 The Pritching Academia and the Professional Theater, but really it is to honor one of our masters, one of our elders of the tribe, but one of the really grand masters in chess, one would say, and a unique theater person. And he is right next to us right now in the dressing room. So he will come here with Cameron Steele, who is someone who studied with him. Cameron also studied a lot with Robert Wilson, but also with Tadashi Suzuki. And he translated to establish him and his work. And so it's a great, I think really great and rare opportunity to listen to one of the masters. So I'll try to say as little as possible, although I won't bore you too much, and try to have questions under 10 words. If you have a cell phone, maybe now also is the time, just take it out, everyone, and make sure and double check. It is not on the, and again, thank you all for coming. And I will go now and get Tadashi Suzuki and camera and again, thank you for coming. The Seagull Center Bridges, Academia and Professional Theater, International and American Theater. And for a long time we have, of course, tried to get him here. We did one evening about his new book, The Culture is the Body with Cameron. He sent us a video, but it's a great honor to have him here. It's also the end of our season. We had a big season. You have the book in front of us. So it's a sad and beautiful moment for us all together here at The Seagull Center. And I would like to thank everybody involved, Rebecca and Brad and Michael, Liu Chen, Isabella, everybody who really worked so hard to make this season so great. So thank you for coming and we will be coming in right now. Again, thank you all for coming and joining us here at The Seagull Center at the Graduate Center of CUNY in the name of The Seagull Center and the PhD program in theater with Peter Akasal. We really welcome you here. And thank you, Tadashi Suzuki, for taking the time out of your life to spend a moment with us. We had a little discussion before and we thought about a couple of questions and I just think we decided to, I'm gonna read them to him and then he will respond to the questions in a free association way. And we have two more chairs here, two more chairs there. I mean, we fill them up before we start. Is someone sitting here? Yeah, so just take, again, so thank you so much. And questions we had for Tadashi Suzuki who is here to show the Trojan women in Saratoga in collaboration with the CT company where also significant conference will take place focusing on his work and impact on the global world of theater but also on America especially. So our questions were, how did it feel for him to be back in the US after 15 years? It's a very long time for anybody who is such a prominent figure. In world theater, the play, the Trojan women which is a play from the ADS, perhaps many say his signature play and he felt strongly that this play should come here and will be performed up in Saratoga. So why that play now and what are the ideas behind it? He is part, one could say, of the 68 generation coming out of Japan and so our question is what does he think now? What theater should be concerned about? What is it concerned about? What should it be? And what could it be really concerned about? He studied as you know, political science. He didn't start right away in acting schools and in the Stella Adler studios of the world he came from political science and then developed his unique work. So our thought was like Bertolt Brecht who also believed in the science of theater. Is there a method? Is there a science? And can it be adopted globally? What he created and found as a model? Is the body, the last book that Cameron translated and we had a great evening here at the Siegel Center of Art and Universe, the body that after all insist the message of his work, the center of communication of culture and art and also globally in between countries and to communicate history. And we of course want to perhaps know a little bit more about Toga, what you saw in this most impressive structure he created, perhaps also a big inspiration for Roland Wilson for his Watermill Center, bit more about Toga, but also he's in October working in China a lot on Asian countries and Indonesia and looking at traditions and who perhaps are vanishing and bringing his work to it. So it's a very long question and a big field. Normally I try to be much shorter I promise I stayed two way out of it, but to Dashi, please. So before I get into the details of these questions, he wants to give you a more of an overall picture of why he began to do theater in the first place. So his first impulse actually when he wanted to be expressive, be an artist, was actually to be a novelist. And he was very interested in French culture, French literature and Russian literature at the time. And also interested in the culture and literature coming from the Latin world. From the whole Mediterranean diaspora. And then he had upon the problem of, you know, why do theater? He, in the moment that he was having these feelings he looked at the theater that was happening around him and he didn't like any of it. So it's an interesting place from which he began. He was a political science economics major at Waseda University when he started. And because he had that field of study he was really looking at the bigger picture. He was trying to formulate as a young man a world view. What place does Japan have in the world? What's going on in the world right now? He was concerned in hitting up against these big ideas. And he thought, And he thought the best way to interrogate and explore these questions was not through economic studies or through political studies, but in fact through the theater. And there's three main reasons behind that. First is theater uses its language, uses words. It has an important role in the process of theater. And it needs a body in space. And it's something that you have to do in a community, in a group. So through those lenses of language, the body, you can view each of the, and also the way different people work in groups, group, body, and language. It's a lens through which you can see the differences between each culture, each group. So if you look at the way that language is used, you can understand history. So you don't only understand history and tradition by looking at language, but you can also understand a kind of mentality. So you can understand the sensitivities of a certain group, or the aesthetics of a certain group by examining each of the aspects of the language. So you can understand the sensitivities of a certain group or the aesthetics of a certain group by examining language. And you thought that's a good tool, a good way to investigate different kinds of cultures, different kinds of people. And then there's the body. So we may think that we all share more or less the same body, but if you actually look at each person, even though we're all the same species, we're quite different if you look at each individual. You can see from... You can see from looking at a person's body the kind of upbringing they had, the kind of household they lived in. You can also see the kind of DNA. So because of those things, the same kind of bacteria, if a person is infected with it, it has a different effect based on that individual makeup. So the way those symptoms show up in different bodies is completely different based on the body and how long it takes for it to show. And also depending on the age, all of these things are shown by the body. And so by looking at the body and being aware of the body, you can right away see the difference between yourself and the other. So oftentimes a theater is thought of as like this very sort of direct relationship between the one director and one actor, but for him he thinks of it more as, at least three, you need a group, you need a sense of community and shared grammar with the people to create what he thinks the theater is. So once you get more than three people working on something, you start to create the idea of a nation, of a community, you start to create rules that are shared by this group of people. And so what allows someone to be brought into that group or not is whether they agree with or have a kind of empathy with the rules that are set up. And then of course you run into the problem of like well who's gonna set the rules. If you look at American politics right now you can see that problem pretty clearly. And in China as well you can see that problem pretty clearly. And within one group you have subgroups that and then they make their own rules within the bigger group. Anyway if you want to create anything that has a degree of continuity to it you need rules. And so one of the interesting things to study is how those rules are made, what's the process through which that shared grammar rules are arrived at. So how do you make rules that will last, that will stand the test of time. So in the case of the theater you have a troop who's creating work based on a set of rules. And if the rules don't hold with that group then the company dissolves. There is friction within the group, people don't agree, it falls apart. And so you need to have a way to resolve creative conflict, you need to have something to fall back on to have solutions to these internal rifts that happen within groups. solve creative conflict. You need to have something to fall back on to have solutions to these internal rifts that happen within groups. So, one of the things that help create this rule, is by examining this idea of the other, the other culture. We try to build rules based on the body, language, and how the group operates, but then one way to create these rules is to, as a group, decide, well, how do we feel about this culture, this person, this event that's outside of the group? How do we view that as a company? So, in his case, he couldn't create a company and only think about Japanese problems. You need something to hit up against, you need something to create a kind of objective distance. In his case, he grew up in a family where there was a degree of Japanese traditional performing arts practice going on, and at the same time he had an interest in European culture and literature. And so, when he was in this process of looking at his own culture's tradition and looking at traditions outside of his culture, the thing that really landed with him was the tradition of Greek tragedy. So, it's not really the source of Anglo-Saxon culture, but when we think of, you know, the source of what is now called Western culture, the Greek tragedies at the center of that. So, he had this knowledge of Japanese traditional performing arts, and then he had this interest and kind of resonance with, you know, European history and culture, and in particular Greek tragedy. And that was the sort of springboard from which he began his exploration. He wasn't doing it in necessarily a scholarly way. He doesn't consider himself a scholar. He thought just studying it through language was not going to, just studying it through reading and writing was not going to be enough. So, he really decided to go deep into what was at the core of the structure of Greek tragedy, Greek tragedy which was, you know, behind a lot of the great work, subsequent works in European history and literature in all of the Mediterranean cultures. This was at the core. So, he wanted to look at how was it structured and what is it that made it tick? So, the feeling when he was growing up in Japan was, you know, Western culture had permeated around the world that no matter what culture you traveled to, Western culture and the traditions of Western culture were there, were part of the base of operations of whatever else was going on. Especially the intellectual circles in Japan at the time, they were very much based in a reading of Western classics and there was a kind of inferiority complex that resulted in the dialogue, especially in the contemporary theater of the time. But he didn't feel that way. He didn't have this kind of inferiority complex, but he was interested in what the structures were lying behind it. And he started to think there must be some universal principles that are shared between this Greek tragic source material that was, you know, permeated throughout the world and within his own Japanese tradition, he thought there must be some. And that was in his 30s he was starting to make that exploration. And the result of that first exploration was the production of the Trojan women. And this is the first production that he brought to the United States in 1979 to Brooklyn College, the production of Trojan women. It was 38 years ago. And then Ellen Stewart invited him to La Mama in 1982 and he brought the Bacchai. And so his creations, based on his exploration of Greek tragedy, were the first productions that, in fact, he brought to the United States. And so one of the things he discovered in his exploration was that he realized that, in fact, the structure that exists in Greek tragedy, especially in the production of Greek tragedy, there were some similarities between traditions that existed in Japan that exist today. And there's basically three points of commonality. The first being that the theater developed out of religious ceremony. And the other is something you don't see so much in the modern theater, the use of a chorus. And finally, the use of mask. These elements you can find in the theater of the know. And so the protagonists usually are coming from a kind of a family situation. And the structure of the theater, for example, in the center of the seats of the Acropolis of Dionysus of Dionysus, is the seat of the Dionysus Priest. And the structure of the space also was similar. So you, in the Greek amphitheater, for example, the actors would speak their text to the seat of Dionysus, where the priest of Dionysus would often sit and would sort of have a dialogue with God through that point of focus in the space. So the performance and the acting was created with an awareness of the hierarchy of the space. The actor on the stage, the seat of the priest, and then God brings kind of like triangle and then the audience being witness to that. And in the know, you had a similar structure. You had a very specific seat in the audience where the Shogun would sit and the actors would speak directly to that point in the space. And so the way you move, everything is done in relation to that focal point in the space. And in realism, you talk like this. You don't say, I'm going to kill you this way. So he was inspired by this sharing of strategies. The use of the space also was quite different than modern theater. So there's a German architect. Do you know who this is? Mies van der Rohe, yes, modernist. So the idea in his architecture was to sort of take hierarchy out of the picture. In other words, wherever you are in the space, the quality is the same. The light is the same, the temperature is the same. It was a kind of democratic way to imagine a space. So basically what makes modern space modern is the fact that we've lost this hierarchy. We've lost a kind of central focal point. It's become everyone equal. Like Nietzsche says, that God is dead, right? So God has left the space. There's no center. So it was from seeing that commonality of strategies that he hit upon the idea of using the text of Greek tragedy to make a new creation. And then just to respond to your question of why the Trojan women now. He finds the themes that the Trojan women addresses to be quite contemporary. So Euripides is the author of the Trojan women. So what happens in the story is that the Greeks go and they annihilate Troy. All of the warriors, the males are destroyed, right? So what happens in contemporary warfare is different. There's a kind of an invasion that happens and taking over of the country. And there's a creation, there's a colonization that takes place. So the idea of completely annihilating not just the people, but all of the buildings, all of the culture in one shot is something unique to what happens in the play. So the idea of completely annihilating not just the people, but all of the buildings, all of the culture in one shot is something unique to what happens in the play. The idea is a complete annihilation of the enemy. And there's this famous scene where Achilles kills Hector and it's not enough to have killed him. He strings him up to the back of his carriage and parades him around to show. He makes a show of the destruction of Hector. So he sees a strong connection between this and the kinds of things Isis is doing today. The mentality behind those kinds of actions and symbolism. So when he talks about sort of an ancient mentality of those days, it's this kind of extremism. So the awareness of this human tendency to total destruction is something that came about in the mediterranean culture of that time. And if you look at what the Nazis did, it was a similar kind of idea, this idea of total annihilation of the people. This idea of total destruction of a race or of a clan. So what makes, what Isis is doing now a little bit different than what the Nazis were doing is in those days, and there's been a lot of sort of talking about and apologizing about a restoration of national relations since those days between Germany and the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. But that was something in those days that was definitely happening in the Middle East. Isis is going beyond national boundaries and just taking anybody it can from any place to get behind a more of a religious push. Well, the Nazis were doing is in those days, and there's been a lot of sort of talking about and apologizing about a restoration of national relations since those days between Germany and the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. But that was something in those days that was definitely happening more so between countries. Now Isis is going beyond national boundaries and just taking anybody it can from any place to get behind a more of a religious push. Now, the name of the religion is different. I think it's different. I think it's different because of the religion. But I think the mentality of the religion is different. It's easy to talk about it as a religious conflict, but he actually thinks of it more as a retrogression into this kind of ancient mentality that you see. It's depicted so clearly in the Greek tragedy. So another important point to think about when analyzing why this is such an important play is the existence of Euripides himself. So Euripides was a Greek. He was from the winning side. He wasn't a victim, he wasn't a Trojan who wrote the play. So he was shocked that it was a play written by a Greek criticizing his own country, his culture. It's something that's difficult to do and get away with. So this idea of being from a country that completes a country and the way we think about it is still there. It's a great play that I think is important. I think it's important. I think it's important. I think it's important. This idea of being from a country that completely annihilates another, and then to write a play from the point of view of the victim's side, and not just write a play about it, but put it in a public forum, was something incredibly to do, not only in his time, but today. He thought the will and courage to do that was impressive. So when you decide to get in a kind of enemy relationship with another, like for example, when Bush got involved in the Iraq war, he called them evil, right? So he thought the will and courage to do that was impressive. And so what he understood with that language is, it's okay to kill them. So in any human being, if you're under the right circumstances, if you're threatened, you have the capacity to kill another human being, regardless of the country you're in, China or Russia. Once you have a mortal enemy, the will and the ability to kill appears. So what happens is there's a suspension of judgment, there's a suspension of thinking of whether what you're doing is good or not. You're in that relationship, and so you have permission to kill. So he thinks it's important for political leaders to come out and have strong opinions and make strong actions at times. That's obviously necessary for the world to continue. But one of the things that's harder to grasp in what this play does such a good job of is this kind of ancient mentality, this ability within the human being to completely annihilate the other, still exists. That potential still lives in us today. And that's why he thinks Greek tragedy is still pertinent today. So it's the sort of thing, you know, there are people from modern realism like Ibsen and writers like this that are thought to sort of continue to carry some kind of message to them. But what Greek tragedy is so good at is making very clear the extreme kind of situations in which human beings can find themselves. So it's the, he's presenting situations in which human beings cannot find a solution for in their daily lives. So whether it's political conflict or military conflict, he's attracted to those kinds of problems that don't have an easy solution. So basically when he's choosing plays, he tries to find things that don't have an easy solution just in thinking about the way he leads his daily life. When he runs up against a conflict written about in these plays that he can't right away figure out how to solve, that's what pulls him in. And he feels that the Greek tragedies are the plays that have the most extreme and most clear conflicts that are attractive to. So one of the things he thinks is important into understanding any culture, understanding one's own culture is to go outside of it, right? To travel outside of it so you get a kind of objectivity. So the way he began that was going to Europe and Greece and the next major step outside of Japan that he made was to Russia. He did a production of King Lear at the Moscow Art Studio. And they're still doing his training there today. And King Lear is now part of the repertory that they performed. And then before he went to Russia, he was also regularly in the United States and had a lot of interest here. And then after being here, he started to think about what is capitalism. And so the years that he was here in the United States was right before Perestroika, right before the Iron Curtain fell and the communist experiment was shown not to work, so he was wondering what is capitalism. So one of the reasons why he's so interested in China now is it's still rampant capitalism, but it's state capitalism. It's communist capitalism. There is no election. So you sort of have to be a capitalist there. It's not democratic. It's state capitalism. He's wondering, like, how is that going to hold up? It's something that's actually, if you look at history, it's actually never happened. And there's people that are really interested in and want to continue with that way that is going. And there's other people that are very much against it. But in any case, it's having a huge influence on the world right now. So if you look at historically, the national socialism or communism or all of those movements that happened in Europe in the 20th century, they had a huge influence over the entire world. And when that experiment failed, you had playwrights like Beckett and Arabal and Ian Esco showing up, talking about the sort of wasteland, the complex that those ideas created left behind. And he's wondering now if maybe that sort of era of wasteland and of ending of an ideal is coming to the United States, perhaps. Everybody has this idea of the American dream. And it's good to have that and be passionate about that. But maybe there is a kind of deception that's going on behind that. Right now, there's a big China dream going on. A lot of people are behind that in China. Of course, there