Toga Process Note #1

It's snowing lightly in Toga. We've been in rehearsals for Dionysus for several days now. We are also doing two training sessions a day in preparation for the demonstration that will take place after the performance of Dionysus in Lithuania.

Our day begins with breakfast that each person prepares for him or herself in the kitchen of the dorm we all stay in, called Kawasemi about a 10 minutes walk from the Kôryûkan交流間 (Exchange Pavilion) . Here in the Kawasemi kitchen, the usual fare is natto 納豆(fermented soy beans), rice, miso soup, and a raw egg for breakfast. There’s also coffee and toast, but this tends not to give quite as much power as the natto, which is important to consider since the days are long and extremely arduous. By 10 am the company, comprised of six actresses, eight actors, three designers, Suzuki, Hiroko his wife, Saito his producer, and three or four additional production staff arrive at the Kôryûkan. At the moment, Saito and the rest of the production staff have returned to Tokyo to make preparations for the tour, so there are only 19 of us here now.

At 10 am, the company begins warming up in the rehearsal space. Again, this is everyone on their own, with no group warm up at all. Some prefer to sleep during this moment in fact, but most do light stretching and a bit of sword work.

Currently the training is developing with quite a few exercises that involve swords. Real metal swords are not used, but rather wooden swords. The longest is the bokutô, 木刀 a wooden version of a standard katana (samurai sword) unsheathed, followed by the tantô, 短刀 or short sword, and the shôtô, 小刀 or small sword, . The small sword is more like a long dagger, since the blade is skinnier. The short sword and katana have the same size blade. In the warm up, people typically grab one of the bokuto and swing it around a bit, doing a few of the simpler sword exercises.

The sequence of the training, which begins at 11am, is

1. Stomping and Shakuhachi (all together)

2. Slow Ten (all together)

3. Basics 1~3 (women, then men)

4. Standing and sitting statues with text (women, then men)

5. Walks (all together, men lead)

6. Voodoo (all together, men lead)

The basic training is still executed for the most part along to the music from Richard Santos' album Fantasy in Japan, just as it has been since it's origin. To go into how these exercises currently differ from the Suzuki Method as I’ve been teaching it (which is based on the 1991 master class), will be covered in a separate entry. Briefly, Basic #3 is what used to be Basic #4 (the swivel exercise), with the addition of a vocal burst. (old Basic #3, which was also the fundamental movement behind the Kanjincho exercise is gone for now). The text used for sitting statues is the “Tomorrow” speech form Macbeth (In Japanese of course), the walks are only done forwards, and the Voodoo exercise is best described as a new march with vocal bursts.

After this basic training, which takes about 40 minutes, begins the more advanced sword work. These exercises are constantly morphing, and tailored to the specific play being worked on, with texts coming from that play as well. Now, we are working mostly on Dionysus, but there are texts from plays produced last summer that also get thrown into the mix. A discussion of these advanced sword exercises also will have to wait for another process entry, but in general they involve cutting down opponents coming from various angles, and are sometimes improvised over 1950’s American pop-music, an . They are:

· Basic Sword Statues (standing and sitting), 4 variations

· Horizontal Sword Swing (furimawashi) with vocal burst, 3 variations

· Vertical Sword Swing (furioroshi) with vocal burst, 2 variations

· Voodoo with Swords, 2 variations with or without text

· Twist [to Chubby Checker 1960 version of "Let's Twist Again"] Improvised with no text

· Patricia [to Perez Prado 1958 version] Improvised with and without text [PICTURED ABOVE]

By 12:45 we’re usually done. Lunch at 1 pm is prepared for us by the Kôryûkan staff. Soup, rice, salad, and some kind of meat or fish. We try to eat calmly and as quickly as possible to give time to digest before the 2pm training.

At 2pm, Suzuki arrives typically and throws the women and then the men into one of the more advanced exercises. At any moment any of the exercises could be done, and at any moment, any of us could be singled out. When in rehearsal for a tour of a show that is in rep (as opposed to a new production), there is a lot of time spent on performers individually, and this can take several hours. Sometimes it gets quite intense.

We eat dinner at 6, and then at 7 or so there is a run through of the play. Though sometimes it stops if it’s not going well. We are generally done by 10pm.

There is variation in the schedule of course, with the runs happening in the afternoon. There are also extended periods of open rehearsal where the actors will organize bits to rehearse among themselves.

While it’s typical for training to be divided up according to sex, this is especially true of Dionysus, which has the male scenes and female scenes very clearly divided. The only dialogue between female and male characters in Suzuki’s version is the final scene, between Cadmus and Agave.

After 10 pm, we sometime are called over to Kawasemi 1 to watch videos related to the work. We watched the live broadcast of Suzuki’s first opera, La Traviata, which premiered in December. It felt a little like a Cassavetes film but with all Japanese.

By the time we all get back to our dorm, we draw a large communal bath (ofuro) which everyone gets in by turns, and then right to bed. We each have individual rooms with our own little toilet and sink, which is helpful since the hallway is very cold now. I sleep with the window slightly cracked to keep a bit of the winter icy air coming in.