The Stories from the Rehearsal Room: Deconstructing Yudai Kamisato’s Immigration Ghost Stories

In Okinawa ghosts and monsters are said to be part of everyday life and many ghost stories are told and re-told daily. In his latest work, Yudai Kamisato, an award-winning Japanese playwright and director born in Peru, uses these stories to re-imagine theatre from ‘a place of seeing’ to ‘a place of seeing through listening’. This new project entitled Immigrant Ghost Stories (2022) is based on ghost stories from Thailand, Laos, Bolivia and Okinawa and takes us on a journey of discovery of the history of migration and wars in the Asia-Pacific.

Emerging from the pandemic, Kamisato rehearsed this play in a unique way. The director was the only one allowed to travel to rehearse one-to-one with performers. The performers would not meet until a week before the premiere. The production staff was also not allowed in the rehearsal room but could watch over Zoom in real-time or a recording. In autumn 2022, I was invited to these online/offline rehearsals which gave me a rare insight into the theatre practice of this acclaimed Japanese theatre-maker.

Combining my own notes from the rehearsals and Kamisato’s own writings, I will explore the ways these ghost stories are deconstructed and reconstructed in the rehearsal room. Using Nanase Shirota’s conceptualisation of listening (2021), the so-called, ‘nagara’ or ‘while’ listening, and Hiroki Azuma’s Philosophy of Tourist (2017), I will also examine how this new method destabilises the ideal model of the rehearsal process.