The Making of Tera with a Minimal Theatre Company

Before she became an actor, Inatsugu had been involved in contemporary dance. Her dream was to become a creator of dance performances, so she enrolled in the department of Musical Creativity and the Environment at Tokyo University of the Arts. This was where she met Yukari Sakata.
 
“I think this happens to a lot of people, but after entering university, there was a point when I lost my sense of direction as a performer. Around that time, Sakata-san, who was my senior, asked me if I wanted to perform in a one-person play. I didn’t have any experience acting in a play before, but oddly enough, I decided to try it out and accepted her invitation. That’s how it all started—after that, we worked on several one-person plays until her graduation.”

“It was a period when dance and drama were drawing closer together as genres, and phrases like ‘physicality in drama’ and ‘theatricality in dance’ abounded in their discourses. In that context, the desire sprung up in me to perform in a piece of work that genuinely excited me, instead of putting dance and drama in different categories. During graduate school, I started to do auditions and working collaboratively with creators that I was interested in, which formed the foundation of how I work.”
 
Inatsugu has built her career as an independent actor since then. After their graduation, Sakata and Inatsugu went on to develop their own projects and spheres of activity. There were several times when they collaborated on small pieces, but it was only when Sakata was going to participate in Festival/Tokyo 2018 that they teamed up again more closely.
 
“Sakata-san got in touch with me. We started out randomly chatting about what we’d want to do in a new piece. At the time, I was part of many projects with a large cast, but at the same time, I had a feeling that the one-person play might actually be at the core of my life as an actor. So I remember telling her, ‘If I’m going to do this, I want to make a one-person play that could become my representative work.’”
 
In 2018, Tera was performed at the temple Saihō-ji in Tokyo. The work references Daffodils and Wooden Fish: A Verse Drama (1957) by Jūrō Miyoshi, and Inatsugu addresses the audience as Mitsuko Kyōgoku. She is accompanied by Kyojun Tanaka, who performs the music and speaks to the audience as himself.

“It was a minimal team: me, Sakata-san, Kyojun Tanaka-kun, and Maho Watanabe-san. It was also clear what each person was supposed to do, which made the creative process very smooth for me,” she explains. “To begin with, the first question I tackled was how to talk about Buddhism or religion in general. What kind of position should I take when speaking about Buddhism especially in a temple? For personal reasons, I wanted to keep a bit of distance from religion myself. So even if it’s acting, I couldn’t possibly have talked about it from a viewpoint like ‘Isn’t Buddhism wonderful?’ Back then, I just felt considerable resistance to talking about Buddhism. I brooded over whether it was the sort of thing that I could speak about just from doing research and understanding it intellectually.”
 
The key person for resolving this issue proved to be Kyojun Tanaka, who grew up as the son of a Buddhist priest, but decided to pursue the path of music instead of following in his father’s footsteps and taking over the family’s temple. Tanaka, now a percussionist, also went to Tokyo University of the Arts, where he was in the same year as Sakata, and a senior of Inatsugu.

“It’s embarrassing to admit, but at first I didn’t even know the differences between schools of Buddhism, so I asked Kyojun-san,” Inatsugu recalls. “He explained everything to me incredibly thoroughly, and on top of that, the metaphors he used were so playful and funny. It made me think that if we spoke to the audience about Buddhism with the same kind of stance and sense of distance as Kyojun-san, the audience might react like I did and find the story amusing.”
 
“I thought the fictional setting itself—that a sickly girl called Mitsuko Kyōgoku lives in this temple—works well for Tera. The four of us put our heads together and delved deep into the views on life and death in Buddhism while referencing Jūrō Miyoshi’s verse drama. Through that process, I think the structure of the work started coming together naturally.”

As part of that process, the team—mainly Sakata and Watanabe—conducted fieldwork, such as researching the neighborhood around Saihō-ji and interviewing the chief priest of the temple. This way, they were able to gain an understanding of the challenges that temples face and their situation in the present day. This led to the theatre piece itself reflecting elements of the temple.
 
