Founded in 1983, Seinendan has been a most up-front theater company with the Komaba Agora Theater as its home base. We have never stopped evolving. The "contemporary colloquial theater theory" proposed by Oriza Hirata, artistic director of Seinendan, playwright, and the innovative theatrical style Seinendan has developed to put the theory into practice have drawn much attention in 1990s. We pride ourselves on influencing the younger generation of the theater community to no small extent.
Hirata claims that modern theater in Japan which started out by importing the Western modern theater has also lead to playwriting governed by the Western logic. Thus, he believes, writing styles and logical structures irrelevant to the Japanese language have been routinely practiced, and in trying to give those irrerevant styles reality the actors have been forced into distorted acting styles too. This is the heart of Hirata's criticism of the conventional Japanese theater.
"Lines are spoken so softly at times that they are hardly heard," "multiple conversations progress simultaneously," "Actors sometimes speak with their backs to the audience"; these are some obvious characteristics that are often pointed out in reviews and critiques. However, beneath those characteristics, there lies a conscious strategy to critically reconsider former theatrical theories and to reconstruct on stage dramatic space based on the world the Japanese live in.
Instead of ostentatious ideas and tricks, Seinendan chooses a clear and firm theory to create our productions in order to establish a new expression that can alter the framework of theater itself.
We aim at the completion of the Japanese modern theater and seek out the global and open contemporary theater.
Hirata's "contemporary colloquial theater" has drawn much attention in the 1990s and has had a great influence on the Japanese theater. Our daily life is not a continuous string of grande passions and murders -- big events conventional theater has eagerly portrayed. Instead, the main portion of life is filled with quiet and uneventful times. Hirata often uses such quiet times for his theatrical works. The existence of people is essentially amazing and dramatic. Life itself is merry, graceful, funny, stupid, complicated and fertile by nature. We try to abstract and then reconstruct these diverse elements and present the quiet life directly on stage.