Toshiki Okada is a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

, theater director, and novelist, founder of the theatrical company chelfitsch. He was awarded the 2008 Kenzaburō Ōe Prize

Kenzaburo Oe Prize

The Kenzaburō Ōe Prize is a literary award, and is sponsord by Kodansha .Established in 2006 in memory of two anniversaries:100th anniversary of Kodansha's establishment and the 50th anniversary of the writing life of Kenzaburō Ōe ....

 for The end of the special time we were allowed , a book consisting of two novels. He is known for "his use of hyper-colloquial

Colloquialism

A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...

 Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 and his unique choreography

Choreography

Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself, which is sometimes expressed by means of dance notation. The word choreography literally means "dance-writing" from the Greek words "χορεία" ...

."

Life and career

Born in Yokohama

Yokohama

is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...

 in 1973, Okada formed the theatrical company chelfitsch in 1997. The name chelfitsch, a play on the English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 word "selfish," is always written with a lowercase c. (In katakana

Katakana

is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...

 it is written チェルフィッチュ.) Okada has directed all of the company's productions.

His work has received numerous honors and awards. Five Days in March, a play that juxtaposes a couple spending five days in a love hotel

Love hotel

A love hotel is a type of short-stay hotel found around the world operated primarily for the purpose of allowing couples privacy for sexual activities...

 against the beginning of the Iraq War, won the 49th Kishida

Kunio Kishida

was one of the most prominent Japanese dramatist and writer of the early 20th century and is regarded as one of the founders of modern Japanese drama....

 drama award in 2005. Air-Conditioner/Cooler was a finalist at the 2005 Toyota Choreography Awards, and Enjoy was presented in December 2006 at the New National Theatre Tokyo. His book The end of the special time we were allowed , published in February 2007, consists of two novels. One is a reworking of his play Five Days in March; the other, an earlier piece, is called Our Many Places (Watashitachi no Basho no Fukusu). The book received the 2008 Kenzaburō Ōe Prize. Besides awards and recognition for specific works, he also received the 2005 Yokohama Cultural Award / Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement.

Besides directing his own plays, he has also directed Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

's Cascando

Cascando

Cascando is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in French in December 1961, subtitled Invention radiophonique pour musique et voix, with music by the Franco-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. It was first broadcast on France Culture on 13 October 1963 with Roger Blin and Jean Martin...

for the Tokyo International Arts Festival Beckett Centennial Memorial Festival, Kōbō Abe

Kobo Abe

, pseudonym of was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities....

's Friends at the Setagaya Public Theater, and several workshop programs with theater students.

Besides performances in Japan, chelfitsch has toured to Brussels

Brussels

Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...

, Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Cardiff

Cardiff

Cardiff is the capital, largest city and most populous county of Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for...

, Salzburg

Salzburg

-Population development:In 1935, the population significantly increased when Salzburg absorbed adjacent municipalities. After World War II, numerous refugees found a new home in the city. New residential space was created for American soldiers of the postwar Occupation, and could be used for...

, Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

, Seattle, and other cities.

Works for the stage

• On the Harmful Effects of Marihuana (2003)
• Five Days in March (2004)
• Air-Conditioner/Cooler (2004)
• The End of Toil (2005)
• Enjoy (2006)
• Three Women

External links

• chelfitsch, official site