Toshiki Okada

is a Japanese playwright, theater director, novelist, and founder of the theatrical company chelfitsch. He is known for "his use of hyper-colloquial Japanese and his unique choreography."

Life and career Personal life Born in Yokohama in 1973, Okada attended Nagatadai Elementary and Nagata Secondary School there. In 1992, he started attending Keio University under the Faculty of Business and Commerce. Being a fan of Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, Okada aspired to be a movie director when he was in middle school, which led him to join a theater club in Keio University. During this process, he gained experience in writing scenarios and scripts, which piqued his interest in stage directing as well. In his first year at Keio, he learned of Hideki Noda through Noda's troupe, , who had their final performance in 1992. Noda's modern and "unexpected" style influenced Okada's earlier works. The name is a play on the English word "selfish," and is always written with a lowercase c. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, chelfitsch relocated from Yokohama to Kumamoto to avoid the threats of the earthquake and nuclear contamination. He received his first award, Yokohama Cultural Award / Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement in 2005. which draws influence from Oriza Hirata's "quiet theater" movement from the 1980s.

His works are distinguished by the use of fragmented and abbreviated idiosyncratic language in the vernacular of Japanese in their twenties, which is deliberately inarticulate, drawn out, and circular. Exaggerating the natural rhythms in human speech, his works comically integrate "natural" Japanese speech that is filled with passive verb forms and chains of dependent clauses, Accompanying the broken phrases is the physical body language of the performers, made up of disjointed and abstract movements that combine isolated pedestrian gestures.

Okada was inspired by Hirata's quote, "It is strange for the actors to tap into their self-consciousness when speaking their lines." Okada believes that his actors should be able to manipulate their consciousness and balance their attention on both their words and movement. The gap between language and the body is the lived experiences each performer gathers from their environment to bring to their performances, and they use the external body to reflect those lived experiences or "images." Okada advises his actors to not be overly attached with the language or the physicality of the performance so that the audience can interpret the "image," themselves. Therefore, his performers usually use indirect, third-person speech in their monologues and narrate directly to the audience in his plays, which breaks the fourth wall. His characters are often labelled only "Actor One," with the same "character" played by more than one performer. In October 2009, , which was co-produced by Hebbel am Ufer, premiered in Berlin. In 2013, Okada collaborated with Hebbel am Ufer again to produce Ground and Floor, which had its premiere in Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels along with an eight-country European tour. In 2014, Okada was invited to present at the Theater der Welt festival in Mannheim, Germany. The play explores Japan's consumerism culture by introducing characters who have different perspectives pertaining to konbini or Japanese convenient stores, whose numbers have increased since the 1970s. His newest work, God Bless Baseball is set to premiere in Gwangju, Korea for the Asian Arts Theatre Festival in September 2015. chelfitsch has also toured Seoul, Cardiff, Salzburg, Singapore, Seattle, Vancouver, and other cities.

America Okada made his American debut in 2009 with a seven-city tour of Five Days in March. The premiere of the play was presented with supertitles by chelfitsch Theater Company at Japan Society in February 2009. The following year in April–May 2010, New York-based company, the Play Company, produced Enjoy at the 59E59 Theaters with Dan Rothenberg from Pig Iron Theatre Company as the director and Aya Ogawa as the translator. The Play Company has also produced works of other renowned Japanese playwright-directors such as Yōji Sakate in the past. In May 2010, Daniel Safer adapted Five Days in March in English based on Ogawa's translations at La MaMa. Since then, Okada's works has been produced numerous times in New York, where he has received generally favorable reviews from various media outlets such as New York Times, nytheater now, Time Out, and The Village Voice. Jason Zinoman from New York Times claimed that, "[Okada's] melancholy style suits the current recession-era America." as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Set in the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake, the play is partly an autobiography of Okada's life, and is also influenced by Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Kyōhei Sakaguchi's nonfiction essay. On March 11, 2012, in collaboration with other playwrights and theaters from Japan and New York, one act from Okada's was showcased at the Segal Theater for the event "Shinsai: Theaters for Japan." The purpose of the event was to raise funds for members of Japan’s theater community who were affected by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. In 2014, Okada returned to New York with The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise, which was staged by the Play Company and performed at the JACK Theater.

Awards and nominations Awards 2005: Yokohama Cultural Award/Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement 2005: 49th Kishida Prize for Drama for Five Days in March 2007: 56th Kanagawa Culture and Sports Award 2008: 2nd Ōe Kenzaburō Prize for The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed

Nominations 2005: 2005 Toyota Choreography Awards for Air Conditioner 2015: 28th Mishima Yukio Prize for Current Location

Works Stage works 1997: 1998: 1999: 2000: 2001: 2001: 2002: 2003: 2003: 2004: 2004: 2004: 2005: 2006: 2006: 2008: 2009: 2009: 2011: 2012: Zero Cost House 2012: 2013: 2014: 2015: God Bless Baseball

Adaptations 2008: , Original: Kōbō Abe 2009: Tätowierung, Original: Dea Loher

Novels 2007: 2008: