Sennojo Shigeyama

‘Revitalizing Beckett in the New Era of Japan’

In conversation with Yoshiko Takebe

In this talk, Sennojo Shigeyama will discuss his experience of acting Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at Kanagawa Arts Theatre (Yokohama city) in 2019. The strategy of featuring a young yet traditional Kyogen actor in a contemporary setting raised the question of what it means to ‘wait’ for the audiences, who were in fact experiencing the transition period from the former Heisei to the new Reiwa era back in 2019. Just as Beckett was writing and directing bilingually, this talk also focuses on the effect of being a bilingual performer and director through the innovative lens of Sennojo Shigeyama.

Saturday 3rd June, 2023

10.00-11.30am (Dublin/London time) / 6.00-7.30pm (Tokyo time)

(via MS Teams)

Booking link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/samuel-beckett-japan-seminar-series-tickets-624293276997 

Speaker Biographies

Sennojo Shigeyama (Doji Shigeyama) (born: 1983) is recognized today as one of the new emerging talents in the world of Okura School Kyogen. Influenced by his pioneering grandfather Sennojo (died: 2010), who broke the taboo of the world of Noh-Kyogen by engaging in a rich variety of activities outside his Kyogen profession, and by his father Akira, who followed that vision by attempting to achieve fusions of traditional Japanese performance arts and Western contemporary theater with his NOHO Gekidan theater company and other international activities such as directing opera and staging Kyogen performances in English, Doji Shigeyama is opening up new horizons as a performer. His activities as an artist have ranged from writing and directing stand-up comedy for his Hyakumanben performances, writing a new Kyogen work for his Marikouji performances with the aim of creating new classics that will still be performed a hundred years from now, directing opera and bilingual Kyogen. 

Yoshiko Takebe is Professor in the Translation and Interpreting Course at the Department of Practical English, Shujitsu University in Japan. Her research focuses on the correlation between nonverbal and verbal forms of expressions with respect to drama and theatre. She studied Drama and Theatre in Research at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has worked as a Japanese-English interpreter and translator in Tokyo. Her recent articles on Beckett are ‘Translating Beckett’s Voices in Different Cultures’ in Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (Eds. Laurens De Vos, Mariko Hori Tanaka, and Nicholas E. Johnson. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021) and ‘Translating Silence: Correlations between Beckett, Chekhov, and Hirata’ in Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (Eds. Anita Rakoczy, Mariko Hori Tanaka, Nicholas E. Johnson. Budapest/Paris: L’Harmattan Publishing, 2020).

Series Organisers: Mariko Hori Tanaka (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo), Michiko Tsushima (University of Tsukuba), Kumiko Kiuchi (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Yoshiko Takebe (Shujitsu University), and Trish McTighe (Queen’s University Belfast).

For queries relating to the event and booking please contact t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.