“Using Words is Tricky” / Toshiki Okada

ētto ētto might open up worlds. we don‛t know about yet!
The festival‛s key phrase for 2024 is ētto ētto (an everyday Japanese phrase meaning “um” and “er” in English). A phrase used when you’re stuck for words during a conversation. Although it might seem meaningless, it can act as a kind of buffer during communication, allowing you to think, ponder or recall a memory. This year, the festival lineup includes all kinds of performances and talks that in some way relate to ētto ētto. In conjunction with this, we asked two writers to contribute articles about this key phrase. We hope these act as alternative doors for experiencing the festival!

Um. Er. Long ago, I wrote plays with a lot of those sorts of words in the dialogue. That was long ago. But it still seems ingrained in people’s impressions of my signature style as a playwright. Maybe it’s just me but it feels like that mark won’t fade anytime soon.

Perhaps because I feel like I’ve done hesitant language to death or maybe because I’m just fed up with the approach, I’ve recently placed most importance in terms of language in my scripts on the actual meaning of the words.

Last year, my theater company, chelfitsch, and Kyoto Experiment co-produced a play called The Window of Spaceship ‘In-Between.’ It is set on a spaceship tasked with the cultural colonialist mission of teaching a language to intelligent extraterrestrial life forms so that the language will be preserved and prosper. Being performed in Japanese, the audience understandably identifies Japanese as the language for whose preservation and prosperity the characters aspire.

The spaceship has a crew of four. These roles were played by actors whose native languages is not Japanese. This choice was made for a number of reasons. It’s because I want to see Japanese spoken onstage by nonnative speakers become more and more common in Japanese theater practices. And it’s because I want to play around with the dizzying diversity of semantic layers that words can have when spoken onstage in theater. (For example, Hamlet is performed in Japanese, but does that make the protagonist a Japanese speaker? Of course not. So is he an English speaker, since the play was originally written in English? But he’s the prince of Denmark. And so on and so on.) And I want to issue a provocation to performances by native Japanese speakers that ordinarily get stuck in the rut of theatrical dialogue (in which I also include dialogue of the colloquial theater movement), making it harder for the words to truly resonate with the audience, through using nonnative speakers, whose delivery of Japanese nonetheless permeates smoothly.

During the rehearsal process, we encountered almost no issues in terms of the Japanese intonation used by the nonnative performers. I never told them to fix the intonation of a word or that, conversely, saying it in a nonnative-sounding way was better. Though obviously adopting the central conceptual conceit of being a Japanese-language play performed by nonnative Japanese speakers, it didn’t prey on our minds when we got down to the nitty-gritty tasks involved in making the play. And this was a very good thing, I think. And despite not concerning ourselves with that during the making of the production, the central concept behind the play nonetheless worked very well when it was performed. This was the case at the premiere in Tokyo at the height of summer, in Kyoto a little later in early autumn, and then in Wuzhen, China.

But in my view, the play’s concept didn’t work when it was performed this year in Brussels. Why not? I don’t think I can understand the reason exactly. Is it because an audience in Brussels can’t tell the difference between Japanese by nonnative and native speakers? In which case, the performance in China would also have gone badly. Most of the audience in Seoul, where we took the show after Brussels, also surely couldn’t understand Japanese (and yet, in my opinion, the Seoul performances went very well). Might it be because a situation where the language most used in a society is spoken by nonnative speakers is totally normal in Brussels? Maybe. But China is also multicultural and multilingual.

This problem, which is ultimately an internal one, led the cast to believe the bad audience response was due to their poor performances. But it was nothing of the kind. I wanted to ensure they understood this and so told the cast my opinion. Everyone gave very good performances. As a show, things actually went very well, having got better and better ever since the premiere. What made the response to the shows in Brussels so muted was not the quality of the performances. I think it was a problem of context. In other words, the most important aesthetic element of the play is that it was performed in Japanese by nonnative speakers, and yet this didn’t come across in Brussels. But the experience of the performances in Brussels seemed to teach me that this issue lies at the heart of the work.

My comment to the cast, however, was problematic. The concept of the play as a Japanese-language theater work performed by nonnative speakers of Japanese, which wasn’t a problem (in a good sense of the term) during the creation process, was clearly being problematized in my comment. At that time, I made the comment because I felt that the most important thing was to convey to the performers that they were not to blame for the poor response of the audiences in Brussels. But it is undeniable that this remark, made as it was to a cast of nonnative Japanese speakers, was effectively telling them that the way they spoke Japanese differed from native speakers (and which I didn’t think was a good thing).

Any international performing arts festival invites and presents works from a wide range of contexts, and this is the same for Kyoto Experiment. This means a work is presented to audiences in a context that differs from that on which it is based or associated with. Within the contexts of the place in which the festival is held, the contexts of a certain work may be understood, but also may not. It is possible to argue that there is value in things not being understood. In theory, I think that’s true. However, if things are not understood, then the show might feel like a failure. In my case, I attempted to explain that this was not so, and ended up criticizing something unnecessary (and which I didn’t want to criticize). It is perhaps inevitable that attempts to present things in different contexts from those that control the here and now would result in the accumulation of such problems (and which, I would like to emphasize, are relatively minor).

Even if I no longer write dialogue with filler words, something still cleaves to words that isn’t retrieved semantically. As a matter of course, when engaging in an art form that uses words (such as theater), how we—both the creators and audience, and the people whose job it is to connect the two—accept and respond to the challenge of incorporating that fact into the main core of the aesthetic elements that make up a work (and which if those elements don’t translate well, will collapse), this challenge that makes it harder for something to successfully transcend cultural contexts, will perhaps determine if we can make the future a bit more positive.

Toshiki Okada
Theater artist, novelist, and artistic director of chelfitsch, Toshiki Okada was born in 1973 in Yokohama. His play Five Days in March won the 49th Kishida Kunio Drama Award in 2005, launching his international career. He has created numerous international co-productions, including repertory works for German public theaters.