Essay

Playing with context

By Aya Ogawa

I was born in Tokyo and grew up in the U.S. — Atlanta, Houston and several towns in northern California. I can't remember exactly how I discovered the theater, but by the time I was a teenager in Monterey, California, I found myself acting in school plays. It was thrilling to be on stage as Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," or rattling off insults in iambic pentameter as Rosalind in Shakespeare's "As You Like It."

My parents were dismayed by my passion for the arts, so much so that my mother (I found out many years later) even went to my high school behind my back to ask my teacher to stop casting me in plays. But I was the typical stubborn first-generation teen, and I fought for my right to pursue happiness — on-stage

It was the mid-'80s. The movie spinoff TV sitcom "Gung Ho" (about a Japanese family transplanted to Pennsylvania) was canned after one season, and Pat Morita of "Karate Kid" fame seemed the only lasting public face of Japanese in the U.S. "You're going to spend your life playing maids and geishas!" my mother would say, "Are you going to be satisfied with a life like that?"

Two decades later, America had cheered Christy Yamaguchi on to win the Olympic gold medal, girls had swooned over James Iha, and Haruki Murakami had made The New York Times Best Seller list. The perspectives had shifted. At least here in New York, there's a hunger for things Japanese. People lined up en masse for the opening of the Muji store. But there's no denying that cultural stereotypes are difficult to break. In fact, new images don't eradicate older preconceptions, but are just added to the messy jumble of biases. If it's not a buck-teethed, photo-snapping tourist, it's the infantile, pigeon-toed Harajuku girls that'll torque the stereotypes of the Japanese

It's in this landscape of contradictory images that I've found myself in a unique position for translation — not only of language, but cultural context. In addition to my own artistic endeavors, I currently hold the position of Senior Program Officer in Performing Arts at the Japan Society, a century-old nonprofit organization that brings the people of Japan and the United States together through mutual understanding. My work there involves facilitating the presentation of Japanese performing artists (ranging from the traditional to the cutting edge in dance, music and theater)

Taking a work out of its context and setting it in front of an audience with which the artists do not have common ground often sheds a different light on the art. In the next few articles I'd like to explore this imperfect and surprising process of cultural translation in the theater.

Shukan ST: Dec. 7, 2007

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