Gecko and CITA Artist Exchange
A huge part of the work we do here at Gecko is within education, outreach, and artist development so when James Sutherland, Artistic Director of CITA Tokyo who met Gecko’s Artistic Director Amit Lahav while teaching students at East15 UK, invited Gecko to collaborate on a creative exchange residency, we very enthusiastically accepted.
We regularly work in other areas of Asia, including China, Hong Kong and South Korea, but this would be Gecko’s first exchange in Japan so we were really excited to meet and work with the artists at the International Centre for Theatre Arts (CITA) in Japan, supported by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and British Council Japan as part of UK in Japan 2019-2020.
CITA seeks to inspire the theatre and performing arts of tomorrow and welcomes those inspired to create new work as actors, directors and writers. Through creative challenges and provocations they nurture and encourage artists to refine their creative vision, a voice that may be heard by many, and spoken through ways that people may be able to identify with. We thought this would be a great match and a brilliant introduction to working in Japan.
Gecko devising performers Ryen Perkins-Gangnes (Missing, Institute, The Wedding, Time of Your Life), and Uroš Petronijević (Missing, The Wedding), were more than willing to grab the challenge with both hands and introduce the participants at CITA to Gecko’s performance and devising methodology. Ryen and Uroš touched down in Tokyo in November 2019 and were met by James and CITAs associate artist, Tatsuya Yasumoto, who introduced them to Japan with a traditional dinner and to discuss the week ahead.
With little time to waste, they dove straight into the work, and the residency began with an introduction of Gecko’s performance style, which was compared with CITA’s methods. If you follow our work you’ll know that Gecko’s methodology relies on body and breath to communicate stories, whereas the artists from CITA regularly use objects, like sticks, to evolve a narrative.
To begin, there were some creative differences to overcome, the participants weren’t used to the emotional commitment of Gecko’s devising style and it took Ryen and Uroš a little time to establish the trust and focus necessary for our style of making, which is common in many schools and companies we visit nationally and internationally. Once mutual trust had been established, they began to explore how they could marry the two companies methods of devising and how, for example, breath could be used to embody and personify the objects CITA uses in their work. Through a series of exercises and improvisations, the group explored the creation of work through ensemble devising processes, again looking at the similarities and differences between Gecko and CITA’s approaches. Over the course of the week, participants developed their own short pieces of physical work exploring their individual responses to the themes of migration and journeys.
As we realign our existence to necessarily restraining from travel and touch, it’s important to reflect on the benefits of creative exchange. Both Ryen and Uros found that the had influenced their thinking around incorporating CITA’s devising technique alongside Gecko’s, particularly in relation to objects and that this is something that they will use back in the UK when developing the new work. For CITA, the residency had huge importance in reaffirming for participants that this work once on the fringes is now an international phenomenon, CITA are doing their best to proliferate contemporary European theatre practice into the local theatre communities in Tokyo in the hope that younger theatre makers are empowered to tell new stories in vivid physical and visual ways.