Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2014
The actor, director and teacher talked to Metropolis about his work in the Kanto drama scene.
What’s the Yokohama Theatre Group?
YTG was founded in 1900 as a drama club for foreigners in Yokohama. Today, we’re a theatre company that specializes in modern, multilingual and multicultural productions and classes. We’re a registered non-profit so that we can make decisions on what’s best for the community we serve (primarily audience and students) rather than hard-nosed business decisions.
Tell us about the classes offered by YTG.
We offer a variety of conservatory-style classes. There is a dearth of affordable western-style actor training in Japan, and I very much wanted to help remedy that. I teach the text-based courses, including scene study, monologues, and Shakespeare. I’ve been very lucky in finding instructors who have deep backgrounds in their respective specialities. Our movement instructor, Tania Coke, was trained and taught at L’Ange Fou in London. Our voice instructor, Graig Russell, has spent years getting to the heart of his craft. And our stage combat gang from Dueling Arts International are all certified fight instructors. They would be my first choice instructors anywhere, and I’m grateful to have found them all in the Kanto area.
We’re also starting our first kids’ classes in May and our long-term goal is to run a full-time school for actors. But people from other disciplines or people who just have an interest in acting can certainly enjoy and benefit from our classes, too.
Any words of advice for someone who wants to get involved in theater in the Tokyo area, either as a spectator, actor or crew?
The YTG ensemble is the probably easiest group to join as performer or a crew member. Basically, you just show up and start participating. But it’s also the most demanding. Our actors are our crew and vice-versa and we expect new members to share our values. It sounds hard, but it’s also very open and don’t care what your level of experience or inexperience is. If you don’t have the courage to jump right in, the classes are also a very good place to start.
What are you working on at the moment?
We’re working on an evening of multilingual theater called The 39 Complex that will run April 11-13 at The World Peace Theatre in Kawasaki. It’s a suite of three thematically linked plays, two by the ensemble and our guest directors, followed by a science fiction play written mostly in poetry called 39. It’s not “lasers beeoop beeoop” science fiction. We take it seriously. But it’s definitely accessible to a general expat audience, and it should be. It is an allegory for alienation of being long-term expatriate. The story is about a guy who leaves Earth for 6 years, and when he returns, 39 years have passed for everyone else, and his home is now unrecognizably and irrevocably changed.
It is a very exciting project for us because we will be crowdfunding it, allowing the audience to buy advance tickets and special perks while helping to fund the show. It also allows our supporters outside of Japan to support our Theatre making mission. We have details at www.ytg.jp
What’s your recipe for a perfect day in Yokohama?
Eating paneer butter masala at my favourite curry place (Sathi, near Kamiooka station) with my wife and son after finding out YTG had just been given a big, fat grant to do an ambitious piece of Theatre. Yeah, I like to set my bar high.
