives us a focus on the changing conditions of our own lives, as well as the lives of the ancient Greeks and modern Japanese thus illustrating a universalism that is often lacking in contemporary theater. This is probably why tickets for all his Taipei performances sold out before he arrived in Taiwan.
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