Meet Toshiki Okada, who is evolving again toward the future, in an online lecture. Since around 2018, he has been closely searching for the possibility for de-anthropocentric theatre. So far he has created two theatre pieces based on this interest: Eraser Mountain(2019) and Metamorphosis of A Living Room(2023). In what ways would de-anthropocentric theatre be possible? Listen to Okada’s reasoning.

Translation: Koh Jooyoung
Video Editing: Jeong Junha

The primary materials that Okada Toshiki took for his scripts, stage directions, as well as novels, come from petty gestures and situations of everyday. The name he gave to the company he formed in 1997, “Chelfitsch” simulates the way a child would pronounce the English word “selfish,” indicating his attention to the unconsciously administered, often unintendedly tangled or disjointed, bodily gestures that are otherwise ignored in social communications. His stage works have since evolved over the span of twenty-five years into an intricate mechanism that conjoin ritualized formulation and slight bits of reality, which ultimately provokes abstract inference and sensibility for the invisible beyond the stage. The unyielding reflexivity upon theater itself that he activates coincides with the interrogating gaze upon the macro-levels of societal currents, the reconfiguration of the theatrical form in crisis often accompanying penetrating insights upon hidden tensions and anxiety of “the lost generation” in crises. Theater according to Okada is the vision upon the world without a vision.

Past Works

• 2008, Nam June Paik Festival Presented by NJP Art Center NOW JUMP: Station 2 ‹5 Days in March›
• 2011, Festival Bo:m ‹Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech›
• 2013, Festival Bo:m ‹Current Location›
• 2015, Asia Culture Center Theater Opening Festival ‹God Bless Baseball›
• 2022, Ob/Scene Festival ‹New Illusion›