Nobuko Tanaka - The Japan Times

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Nobuko Tanaka

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Nobuko Tanaka

Nobuko Tanaka is a stage writer who has regularly contributed contemporary theater and dance articles to The Japan Times since 2001. She also writes for several Japanese and overseas magazines and web sites. As a promoter, she takes Japanese artists to foreign theater festivals.

For Nobuko Tanaka's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Mar 2, 2006

TIF pushes theater's borders

With guest productions from as far afield as Kuwait, Israel, Germany and the United States, this year's 12th annual Tokyo International Arts Festival (TIF) is delivering a challenging program of theater and dance from some of the world's leading dramatists. In doing so, TIF -- held for the first time at the Nishi-Sugamo Arts Factory, a disused junior high school in Toshima Ward -- is living up to the high standards the nonprofit group's selection committee has previously set itself.

Japan Times

Events / Events Outside Tokyo

Feb 24, 2006

Essence of womanhood from top flamenco muse

One of the so-called "Three Muses" at the summit of flamenco dancing, along with Sara Baras and Maria Pages, is Eva Yerbabuena. The Granada-born dancer returns to Japan riding a wave of success in the wake of her performances last year at the Spanish Pavilion at Aichi Expo, and at the Flamenco Festival in Tokyo.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Feb 16, 2006

Awkward casting mutes plays impact

In "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams, a classic story of youthful dissatisfaction, you'd expect to see a restless young actor dig into the role of Tom Wingfield and explore his frustration. It is surprising, then, that in the current production of the play at the New National Theatre, director Irina Brook, daughter of influential English contemporary theater director Peter Brook, has chosen to cast 56-year-old Katsumi Kiba in that role.

Events / Events Outside Tokyo

Feb 10, 2006

Youthful dramatics

Oriza Hirata, founder of the cutting-edge, Tokyo-based Seinendan Theater Company that has been at the forefront of Japanese contemporary drama for over a decade, is one of Japan's leading scriptwriters and directors. But as owner of the Komaba Agora Theater, two stops down the Keio Inokashira Line from Shibuya, Hirata is not content -- like so many others -- to simply operate within an artistic bubble of his own making.

Events / Events Outside Tokyo

Feb 3, 2006

Kabuki duo turn Bard into a mythical folktale

Ryutopia Company shot to prominence in December 2003 with its Noh staging of "Macbeth." Since then, Ryutopia's 48-year-old director Yoshihiro Kurita has twice more pulled off the feat of breaking the Tokyo-Osaka stranglehold on Japanese theater by luring the nation's critics north through the snows for premieres of his acclaimed noh productions of Shakespeare -- first with "King Lear" in December 2004, and then with "The Winter's Tale" late last year.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jan 19, 2006

"Stuff Happens" : So what do you think about it?

The night I got back home from the premiere of "Stuff Happens," the BBC World television news led off with a report on a further mess in Iraq -- the chief judge in the trial of deposed president Saddam Hussein had resigned following criticism of his "soft attitude" toward the defendant. I felt strongly that the play by the Tokyo-based Rinkogun company that I saw a few hours before had not been a historical work, but was about something that is very much still happening in real time in Iraq. The curtain has not fallen yet.

Events / Events Outside Tokyo

Jan 13, 2006

Director reworks Russian epic with gender twist

Ten years ago, then aged 40, contemporary theater actor/director Hideki Noda was, even by his own standards, bold to write a play based on "Crime and Punishment," the lengthy 19th-century masterpiece by the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevski. His "Gansaku Tsumi to Batsu (Fake Crime and Punishment)" runs till Jan. 29 at Theatre Coccon in Shibuya, Tokyo, before touring Theater Brava, Osaka.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Dec 29, 2005

A gradual rise to excellence

A loss of direction appeared to afflict large parts of the Japanese theater world in the beginning of 2005 as last year's promising stream of new actors and directors failed to live up to their 2004 debuts. Dramatists responded by looking outward for inspiration, creating an upsurge in international collaborations throughout the year.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Dec 15, 2005

Director Koki Mitani and the gentle indecision of Japanese juries

When 44-year-old writer/director Koki Mitani was young, he got so excited watching "Twelve Angry Men," a classic American jury-room film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, that he wanted someday to make his own original version.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Oct 6, 2005

