Wakana Arai (Festival/Tokyo), Katarzyna BiałachĪ Festival/Tokyo, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and TR Warszawa co-production We hope you will enjoy it.Īyako Araki, Miho Inatsugu, Nana Suzuki, Monika Frajczyk, Mateusz Górski, Paweł Smagała

What you will watch today is the result of this collaborative process. The rehearsals that started in Warsaw in September then saw the rest of the creative team, not least the Japanese and Polish actors, contribute idea after idea. During this period we also received a lot of input from Chisato and Kenyu as well as Roman, the director for programming of TR Warszawa. We were left with a mountain of rejected and discarded ideas. We considered a range of ideas and wrote a text based on them, and then brought in Magda to discuss this further. This was the time during which Łukasz and I would hold our discussions. How could we possibly organize the immense amount of information in the original book? What kind of structure should we adopt? 10 pm in Tokyo is 3 pm in Warsaw.

What are the ways in which people are envisioning worlds that do not exist in reality? We carried out research in order to learn this.Īfter the New Year, Łukasz and I began chatting online as we developed the text. The first thing we did was to ask various people to tell us about their idea of a utopia. The reader is called upon to pick out information from the deluge of content available on theses pages, to reorder it, and to imagine his or her own version of the Valley.Īs such, how can we construct “fragments” that harness the characteristics of theatre? We might say that we spent the next year exhaustively engaging with this question.

Each of the texts is merely a fragment representing part of the world in which it is set. Le Guin’s “Always Coming Home” is a particularly unusual kind of book in that it comprises a collection of highly diverse texts about a fictional place called the Valley.

Why are they interested in the work of Le Guin? What are their aims behind attempting this project? Over the course of their three weeks in Japan, we were joined by the assistant dramaturges Chisato Sone and Kenyu Paku and held many such discussions, either in the F/T office or ensconced at an Ikebukuro izakaya.Īs the talks continued, our interest seemed to converge into the question of how we can use the medium of theatre to envision the world. It is October 28th, 2018 and I am deep in conversation with Magda Szpecht and Łukasz Wojtysko at a cafe inside Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre.

Always coming home