YUBIWA Hotel: CANDIES girlish hardcore

I'll start with a kind of self-serving one... I work at Japan Society in the Performing Arts program. I do a shitload of stuff there, from contracting artists, booking/selling tours, organizing publicity, writing the playbill and brochures, writing grants, translating scripts, translating events, organizing programs/events, etc. and on and on.

This week we kicked off the season with YUBIWA Hotel's CANDIES: girlish hardcore.
Shirotama is a friend of mine. I helped her with a lot of stuff when she was in NY for 6 months on the ACC grant. She put on this crazy show that happened simultaneously in NYC and Tokyo, and the actresses connected with their scene partners via the internet. Some kind of video-conferencing program that had a deadly 8 second delay. She worked with 4 NY-based actors here and directed her 4 Japanese actors via internet too. insanity.

I feel like she is trying to express/explore the same subject matter in all of her work. Essentially - the experience of growing up as a girl. Or how a woman (a Japanese woman) is taught how to interface with the world. Though her work always has images and ideas that are engaging and striking, I always felt on some level that she fed into the objectification and fetishism of cute japanese girls, rather than opposed such phenomena or offered an alternative to them.

But CANDIES was somehow different for me. There was something very bare about this one, very vulnerable. It wouldn't make much sense for me to describe what happens here; it was essentially a series of vignettes and montages that were not really linear or narrative, many scenes accompanied by a voiceover of an older woman reciting a pensive poetic text about all the things she's lost in her life. We follow 5 girls from childhood into old age, at times wearing animal masks, moving through what should be prominent events in one's life: marriage, going to school, playing basketball, death, and making pancakes out of another woman's secretions and eating them with your best friend. always a highlight for me.

But something happened in this piece, the cumulative affect of these quizzical interactions, and the lovely finale where the 5 women discard their animal masks, frilly skirts, and dance a kind of repetitive, frenetic strip tease that ended with them putting out their cigarettes on the soles of their high-heeled shoes -- it was extremely moving. This is why I think Shirotama is pretty great, despite her idiosyncracies. She can capture these moments, and create a visceral, emotional experience out of scraps and pieces. I was left really wondering what a human being's life, a woman's life, ultimately consists of. "So, walk alone, like a rhonoceros' horn." The strength and the loneliness of abandoning one's family, friends, lovers, community. What are you without your community? What are you without your culture? Can you really shed your cultural identity? Your gender identity?

Oh Shirotama. Once she came from Japan to stay at my house, and she brought 2 other people with her -- without telling me she was bringing more people. But she's a sweetheart. She's got this big fat old orange cat she's in love with. http://www.yubiwahotel.com/