Tadashi+Suzuki

Tadashi Suzuki was born on the 21st of June 1939, in Shimizu City. In 1966, Suzuki formed Waseda-shōgekijō (Little Theatre Waseda) in Tokyo – a leading company of Japanese avant-garde theatre in the sixties. From 1982 to 1999, he had been organizing an annual international theatre festival in the mountain village of Toga (now a part of the city of Nanko), which was the first of such an event in Japan; it gave the Japanese a chance to enjoy the works of Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Yuri Lyubimov, Theodoros Terzopoulos, among others. . In 1984, he moved his theatre company to Toga, and appropriately renamed it the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT, for short). Identifying features, that have made the company unique is its creative use of spaces, in mountains and hills, a primary implementation of the Suzuki Method, and a unique acting style, "capable of creating supreme concentration". This company still holds shows both locally and abroad. Two years later, he wrote //The Way of Acting,// which is his most influential work in the English speaking world.
 * Tadashi Suzuki is a Japanese director of theatre, writer, and philosopher. **
 * Biography **

Suzuki believes in a very universal system for theatre. Western avant-garde influences (Euripides and Chekhov) are mixed in with more traditional Japanese //Noh// and //Kabuki//. This progressive attitude has refreshed theatre by redrawing cultural boundaries and customs. For example, he has also studied extensively in Greek theatre, and has adapted many of its devices to fit his own style. In //The Way of Acting//, Suzuki argued that the most important part of the human body in acting are the feet: “The way in which the feet are used is the basis of a stage performance…the movements of the arms and hands can only augment the feeling inherent in the body positions established by the feet.” This was called the //grammar of feet//, and thus several of his exercises focused on the lower body. To Suzuki, it was important that the actor was aware of their feet, and their connection with what he called one’s ‘centre’.He acknowledges that it isn’t the only system to acting, but calls it a “working hypothesis”. Like many of his contemporaries, Suzuki felt that the modern world was separating the physical and essential components of an individual. He is incredibly naturalistic, and anti-materialistic, believing that the relationship between the actor and the ground they are on to be worth emphasizing. Suzuki training can be strict physically, due to the involvement of more bodily (particularly lower) techniques than other styles. Several of these exercises are directed towards the actors being able to cultivate this relationship, and Suzuki encourages actors to send and receive energy to and from the Earth through these drills. The point of these exercises is to restore the “wholeness” of the relationship between actor and Earth.
 * The Suzuki Method **

Suzuki is, as has been pointed out before, the founder and director of the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), and co-founder of the SITI (Saratoga International Theatre Institute) Company in New York, which he had founded with Anne Bogart, one of the developers of the viewpoints method. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Japan Performing Arts Foundation. The Suzuki method itself is also fairly prominent, with several major theatre companies (Julliard, RSC,) offering courses in it, as well as other theatre companies founded by actors who have worked with Suzuki in the past. He has also directed with several different plays internationally. Due to a long lasting collaboration between esteemed architect Arata Isozaki and Suzuki, several (eight, to be precise) theatre spaces have been built, including, for no other reason than they could, one designed to float on water.
 * Influence **

This is really good but some parts look like they have been copy and pasted (sorry if I'm wrong). There is plenty of information about Suzuki and his method but there doesn't seem to be much about the history of Suzuki. Other than this, it is very good. -Robbie W.

Sources: http://www.theatre.ru/chekhov_fest/edionis.html **__//http://www.blesok.com.mk/tekst.asp?lang=eng&tekst=484 []//__**
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