You cannot force them to sing it in Japan, or to listen in London

"In this 60th anniversary year of the end of the war . . . I thought it was the right time to ask about Japan's current movement toward constitutional revision -- especially the revision of (war-renouncing) Article 9," said 53-year-old Ai Nagai, founder of Nitosha (Two Rabbits) Theater Company, as she explained why she wrote her new play "Utawasetai Otokotachi (Men who Force Singing of the Song)."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Sep 22, 2005

The Bard in abundance in Edo Japan

After four hours rejoicing in my seat as I watched "Tempo 12-nen no Shakespeare (Shakespeare in the 12th year of Tempo)" at the Theatre Cocoon, had I been wearing one I would have taken off my hat to the team who delivered the marvelous, grand-scale production -- director Yukio Ninagawa, writer Hisashi Inoue, music director Ryudo Uzaki and the entire, accomplished cast.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Sep 7, 2005

Salaryman nightmare, otaku dreams

Playwright David Mamet was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his play "Glengarry Glen Ross." Two years before that, however, an earlier, major work, "Edmond," had fared less well with the critics.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Aug 17, 2005

The Tokyo Python returns

Once upon a time in the 1980s, there was a theater company called Gekidan Kenko (Health Theater), whose zany, nonsensical and sometimes radical stagings became the stuff of cult legend. But then, in 1992, this quirky gem was dissolved by its quirky Japanese founder, self-styled Keralino Sandoroviich, as he embarked on Nylon 100 degrees C, a project in which he continues to this day to take on a much wider range of drama.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Aug 3, 2005

New dimensions in dance

Noism is a veritable supernova in the rapidly expanding universe of Japanese contemporary dance. It burst on the scene in 2004 as the residential company of the Niigata Ryutopia Theater, two years after its founder, 30-year-old Jo Kanamori, returned from Europe.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 20, 2005

Shock & awe: hotshots wow Shibuya

Two leading contenders to the throne of the contemporary drama world, now long occupied by Yukio Ninagawa, are certainly Suzuki Matsuo, 42, founder of the Otona Keikaku theater company, and the Asagaya Spiders' 30-year-old founder, Keishi Nagatsuka. Currently both of these rising stars happen to be staking their respective claims on amazingly high-quality productions in the heart of Tokyo's Shibuya.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 20, 2005

The Bard on the hanamichi

With his characters given samurai names and clad in kimono, whatever would the Bard make of this "Twelfth Night" by Japan's foremost Shakespeare dramatist, 69-year-old Yukio Ninagawa? This veteran theatrical explorer long vowed never to tackle kabuki, but is doing just that with "Twelfth Night" to packed houses at the Kabuki-za in Tokyo's Ginza. Here, in an interview with The Japan Times, Ninagawa casts light on his reasons for changing his mind, and how he feels about the result.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 6, 2005

'Noises Off' finds the right director

While tragedy is universal, comedy tends to be far more culturally specific, and this is especially true with theater. When drama is transposed out of its vernacular, audiences can be expected to tune in more easily to a mournful melodrama or saga of self-destruction than to a humorous work with all the nuances, inferences and subtleties that lovers of the stage expect from comedic drama.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jun 15, 2005

A new cherry for a new theater

Theatre Cocoon in Shibuya is renowned for staging some of the best contemporary drama in Japan, whether from established masters such as Yukio Ninagawa and Hideki Noda, or young blades like Suzuki Matsuo.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jun 8, 2005

House of babel that bubbles over

Hot on the heels of Hisashi Inoue's new play "Hakone Gora Hotel," which opened at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, "Kokugo Gannen (The First Year of the Japanese Language)," a vintage classic by the same playwright that premiered on the other side of Shinjuku at the Kinokuniya Hall in 1986, has now opened to packed houses there again.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jun 8, 2005

A fling to remember

The all-male reworking of "Swan Lake" by English choreographer Matthew Bourne has become a dance and stage legend since its November 1995 premiere at Sadler's Wells Theater in London. This powerful piece of ballet zeitgeist toured widely before arriving in Japan in spring 2003. With nonstop curtain calls, its charismatic main dancer Adam Cooper, in the role of the Swan, shot to pop-idol status. He's since returned here to dance several times, while "Swan Lake" itself again packed the Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo for a two-month run this spring.

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How 'Reiwa moms' are reshaping motherhood in Japan

By Mai Yoshikawa

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