Annex 1
Heavenly Bento
post theater[new york | berlin]
Asian Premiere
synopsis
At the end of their lives, two old friends meet and reminisce. It has been40 years since they last met. After the war, they founded a small enterprise in a burned ruin in the devastated city of Tokyo. They were dreamers. They dreamt of becoming the leading company in consumer electronics, they wanted to help reconstructing Japan and strengthen its pride and dignity, and they even planned to conquer the American market once. Now, looking back, they tell once more the story of their success. But there are two sides to everything.
Heavenly Bento tells the (almost true) story of two men and their creation. It is a story of friendship and power, genius and insanity, identity and assimilation, control and its loss.
post theater combines different performance styles with dance, live generated video and electronic music to narrate an intercultural epic. The audience is invited to enjoy an abstract bento box full of pictures and remembrances, anecdotes and stories, victories and defeats - a bento box full of life.
Annex 2
Heavenly Bento
post theater[new york | berlin]
Asian Premiere
Director’s Note
Camcorder, walkman, television, mobile phones - we are surrounded by numerous inventions. They have become so familiar in everyday life that it is hard to imagine living without them. I wondered what kind of people had actually thought of these inventions.
One day I found two visionaries who had come up with some of these ideas. As it happened, I found them in Japan, my home country. But their story – like my own – was one of travelling the world. They set an example: seemingly crazy ideas do not necessarily end up as illusions, but can become reality. And the distribution of innovation does not know cultural borders.
Theatre, for me, can be the equivalent of what these two men did. Theatre is full of inventions, ideas and visions. As a theatre artist, I imagine a world that does not exist, based on a world that does exist. For the moment of the live performance, I want this world of ideas to be real.
These two Japanese men are especially close to my heart, since they were people who were not afraid of leaving their homes to make their dream come true. I strongly believe that our piece will communicate a universal idea of cross-cultural experiences, especially in the age of high mobility and high speed communication.
Hiroko Tanahashi
Annex 3
Heavenly Bento
post theater [new york | berlin]
Asian Premiere
profile of DIRECTORS and PERFORMERS
Hiroko Tanahashi (Artistic Director / Media Artist)
Tanahashi is a graduate of the TischSchool of the Arts‘ Film Program at New York University (BFA) and of the MFA Program in Multi Media Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design, New York, where she focused on interactive media. She presented various installations and performances, such as her series of Tanabataperformances in Berlin, Vienna andBelgrade. In 2003 she has been invited by the Bauhaus Foundation to produce a multi media dance piece, Bisscuit. Her interactive theatre piece The Last
Circushas been shown in New York and Berlin. For the Theater am Halleschen Ufer Berlin she conceived the performance Turnover (House, Unsettled). Her ongoing piece skinSITEs has toured to the Bangkok Fringe Festival, City of Women, Ljubljana and Zagreb’s Dance Week.
Max Schumacher (Performance Director)
Schumacher studied dramaturgy at Humboldt UniversityBerlin and performance studies at New YorkUniversity. He founded post theater in New York in 1998. His pieces toured to Austria, Germany, Italy, Korea, Serbia, Singapore and Thailand and have been invited to several international festivals. He was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart in 2001. In 2003 he conceived matchmaker matchmaker with Matthias Böttger and Turnover (House, Unsettled)with Hiroko Tanahashi. He also works as curator for performing arts festivals, including PET, Berlin, and Rohkunstbau, Brandenburg.
Kazue Ikeda (Dancer/Choreographer)
Ikeda studied dance in Osaka and New York and worked with The Kevin Wynn Collection, Bill T. Jones & Arnie Zane Dance Compmany and Anna Sokolow Players Project. She won the competition 'The Best German Dance Solo' in Leipzig in 1999. She is currently artist-in-residence at Tanzfabrik, Berlin. Her choreographies and solos have been shown in Japan,Germany and the United States.
Jun Kim (Performer)
Kim is a native Japanese living in New York. His theatre credits in New York include roles in Benten Kozo, The Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman, Cellophane and Messiah performed in the United States and Holland. He studied Kabuki Theatre in 2003 and is an original member of the Bat Theater Company.Kim is also a grant recipient of the Japan-US Arts Program of ACC.
Lim Kay Tong (Performer)
Lim studied theatre in Hull and London. He played in several international movies such as Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story,Shanghai Surprise andOff Limits. He also appeared in several international TV productions.
Lim Kay Tong’s theater credits include productions withSingapore companies such as TheatreWorks (which he co-founded), Practice Theatre, Singapore Repertory Theatre, luna-id, Escape Theatre and The Necessary Stage. He has performed in landmark productions that have travelled international festivals, including the Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Edinburgh Festival.
Annex 4
Heavenly Bento
post theater[new york | berlin]
Credit List
PerformersJun Kim
Kay Tong Lim
Kazue Ikeda
Artistic Director / Media DesignerHiroko Tanahashi
Performance DirectorMax Schumacher
Assistant DirectorSimone Bennett
DramaturgeAndreas Horbelt
ChoreographerKazue Ikeda
Stage Designer/ ProducerMatthias Böttger
Sound ComposerSibin Vassilev
Costume DesigerNaoki Koketsu
Press PhotographerAlice Schauhoff
Thanks to:
Jason Danziger, Glenn Hashitani, Julie Randall (Off Voices), Linda Mantscheva (Cello Sounds), Pascal Molenat, Klaus Fehling (Script Doctors), and Shinho Lee, Taichiro Kajimura, Masayo Kajimura, Heman Chong, Suhaila Sulaiman, Maren Strack, Naoko Kaltschmidt, Steffen Kopetzky, Elena Krüskemper, Amelie Deuffelhard, Joachim Kallinich, and the Nippon Restaurant Enterprise.
This production is funded and supported by:
Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, Bonn Biennale, Sophiensaele Berlin, Museum für Kommunikation BerlinInaShokuhinkougyou, Theodor Schumacher Soehne Koeln
Annex 5
Heavenly Bento
post theater[new york | berlin]
Asian Premiere
Profile of post theater [new york | berlin]
post theater is a theatre company without a theatre and without a company: there is no art space permanently used by post theater and there is no permanent ensemble of performers; instead there is a team of artists and academics of various backgrounds who continuously switch roles and responsibilities.
Although named post theater, there is no focus on theatre at all. Theatre is just the point of departure. Hence post theater is open to all forms, genres, media and contents.
The recurring themes in post theater's works are identity and technology. These issues relate to form and content. To what degree does technology act as a protagonist, and to what degree do performers resemble machines?
post theater plays with reality and fake - with its audience and its audience's expectations, and with the show before the show. It aims to engage with its audience in various ways. It wants to seduce them to take actively part in performances. The works are multi-sensory, tangible, daring, curious, surprising and magical.
post theater was founded in 1998 in New York and has toured internationally. For each tour, the company aims to collaborate and work with local performers and practitioners.
In 2001, post theater presented “The Real Forensic” at The Substation; “accessible post modernism with a maggot-shaped cherry on top” (Clarissa Oon, The Straits Times).