The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso

Yudai Kamisato / Okazaki Art Theatre, The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso, 2017, Kyoto Art Center. Photo by Yoshikazu Inoue, courtesy of Kyoto Experiment

Synopsys
A man and woman are in front of a car. They have come here to sca/er the ashes of the man’s father and the woman’s
husband, in accordance with the wishes of the deceased. Exasperated by the woman, who will not move away from the car,the man tells her a story he heard from a Japanese emigrant who se/led in Paraguay. Two men appear. One of them treats
the other almost like a slave and, rather than o ering his condolences to the man and woman who have come here to sca/er
the ashes of the man who was, respecSvely, their father and husband, he starts to tell them a story about Okinawa that heheard from a friend. When he nishes the story, the two men depart, leaving the mother and son alone again. The son talks
about the Smes he visited the remote island of Ogasawara and Valparaíso in Chile. He relates a story about paradise, told tohim by a Peruvian man on a long-distance bus traveling to Chile. The son talks to his mother.
“The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso”
Yudai Kamisato* Messaging, messenger/what I wrote in this work
I think the most important function of theater is "messaging." In short, someone relays someone else's words or a happening= a message to someone else. Theater has always shown us how the person receiving this message reacts. The person
receiving and reacting to the message is the so-called protagonist.
The characters appearing in the scripts of my works in recent years have all been messengers delivering messages. Theaudience is presumed to be the party receiving these messages. In other words, I have regarded the audience as being theprincipal and at the focus of the work. For "The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaiso," I have adopted a dialogue
format; the characters give messages to each other. It is my intention to have these messages build on each other until theentire work becomes a single message = messenger, in that it delivers this message to the audience.
This work was written on the basis of things I heard from others somewhere. As the writer, I myself am therefore amessenger. To my thinking, it is precisely the action and behavior of the receiver, meaning audience members that hear thewords of another, picture the other's circumstances, and are inﬂuenced in their behavior as a result, that are at the foundationof theater. Thanks to advances in communications technology, anyone can show and tell others about his or her experiences
and perspectives these days. But for this very reason, I suspect that we may be neglecting the practice of listening tosomeone's words and picturing things in response. This is what I am apprehensive about, and I believe it is also a requirement
for theater to function.
What I wrote in this work are all sorts of stories: stories of people after scattering the ashes of a husband or father at sea, ofpeople who emigrated to South America from Japan, of people born on a certain island when it was under US administration,of human beings scattered around the globe, and of people who continue to dig up the bones of others who died in the war.
They are stories of movement. This "movement" refers not only to physical relocation but also movement from life to death,and from death to life. The steady buildup and inheritance of this movemet is what makes history. This is all part of the work's
message.
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The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso

Yudai Kamisato / Okazaki Art Theatre, The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso, 2017, Kyoto Art Center. Photo by Yoshikazu Inoue, courtesy of Kyoto Experiment* About the spatial presentation
Over the last few years, I have travelled to various countries and regions around the world and seen theatrical and otherperformances in them. It has prompted me to think about the key role of the theater (i.e., playhouse) as a place where diverse
people gather.
The Western-style theater where contemporary theater has nearly always been staged in Japan is merely one model of such agathering site. I am not rejecting the European-derived theater of this country, which has a history of over 100 years, but Ihave come to think that there should be a wider range of freedom as regards the site.
In the audience space for this work, I placed
objects and other items that have something to
do with the stories in the play and places
mentioned in them. They are a jumbled mixtureof things such as a church pew, bunk bed, coﬃn,ship deck, and patch of red clay. By laying all sortsof objects with a miscellaneous cultural
background in the seating area, I am attempting
to heighten the degree of freedom for membersof the audience.
For the acting area, I decided to apply traditional
show and billboard know-how, and to makeextensive use of backdrops, stage curtains, andspotlights. My purpose in so doing is toemphasize that the play performed there is a"show" for the audience, and that the seatingarea is at the focus.

Text and direc1on: Yudai Kamisato
Dramaturge: Masashi Nomura Transla1on: Gonzalo Robledo Set design: dot architects
Casts: 4 (M:3, F:1)
Staﬀ : 5 (Stage Manager 1 / Sound 1 / LighSng 1 / Manager 1 / Producer 1)
Produced by Kyoto Experiment
DuraSon: 85 min.
Language: Spanish with Japanese and English subStles
Minimum necessary dimensions of the stage area: Width: 5.4mHeight to hanging posiSons: 3.1mDepth: 5.6m
Premire : 2017 KYOTO EXPERIMENTS2017 Auditorium, Kyoto Art Centerprecog co .,LTD. | h/p://precog-jp.net | info@precog-jp.net | TEL: +81-3-6825-1223 |Contact: Akane Nakamura, Mihoka Kawamura