“We all wanted to reference interactive parts of what happens at a temple—for example, how everyone repeats after the priest’s recitation of the sutra, or how they ask questions in response to the priest’s teaching. In Tera, we invite the audience to strike the mokugyo, or wooden fish, during the performance. We ask the audience questions, and we incorporate music sessions. Putting in those kinds of devices freed the piece from my reluctance to speak about religion that I’d struggled with in the beginning.”
 
“For Japanese people, Buddhism is part of everyday life, even if we’re not aware of it. While I’m sure there were people in the audience who believed in different religions or a different school of Buddhism, of course, my stance shifted to ‘since we’re all here in this temple, let’s think about what we can think about’ as I developed the focus of the piece. Mitsuko Kyōgoku says a line like that, too.”

Another crucial element of Tera was poetry. In their previous collaborations, Sakata and Inatsugu often incorporated poetic texts, but they made a bit of a leap in Tera.
 
“I think that by nature, poetry is best encountered directly by the reader, as a printed text that they can read with their eyes and minds, or out loud,” Inatsugu says. “So there’s a conflict and struggle inside me when it comes to expressing poetry through the body of an actor and making people listen to it. But since I was performing with Kyojun-san in Tera, I was able to use the texts in a way that was extremely close to performing music.”
 
“A poem’s meanings and interpretations are only my own. In Tera, instead of trying to convey my interpretation of the text, I explored how the words of the written poem resonate in the space and the time of the performance through my own body and being. It’s a bit abstract, but I could genuinely strive to achieve that feeling like ‘it’s resonating really well right now.’ I think it was good that the poetry and the music coexisted in the piece at the same level of strength.”

From Tokyo to Kyoto: The Journey of Tera in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Tera, which was born in Tokyo, evolved into a performance in Kyoto three years later. This was in March 2021, soon after the Covid-19 pandemic broke out world-wide, and TERASIA: Theatre for Traveling in the Age of Isolation was established.
 
“From the very beginning, Tera wasn’t made for doing lots of tours in a short period of time. Our aim was to create a piece in a format that would allow us to continue performing it in different situations years later—something we could do even in five or ten years. Like Jakucho Setouchi-san’s teachings! Maybe that’s partly why our team was made up of people in the same generation. But it wasn’t like we promised each other that we’d come back to it in a few years’ time. It was mainly through Sakata-san and Maho-san that it turned into a performance in a temple in Kyoto.”
 
“Personally, a powerful stimulus was watching the Thai version, TERA เถระ (TERA Tera). It was truly fantastic. They didn’t just translate Tera into Thai, but they watched a recording of Tera and drew on its concept to create a whole new Thai adaptation, giving birth to TERA เถระ (TERA Tera). And Sonoko-san, the leading actor, blew me away. When I saw the video of their theatre piece, it made me want to perform Tera again, to come back to it as a different me in the present.”

TERA เถระ teaser video

Tera was recreated as TERA in Kyoto. While it inherited the structure of the original Tera performed in Tokyo, it underwent significant changes, particularly to correspond to the new venue in Kyoto, Kōshō-ji.
 
“The biggest change in the content came from the fact that we were now going to perform at a different temple, in a different school of Buddhism. I was surprised just how varied the schools can be, even though they’re both Buddhism. In Kyoto, we performed in a temple in the Rinzai School (the Zen sect), and what we said in the first performance simply didn’t work anymore. It goes to show how there are so many ways of talking about the single theme of Buddhism, and that’s such an interesting thing.”
 
“The first performance was in a Jōdo School temple, so in the piece, we talked quite a lot about going to the Pure Land. In the Kyoto version, the temple hall enshrined a Jizo (Ksitigarbha). When we looked into it, we found that the Jizo is actually a Bosatsu (Bodhisattva) that comes to save the people who went to hell.”

From that point, they came to call the Kyoto version the “Hell Arc” (and the Tokyo version the “Pure Land Arc”). The theatre piece evolved into the “Hell Arc” not just because of the difference in the school of Buddhism, but also because the reality of people’s lives were changing under the pandemic.

“There was a sense that various things we experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic was like hell. The reality we lived in at that time made us explore the question: if we are in a hellish place now, how will we find salvation? So the Kyoto version wouldn’t have been possible without almost completely recreating the content.”

