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Shimizu Kunio
Shimizu Kunio is a Japanese playwright who was born in the year 1936. At Tama University of Fine Arts Shimizu is a professor working in the Moving Images and Performing Arts Department. As a student at Waseda University located in Tokyo Shimizu wrote The Signatory in 1958 as well as Tomorrow I’ll Put Flowers There in 1959. These plays were produced in the year 1960 by Seihai, a professional theatre company. After he finished studying at Waseda University Shimizu worked at Iwanami Film Productions which is a Tokyo firm. There he wrote scenarios for documentaries as well as public relations films. In 1965 he went on to be an independent playwright and left the company. Somewhere around 1968 Ninagawa Yukio asked Shimizu to write a play that would be directed by Ninagawa. Ninagawa at the time was an actor for Seihai. Shimizu wrote Such a Serious Frivolity for Ninagawa to produce however, even though Ninagawa wanted to produce the play the script got rejected. Due to this incident Ninagawa and some other people who worked with him left Seihai. They made a new company that was called the Modern People’s Theater. Around this time there were a lot of social disruptions occurring. Young people across Japan from what was call New Left started political argumentative meetings. Therefore Shimizu wrote some plays in order to bring up a sense of the view of the people whose political reform demands were not being met.

Niigata is his hometown, which is located on the Japan Sea. The plays he has written include The Dressing Room (Gakuya), Such a Serious Frivolity (Shinjō afururu keihakusa), Tango at the End of Winter (Tango fuyu no owari ni), When We Go Down That Great Unfeeling River (Bokura ga hijō no taiga o kudaru toki), and An Older Sister, Burning Like a Flame (Hi no yō ni samishii ane ga ita). Shimizu Kunio went to Waseda University and started writing plays to be performed in the 1960s. His play W'hen We Go Down That Great Unfeeling River (Bokura ga hijō no taiga o kudaro toki'') received the Kishida Award for being the best play in the year 1974. Shimizu Kunio married Matsumoto Noriko who was an actress. Together they founded a group of entertainers called the Winter Tree Company (Mokutōsha). He also set up the Modern Man’s Theater (Gendaijin gekijō) along with Ninagawa Yukio, a director.

There are works of Shimizu Kunio that have become postwar theatre classics. He wrote that Abe KÔbÔ has influenced him as well as been an example to him. Shimizu has recurring themes in his plays such as a frustrated search for a personal identity, and madness. Furthermore, another common component of Shimizu Kunio’s plays are having the central drama come from siblings and their parents.Shimizu Kunio also makes use of other literature, which usually comes from drama as well as poetry in the west. He uses these works in order to make his scenes more powerful. For example, An Older Sister, Burning Like a Flame (yō ni samishii ane ga ita) used the works of Othello by Shakespeare. Shimizu Kunio also appears to have a similar understanding with Chekhov, a Russian author in terms of how Chekhov uses a mixture of light humor as well as an intense feeling of wanting something. However, there are some differences between the works of Chekhov and Shimizu Kunio. For example, the characters of Chekhov are not cable of bringing out the energy and sense they need to change their lives. The characters of Shimizu Kunio however express a lot of energy. Also, in the works of Chekhov, usually the main character is alive in the end while in Shimizu Kunio’s works the main character usually does not end up living Shimizu Kunio has written many plays as the collection of his plays add up to forty- three. Another one of Shimizu Kunio’s plays called When we go Down that Heartless River (Bokura ga HijÔ no Taiga o Kudaro Toki) was first performed in the year 1972 is an example of an extended metaphor. In the year 1978 his play An Older Sister, Burning like a Flame(yō ni samishii ane ga ita) was written. The play is about the main character that has to deal with their past.In the play a main character is an actor who becomes tiered of being in Othello, a play by Shakespeare. The main character then returns to his homeland that he has not been to since he was little. A motif that occurs in Shimizu’s plays include the city vs. the country. This is also present in Chekhov’s work. For Shimizu the country is dangerous and the country is made into a metaphor to represent the things that humans run from in their lives and the things that humans are unable to deal with.

Another one of Shimizu Kunio’s plays The Dressing Room is a little over an hour long. Shimizu uses a collage in order to indirectly convey his thoughts. This type of collage done in drama was created by Suzuki Tadashi. However, the whole play is not a collage. The Dressing Room is a play about an actress and three other actresses who died without ever getting fame. The three dead actresses are in the dressing room and wait so that they can be characters in a play that they will never be asked to take on. Shimizu’s play Tango at the End of Winter goes back to the motifs and techniques that were used when he first began writing plays. In this play Sei tries to get freedom by performance however, the character ends up stuck in a movie theatre that is falling apart. The character chooses a ghost to be his partner. He dances a tango with a ghost, the ghost of his past. The other people cannot see who he is dancing with while he is able to see a peacock which is something he finds optimal, which he has chased ever since he was young.

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