past performances

Our newest collaborative work is a film, Feast of Light, premiered in Kanazawa in April of 2003 to mark our 20th year in Japan.

When the Woman Who Loved Insects Hid was one of our first collaborative works. Beginning at the Festival Fringe in 1987 in Edinburgh, Scotland, this theater piece with original music for traditional Japanese instruments was performed in theater festivals around the world. The most memorable performance for the writer was on the Ishikawa Prefectural Noh Stage. A bilingual book has been published by Kanazawa Ikadaigaiku Press and is available by contacting us.

Feast of Light

Based on a true story that happened in our little village, the film traces the journey of a priest in search of his lost friend. The delicate play of dark and light and the elegant flow of the music take the audience on an elegant journey through the shadows of death to life. The actors often played themselves: our friend, Koushi Fukushima, the priest in the temple below actually was the dance partner of the missing old man. His wife and son Eiko and Shuho also acted and supported us in many other capacities. Through the excellent editing skills and advice of Tara Alexander, we created a piece that expresses the magic of this mountain village that has been our home for so many years.

Notes by the writer:
This play had many lives. First, in order to get this play on the road, we bravely performed it ourselves, Mary Lou Prince playing the Japanese koto together with a shakuhachi player and I, Patty, performing the play about three different characters as a one-woman play. In this incarnation, it was performed in many different countries and in festivals in Japan and abroad. The high point was a performance on the Ishikawa Prefectural Noh stage. In 1996, the play was picked up by Senga Yuko, a fabulous Japanese actress and she performed the play brilliantly with her troupe of fine actors. The play seemed curiously prophetic, since the house I described in my third year in Japan was very much like the house we now inhabit in the mountainside.

Other works include The County Home, a humorous one-woman play set in a county mental hospital, Just Between the Three of Us, a story of twins that we performed with a Bunraku puppet and a 13 string and a17 string bass koto and a shakuhachi. In 1997, I was the recipient of a nationwide play writing award for Yugetsu, a play within a play about a plot by Kano Suga and Kotoku Shusui to assassinate the Meiji Emperor. At great expense and totally outside of our artistic direction, this was given a completely forgettable performance in 1999, demonstrating to us why we went to such trouble to produce projects ourselves. We vowed to never let it happen again. It is a brilliant work that we hope receives a fine performance at some future date.