is a critical voice about that idea, but there's a large force that believes in that and is moving that idea forward. And so really, the idea of how the theater in China is going to respond to that, it's an interesting moment, especially when you look at theater and the process of making theater via language, via the body, via the way groups and rules are formed. It's an interesting moment. So these are, this is kind of the base of his thinking, and he's sort of set that out for you. And so he doesn't have any more to say. Now you just have to see the play. He sort of, you know, was a stream of consciousness, explanation of what was going on. He went there and here. He sort of, you know, it was a stream of consciousness, explanation of what was going on. He went there and here. So instead of responding to each of these questions individually, he really wanted to give you first an idea of his world view and why he thought to make theater in the first place and to get the base ideas behind that clear to you. So thank you very much. What is your very first memory of theater ever? So Suzuki grew up in a household where there were musicians who accompany the Bunraku, a traditional form of puppetry in Japan, which is called Bunraku. In his case, they were operated with string. And next to that, puppet is a musician playing a shamisen, a string. And so at the same time that you play, there's a vocalization. And you have to sit in Seiza with your knees on the ground to sit on your heels. And for example, you sit here and over there, there's an old man. And when he was in elementary school, he remembers seeing this. And so the old man sitting there said, come over here. And he was playing the shamisen, makes all these voices. And he was really terrified by the sounds that were coming from his body. And the expressions in his face as he made these sounds and played the instrument. He thought he was going to die. He thought it was going to be like Mishima Yukio committing harakiri. And then from this kind of intense body, the voice would come. It seemed like a kind of hysteria. So he tried not to look because it was too much for him. So when he sort of shipped his body not to look, someone behind would like hit him on the back with a stick. So he looked. And you may know this, but if you sit in Seiza for a long time on your knees, sooner or later you're going to lose circulation in your calves, your legs. You can't really relax when you're in this position. Keep your tension and keep your position. I hate Japanese culture. And then you thought, God, this is theater. I never want to do this. I'm going to go study French literature. And so every moment he had, he read French literature, whether he was in the bathroom, in the toilet, whatever he was doing, he would try to escape. That was his first memory. But lately he's thinking that was a good experience to have. But it was shocking to the system. It was hard to get through. If you see these traditional forms of Asian theater now in Indonesia or China, what is the future of that? What is his intervention? What does he bring there? What does he really do? I think it's very difficult for an Indonesian to speak Chinese. But Indonesia is different from China. Indonesia is different from Japan. In China, there is a difference between the two countries. So the cases between Indonesia and China are different, obviously. But in the case of China, the different dynasties changed the way the culture developed over history, for example, changing often. So basically it came out of an agricultural tradition. So before the agricultural civilization existed in China, there was a kind of civilization that was driven by horses, by the use of horses. And another big difference is that in China, there's the use of the chair. So the connection to the floor is different. In Japan, you would sit on top of tatami or on top of straw as a connection directly. Even within the house, you would sit directly on the floor. And because of that, there's a little bit more of a connection with Indonesia and Japan and China. And also in Japan, the use of rice fields and rice paddies and planting within water. And through doing that kind of planting, you develop a different sensitivity in your feet. He's going to show you. So if you just jump into the rice paddy, you're going to slide and sink into it. It's soft, so in order not to sink on it, you need to walk a certain way. You have to hold on with your core, with your center of gravity, to keep your balance and not sink suddenly. If you can't keep your clear line with your center as you walk through the rice paddy, the way you distribute the rice seeds isn't going to be even. So how you're able to control your center as you cross the rice paddy to distribute the seeds becomes very important. And if you look at sumo wrestlers, there's a similar phenomenon. And also in judo, other martial arts. If they have to make a quick cross, they keep the level of their center the same, same in the no, when you cross the space, the height of your center is the same. In China, that exists, but it's more up and down. It's more about the center rises and falls more. If you look at Indonesian culture, there's more of a connection to the ground. And there's still in the everyday life there, there's a religious ritual from Islam, from the Hindu culture. It still exists in everyday life. And so you can see that connection very clearly in those rituals. So, judi, for example, spent a lot of time in Indonesia watching the way, when she was young, watching the way the traditional performing artists move. The way they could quickly lower their center close to the ground. That's something he did recently in an audition. He had the Indonesian actors come out, and then suddenly they all, even though Clytemnestra was speaking her text, she, in Indonesia, you have everyone basically able to do that, very flexible in this part of their body. And in