É um relato vibrante da experiência vivida por um ator japonês, que deixa sua terra para integrar um grupo de atores de várias nacionalidades em uma experiência teatral nova, com Peter Brook, em Paris, que resultou, nos anos 70, no Centre International de Recherches Théatrales (CIRT), com sede no teatro parisiense Bouffes du Nord. Yoshi tem um texto extremamente agradável, rico de experiências das diversas práticas teatrais e sensíveis reflexões acerca do teatro ocidental a partir da sua ótica de oriental.
The Japanese actor, director and teacher, Yoshi Oida, has created his own acting style, after years of performance with the theatre icon Peter Brook. As part of Brook`s International Theatre Group, Yoshi Oida performed on various stages all over the world. Several years ago he began directing plays himself using a unique combination of Eastern and Western approaches to theatre.
How this man explains acting, views the world and describes cultural meetings.. It drives me more than anything and is what I want cultural exchange to be. <3YOSHI<3
Yoshi Oida has contributed two of my favorite books about the craft of acting, The Invisible Actor and An Actor's Tricks, so I had been looking forward to reading this for a long time, knowing it was more of a personal memoir of his years working with Peter Brook and since.
The book is at its strongest recounting Oida's initial contact with Peter Brook, and his departure from Japan to work with Brook's international company in Paris just as the 1968 uprising was taking place. From the beginning, Oida-san recounts his struggle to figure out his contribution, as a Japanese actor who began working in western-style acting before investigating traditional Japanese performance. These chapters include his travels with Brook to pre-revolutionary Iran, across Africa, and to New York. In telling his story, he recounts working practically with the theories Brook developed in The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. These chapters are excellent, consistently linking Oida's personal struggles with his artistic work.
The book begins to lose steam in chapter seven, when Oida enters a period of clerical training in Shingon Buddhism, where he seems impressed by pseudo-science such as photographs of people's energy leaving their fingers, and where the connection between his spiritual investigations and creativity gets noisier. The final chapters rapidly summarize events and, while explaining his ambivalence about acting and directing, never explains how he began teaching his well-known theatre workshops.