Wiener Festwochen 2010: Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech

Wiener Festwochen 2010: Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech
Toshiki Okada / chelfitsch

Date: 16 jun to 19 jun, 20:30
Venue: HALLE E+G / HALLE G

Acting and Dance Performance / TOKYO / Austrian Premiere

Tokyo theatre maker toshiki okada has created a moving and shocking study of the modern professional world. he explores the rituals of communication in the work place through physical and vocal choreography. More

Suffering from an air-conditioning unit on overdrive, office staff try to talk about their grotesque working conditions while observing the imposed rituals of communication. There is a great emptiness around them. A group of employees confer about the farewell dinner for a laid-off colleague, with monotonously repeated quotations from restaurant guides covering up the disquieting question of who will be the next to get the boot. In this, the performers execute strangely autistic movements while talking, teasing sentences out of their bodies under great pressure and with massive effort. Gestures of suppressed fear slip through the formalised rituals of behaviour and figures of speech. Proprieties are always observed, business suits always fit snugly. Pressure must be released in some roundabout way. In his voice-and-body choreography, Toshiki Okada reports on precarious working conditions. Most Japanese enterprises do not offer permanent work contracts anymore but instead opt for temporary agreements that can be terminated anytime or quite simply subcontract work. At the same time, however, they demand maximum identification of these subcontracted workers with the company, and high performance demands, hierarchic rituals and the old fiction of lifelong worker loyalty are perpetuated.

With this three-scene production, Toshiki Okada has created a touching and startling study of a modern-day working environment. Okada is part of the new, highly productive theatre scene of Tokyo. His work Free Time was shown at Wiener Festwochen 2008.

copyright:
© Dieter Hartwig