Japan, nowadays, that actually flexibility is going away in China. Also, in Islamic ceremonies, there's a strong connection to the floor. So, in Japan, in the house, you have the tatami or the straw mats that you're walking on. But in Indonesia, it's directly with the earth. It's on the ground that there's this relationship. So, that's a big difference. So, one of the most noticeable differences is, for example, you go to Greece and you see that the theaters are made of stone. You can't use your feet in a dynamic way. You can't stomp. You can't do Suzuki training on that space. It's made of stone. You'll hurt yourself. In order to develop a sensitivity in your feet, in the bottoms of your feet, you need a space that's able to be pliable. So, in Indonesia, they still have that connection with pliable earth. In Japan, now it's so westernized, they're losing it a little. Different, yeah, Americanized. It's become Americanized. I was trying to sort of avoid that. Before we take maybe one or two of the audience questions, really one question about Toga, this incredible dream or vision for the theater and for the world. So, it's kind of a very local place, but also such a global place. Over the decades, does this theater a global? Do we all have to think in global connections now? Say, Toga. So, his reason for going to Toga, and those of you who don't know, Toga is a small hamlet way in the mountains of Japan, and he brought his company there. And the reason he went there was he wanted to figure out how to create a group. So, in the case of ballet, classical ballet, there's a process through which you're able to become part of a group of ballerinas, right? You need to transform your body to be able to enter into that grammar, right? And musicians have a grammar. They need to become proficient at it in order to be part of the conversation, right? And so, he thought, what do I need to do to create a kind of theatrical grammar? How do I create a group that shares such a grammar? Well, one way is to have a great writer and to have a group of performers that are around that writer. Well, one thing that's important is you need to economically support that group, right? You have, you know, a chunk of money, and you evenly distribute that to the people that are there, and that's one way to support the group, right? To keep it together. But if you look at music, even if you have a great composer, that composer alone is not necessarily what makes a group of musicians able to play together. So, what, but what can I do in the theater? I thought, what could I do in the theater to make a group possible? I had a two-pronged approach to this. And so, the first thing was to create a physical grammar that all the actors could share, right? And another really important part of this is creating with that group a relationship with a space, right? Much in the way that religious groups have a very special relationship with a place of worship, you know, a theater company needs to have a space in which they work and a deep relationship that's developed in which they develop that grammar. So, there were two basic things he wanted to do in Toga. Create a method which would be supporting of his style that all the members of the group would share, and then to have that group from their own efforts create a space and create a relationship with that space. So, if you know Sushi, you know this Norimaki, you're rapping in Nori seaweed, it's a roll, right? So, one of the reasons why Sushi rolls work is because the rice sticks together. It's all Sushi rice. It's all been cooked a certain way with vinegar and it sticks together. But that alone isn't enough. You need to wrap a bunch of Nori around it to keep it really together. So, the idea is that you have all the pieces of rice sticking together and they're surrounded by the Nori seaweed. So, you need the fact that all these pieces of rice share a similar quality and they can stick together and you need the Nori around them to keep the shape. So, the Nori, the seaweed, is the space. And the thing that makes the pieces of rice stick together is the grammar, is the training. And you realize that to really make sticky rice in the purest way and in the most thorough way, he had to go outside of the city. People are too distracted in the big city. They can't concentrate to really transform themselves. And so that was the choice to get out. So, the other main reason why he wanted to go to Toga is he wanted to create a place where it would be possible to encounter the other. It's something in Japan that's actually very difficult. It's a homogenous society and it's difficult to have meaningful connections with people outside of Japanese society. And so in Toga and the way it exists now is there's every summer, people from up to 20 countries come and gather there and they cross pollinate. They influence each other and different points of view are possible to encounter. So here we have Ellen Loren who's with us. We also have Tom Hewitt who's a star of Broadway musicals. He performed in pieces that were performed in English and Japanese just as Ellen has done. And then the bunch of actors from the Moscow Arts Theater came to Toga and trained there. And then an entire class from the Central Academy of Drama and China has just recently been in Toga as well. It's a facility that has five theaters and 150 people can stay in the dormitories that are there. And so his idea was then this kind of place was necessary, a place where you could in a very focused way encounter the other, encounter someone from a culture different than your own and many and to see what you shared. But it's the kind of idealistic situation which would be incredibly expensive to do in a place like Tokyo. And also because we live in this era of terrorism, whatever you do in a place like Tokyo or New York, you're constantly being, people are looking at what you're doing. You're being a survey from the outside. And you have to be