Artistic Director of Yamanote Jijôsha. Councilor of Japan Performing Arts Foundation.
Born in Tokyo in 1962, Masahiro Yasuda was a graduate of Waseda University. As a founder and artistic director of Yamanote Jijôsha, he has directed over 40 productions since 1984. As assigned directors of regional and other art promotion foundations and councils, he staged the productions such as: Romeo and Juliet(1995, Mito-City Art Promotion Foundation), Twelfth Night (MAPE, 1996), Fairly Tale(written by Oriza Hirata, Saitama Prefecture Art Promotion Foundation, 1997) ,The Rise and Fall of the Garden of Zeus(written by Kyoji Kobayashi, BeSeTo Theatre Festival, 1998), A Midsummer Night's Dream(Nagaoka-City Art and Culture Promotion Foundation, 1999), The Taming of the Shrew(NACPF, 2000), An Evening of Chekhov(NACPF, 2001), L'oiseau blue(Yamanashi Prefecture Theatre college and Region Creation Foundation, 2001), Romeo and Juliet(Theatre project Kagawa and Kagawa Prefecture, 2003), and Hamlet(TPK and Kagawa Prefecture, 2004).
Yasuda has taught at Tôhô Gakuen Junior college of Art, Ôbirin University, and University of Nîgata. He served as Festival Director of Toga Spring Art Festival(1998 and 2000) and judged many theatre competitions such as National Competition of High School Theatre Clubs, Guardian Garden Theatre Festival, and Directors' Competition at Toga.
Every year he holds over 150 workshops at the invitation of municipal corporations and high schools as well business corporations. His book, Happy Body("Happy na karada") was published by Yôsensha in 2003.
Yasuda Masahiro
(Founder and Artistic Director of Yamanote Jijôsha)
Theatre makes you examine yourself. That's my motto, and I keep saying it to my company members. The aim of theatre is to rediscover yourself as a historical presence, through playing the role of someone else and presenting on stage worlds far apart from our everyday life.
I made this booklet not because I wanted to be indulged in the past memories, but because I wanted to review what we have done for twenty years. It is significant to look at ourselves in retrospect, especially when we share this experience with our audiences.
When you know foreign cultures for the first time, you cannot help being aware of your habits or culture that have enveloped you like the air. When you create something new, you will realize the past or tradition on which you have stood as if it were the ground. Our twenty years have passed as we have come to recognize these facts most keenly. Yamanote Jijôsha is just one of the many companies that started theatrical activities in Tokyo in the 1980s. We are still in the process of struggling to discover ourselves in the context of theatre history, without any clues to it.
The smaller the globe has become, the more frequently frictions have arisen because of ethnic, religious, and historical differences in regions. What can theatre do in a situation like this? Think of unique characteristics of theatrical expressions: actors' gestures, voices, and breathing-bodies; stage designs, costumes, and lighting-space; musical scales and rhythms, -time; words and arguments-philosophy. Ultimately they are all rooted in your physical conditions. In other words, in theatre you can meet the other in terms of physical conditions. This experience does not create understanding or sympathy so much as it makes you recognize distances or gaps. But in spite of this severe limitation, you can sometimes experience something other than mere distances or gaps. Feeling human pathos, you vibrate quietly. This is the most blissful moment in theatre.