Chiten”Sports Play”

Chiten opened its own performance studio, UNDER-THROW, in Kyoto in 2013, where it continues to challenge the conventions of theater and theater spaces. Utilizing a wide range of global texts by the likes of Chekhov, Chiten has honed a radically new style of theater through director Motoi Miura’s deconstruction of language and body. Chiten first tackled the work of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek in 2012 with its staging of Kein Licht., a postdramatic text devoid of narrative which Jelinek wrote in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima crisis. The highly acclaimed production was revived at Kyoto Experiment 2014. Deftly directed by Miura, it also featured a soundscape by composer Masahiro Miwa that resonated live voices. Miura has now chosen to stage Jelinek’s long 1998 work, Sports Play. In it, Jelinek likens today’s mass frenzy for sports to warfare. Her text interweaves multiple layers of fragmentary monologues, forming a vast collage with characters from Greek tragedy such as Electra, Achilles, and Hector that transcends straightforward social critique. Once again teaming up with composer Miwa, Chiten serves up a bold and avant-garde portrayal of sports in the twenty-first century, continually exploited by politics and the media.