really careful with time. And you have to be careful with how you organize this space. So in order to have a free use of time and space, the only choice is to go up into the mountains. The only people that are, you know, the only surveillance we have up there in the mountains are the raccoons. They're the only ones who are watching what we're doing. This last year there was a big incident in Toga. There was a huge landslide. You couldn't get in and out of the town for about a week. And it's a town where only 400 people live. And the people that live there now after this landslide, they all want to leave. And so he's thinking, well, that's pretty good. Now I can really do whatever I want. So he might have to ask the martins, the martins of a kind of tree animal. They're the ones that will help them. So because all of this happened, now they actually have a lot more support from the central government. All of this land and facilities he's able to use for you. Is there something good out of a catastrophe? Maybe we'll take a one or two questions and then maybe TCG makes a short statement. But thank you again. Thank you very much. I also want to point out that Martin Siegel, after whom this theater actually is named, brought him, I think in 1991, to the Festival of the International Arts. I don't know if you remember Marty Siegel, who also brought him here for the last one of the really great shows, the Dionysus. So I don't know how to do that, but really Tadashi Suzuki has to be out at 12.15. So we have one or two questions. So one here and two. I'm curious. One second. Hi, I'm curious how you feel your teaching and your work has transformed since the 1970s to now. Yes. Has it changed? But the world has changed. So he's, you know, the way in which the world... The angle of his work, his approach, changes as the world. The strategy, his directorial strategy and the training itself hasn't really changed that much. I mean, of course he's a director and he's had a natural organic progression. He's gone from one text to another. There are different things he's been interested in, but his strategy and his philosophy has expanded, but it hasn't really, the essence of it hasn't changed. Some people, when they meet him, they say, you haven't changed at all. But those are usually Japanese people who say that. So the philosophical point of view, and his world view, he's kept a clear point of view that's developed and he's shifted it as the world is shifting. In the book, Culture is the Body, there's an essay called The Lonely Village. And that's something he wrote 30 years ago. But the ideas that are expressed in that article still hold true today. He may even be... He may even have more resolution behind those ideas today than he did when he wrote it. You know, every day Japan is becoming more and more an urbanized country. So people are leaving from the countryside still today. So all the arguments he's making in that are still quite true. So we all know that Greek tragedy and also Shakespeare, more or less, play very significantly in your work and your way of thinking. And you also mentioned a lot about French literature since you love French literature. So I wonder how French literature has changed your way of thought or your practice, if any. What did you say at the end? I don't know. Did you have any influence? No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. When I was young, it was just music. French literature is a big influence on the way of thinking about people like Samuels. So just in, you know, it was something, especially when he was young that really influenced him. And the writer who influenced him most was, in fact, Samuel Beckett. His work. He focuses most of his work on four playwrights, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Samuel Beckett. In terms of working with European playwrights, he almost never does work beyond those four. He did do a version of Cyrano de Bergerac, but besides that, he sticks to those four, generally. He's not interested in anything else. Thank you. So we now come to the last segment of the great publishers of Tadashi Suzuki's book and many others are here, Terry, to speak a bit about their relation, what they do with him. And also there will be a signing of some of the books here, just because, you know, in case we have one or want to get one or want to have Sam somewhere else that is a possibility now to take away from the many great things and significant things he said, but say for ten years the company went into a small mountain village on their own and without any influence on the outside and became a global force. I think this is quite a stunning achievement to have done that. So Terry, boy, we had the incredible honor of having Tadashi Suzuki come to our conference in 1984 and that started a long relationship with my first boss, Peter Zeissler and I think the little short film you'll see later will explain some of those connections a little bit fuller, but two years later we have the honor of publishing the original book which was the way of acting which has now been supplanted by Cultures of the Body 30 years later, thanks to all the fantastic work of Cameron Steele. Just a short note about who we are. We're a theater communications group for the National Organization for Nonprofit Theater in the United States. Our role is to nurture, support and celebrate the theater forum in America. We do lots of re-granting programs, lots of convenings, lots of resources for equity, diversion, inclusion work. We also publish and that's where our connection with Mr. Suzuki is here. And so 30 years later we're so thrilled that we could bring out the book the way we wanted to bring it out. Thank you. But now a big applause for Tadashi Suzuki. Thank you. I'm 78 years old so thank you for bringing me to America. How do you got this? So he's going to be 78 this year. He doesn't know if he's going to make it back to the U.S. so thanks for having me.