Tera → TERASIA: Exploring Views on Life, Death, and Religion

The team of four created two works of Tera in Japan. Through this experience, did something change inside Inatsugu in terms of her own attitude towards or distance from religion?

“For me personally, I had a kind of fear about believing in and surrendering oneself to some ‘answer’ that a religion might provide. And more specifically, about how such a belief can lead to animosity towards people of other denominations or religions, and how numerous wars have been fought on the basis of religion. I might have had a deeper fear of those things than most people—that sense of terror.”
 
“But as I experienced Tera, I began to think that Buddhism is interesting in a way that’s a little closer to philosophy. Rather than offering an ‘answer,’ it gave questions that people have been asking for all time. When I watched Thai’s TERA เถระ, I felt the close, natural parallel between what it means to live and die, and what it means to believe in a faith. They handled the themes of life and death, and Buddhism, in a natural way. It made me realize that religion can be one of the techniques or something that help us live our lives. Watching the piece loosened up a part of me that had become rigid.”
 
Tera transformed into the project TERASIA: artists from another country created a new version of TERA, and inspired by this new work, the original team created yet another piece. In that whole process, the members’ views on Buddhism and religion continued to change little by little. It seems that TERASIA has a unique cyclical function of its own. 

“It was just so captivating to see a character I played turn into something completely different, performed by another actor from a different country. It’s nice to think that Mitsuko Kyōgoku, the character I portrayed, travels to artists and actors in other countries through the video recording and stimulates them in some way.”

TERASIA has been creating, performing, and showcasing various works by international artists while moving toward its final destination, Sua TERASIA. These works are not only theatre pieces, but also video performances, art installations, and so on. Inspired by each other, each TERASIA team is exploring their projects in diverse ways. What does the Japan team’s Inatsugu think of TERASIA? What does the word “TERA” mean for her?
 
“At first, when we came up with the idea for Tera (Japanese for ‘temple’), I think we made it hold more meanings than just a literal temple, like ‘terra’ as in Earth, or terabyte. But in the end, if you ask me what ‘TERA’ really stands for, I would answer the temple. For me, it encapsulates the encounter with the temple, and the encounter with the presence of religion that had crusted over inside me.”

“Meanwhile, during the Covid-19 pandemic, our lives changed so drastically, including political changes as well, and I feel that TERASIA makes visible the present-day reality that people in these parts of Asia are facing, the urgency with which they live. Instead of passing on a single play just as it is, we are sharing the concept and attitude of TERA, and that’s what illuminates those realities. What’s new about this TERASIA initiative, I think, is that all these projects don’t need to have an obvious relation to each other. It’s interesting that it’s just the theme, concept, and philosophy that are traveling, but we’re still able to communicate with each other in a collaborative way.”
 
Inatsugu speculates that each artist with whom the concept of TERASIA resonated likely reacted to different elements of it. Perhaps, she points out, the concept and network of TERASIA involves a variety of things that can spur on creativity, including the exploration of views on life and death, Buddhism, and even bigger themes, or ways of connecting with people of the same generation. At the same time, her hopes for the destination of TERA haven’t changed at all since the very first performance in Tokyo.
 
“The Mitsuko Kyōgoku that I performed with my body and voice in 2018 and in 2021 must be totally different from the Mitsuko Kyōgoku that I can play in the future when I’m older. No matter how many years go by, I want this woman named Mitsuko Kyōgoku to come along, and talk poetry while chit-chatting with the audience. I want to stand in a temple and question what it means to live, and to die. I want TERA to be a piece that I can perform at various turning points in my life,” she asserts. “Though it’s not like I want to conquer every school of Buddhism or anything! But the good thing about temples is that there are so many more of them than theatres, anywhere across the country. I think Japanese people’s relationship to Buddhism and views on religion will continue to change with the times. In the midst of those changes, I hope the ways we think can shift a little or become freer through our encounters with TERA.”

(Interview and text by Saori Azuma, English translation by Yui Kajita. The interview took place in March 2023.)