Director

Ku Na'uka Theatre Company

Born in 1959, in Kanda, Tokyo. Studied aesthetics at Tokyo University. Had a strong interest in Rakugo (japanese comic talk) since his teens.

In 1980, he created a performance group at university and started his career as a director as well as an actor. In this period, he developed a unique training method for actors, based on oriental gymnastics.

In 1986, he started performing solo, basing his work on modern novels. These shows were praised as "the birth of new clown art, founded upon a concrete story telling technique with an element of dance" He took part, as an actor, in Se-wori-chotta directed by Lee Yuntaek, a Korean director, and toured Korea, the U.S.A. and Japan.

In 1990, he founded a new theatre company "Ku Na'uka" with the "two actors play one role" method thanks to the discovery of young talents.

In 1993, Ku Na'uka was invited to Toga Festival and has been presenting a new production on the occasion of Toga spring festival since 1995.

In 1995, for the first edition of Theatre Olympics in Delphi, he presented Elektra with the Suzuki Company of Toga and Tadashi Suzuki in which the leading role was played by Mikari, a brilliant actress from Ku Na'uka, touring Copenhagen, Stockholm, Beijing and Shanghai. Since 1996, the company has been venturing into the realm of japanese classical pieces, of which Tenshu-Monogatari, the fantastic piece by Kyoka Izumi, has been highly successful with audiences and toured many cities in Japan, India, Pakistan.

In 1999, Satoshi Miyagi presented Chushin-gura, the play written for Bunraku and Kabuki, for the 2nd edition of Theatre Olympics, which had been held in Shizuoka.

The highly developed information society of today which brought us various conveniences, at the same time, gradually made us lose confidence in the human being.
Thus, our social, economic and even our leisure activities, we no longer feel the need to maintain face to face contact with others. Everyone is reduced to being nothing more than part of the system and a lot of us feel like dispersible parts of a cogwheel. In other words, each person simply plays the part expected of him ; a role decided by the different situations of daily life, for example work, family, school, etc.
We rarely have the opportunity to experience ourselves as whole beings, to be able to say "This is me!". We are victims of a loss of confidence in the human being, a doubt in our unique value, a feeling of personal powerlessness, and a lack of conviction that "My being can affect others' lives."

All of this has already begun to weaken the vitality of our society through an indifference to politics and the disintegration of local communities.
Under these conditions, the social responsibility of theatrical performance, which is, in my opinion, the most primitive art, is more crucial than at any other time.

I produce pieces of theatre for the Ku Na'uka theatre company, with the objective of rediscovering confidence in the power of the human being ; "I am one total life being" and of sharing this with the audience.
Word and body (Logos and Pathos), which are torn apart on stage, show us to what extent they are vital to each other. One could say that there is a fervent courtship between word and body, and, beyond it, a moment of bliss where these two overcome their alienation and fuse together.
Thus, the primitive image of the human being will manifest itself on stage.