Suzuki + Toga Arts Park

Space as Suzuki understands it is not just the stage on which the performer walks, nor the intangible entity which they attempt to control, and which the body occupies. Theatrical space refers as much to the total environment and context within which the event happens as it does to the actor-audience arrangement or the body alignment that the training enables so precisely. As such, theatre neds to extend outwards and be coordinated with the natural or local habitat. To attain this, Suzuki has collaborated with one of the world’s leading architects, Arata Isozaki.

The task of redesigning the old sanbo (as the farmhouse is known in Japanese) fell to Arata Isozaki. Like Suzuki, Isozaki is equally recognised as a writer and theorist who values the explanation of his work for cognoscenti and broader public alike. The fact that artists exploit and update traditional models, creating bold, challenging art with an explicit cultural and social purpose that can be defined loosely within a postmodern aesthetic suited him for this reinvention.

Suzuki wanted to recreate ‘a space in which people actually lived’. Yet what Suzuki and Isozaki managed to forge was an even more difficult concept and a true hybrid - a theatre space that was both domestic and sacred, where the daily and extra-daily could exist. 

In 1982, the farmhouse theatre was reopened, renovated by Isozaki to appear as it does today. To this building Isozaki added a new entrance lobby, ‘a space of light’, where you take off and leave your shoes before passing through a small covered corridor into the dark interior of the sanbo. 

Inside the sanbo you are struck first by the dominating black aluminium stage floor. It is central to the dark atmosphere that conjures the other-worldliness of noh performances which Isozaki wanted to create in his original exhibit.

Marianne McDonald described the mood inside the farmhouse itself - 

All is painted black and the stage is lit by low-intensity lamps, suggesting the original illuminations of Noh stages by candlelight or lanterns. There is also a philosophical components to this low lighting. Noh drama often showed the emergence of a divinity of ghost from the darkness, as it were the primeval womb of the world. This sense of oneness with the world was also the experience of Greek drama for its original audience.

The Greek style amphitheatre is the main focus of the park. It lies on the east side of the main road, overlooking a lake. On stage are two pillars, holding up nothing except the heavens and serving no direct function, but operating as a visual reminder of a noh theatre’s four pillars that support the stage roof. The theatre has a steeply raked auditorium to keep the audience close to the action, with dressing rooms and storage space located underneath. Two hanamichis (or runways) stretch from both sides of the front edge of the stage to the lake’s banks. The two hanamichis  allow long dramatic entrances and exits from either bank of the lake, and lead away from, rather than into, the audience.

Nine rows of seats sweep in wide semicircles with a total seating capacity of around 800. As members of the audience you enter the top of the auditorium by one of four points and look over the stage and lake towards the trees, which is reflected in the water. Beyond rises the wooded slope of the other valley side, providing a natural backdrop. The theatre itself nestles within trees and is approached by a gravel path, creating a further sense of isolation from civilisation. The whole is open to the elements and nature’s sounds and smells.

The scenography for performances outdoors and in the indoor spaces has a similar openness, though in a visual rather than public sense. The architecture and shaped natural environment become the main focus of the scenography. The scenography of the amphitheatre within the environment encourages you to look and observes, viewing the harmonious integration of man and nature.