YORU

夜が一つの音になる
yoru ga hitostu no oto ni naru

ABOUT

夜 YORU GA HITOTSU NO OTO NI NARU (or, WHEN THE NIGHT BECOMES ON SOUND) is a full-length interdisciplinary work combining a text-based narrative storyline predominantly in English, but using elements of  Japanese and German. The sound world pulls from Japanese folk and enka genres, as well as German folk lieder, traditional Christmas carols, and music from the operatic and classical music canons.

The play centres around the story of Hana (they/them), a 30s-something AFAB (assigned female at birth) Nikkei-Canadian who yearns for a connection to their late Japanese father who died over a decade ago. Having protected themself from their parents’ crumbling marriage and the trauma of their father’s terminal cancer, Hana finds themself now fearing that they missed the opportunity to know their father and ultimately their culture. An athlete in their youth, Hana recently finds themself more unemployed than not, more directionless and apathetic since growing tired of continually having to perform whiteness and astringent gender roles both on and off stage as a professional opera singer. When an unexpected downsizing of their mother’s house prompts a sudden trip back to their childhood home, Hana can’t avoid the internal reckoning that awaits, not only forcing them to grapple with their past, but with their present and ultimately their future.

History of Development

2020-2021

• 夜 YORU is being developed in the Nightwood Theatre’s Write From the Hip Playwright’s program

• An excerpt from the online workshop of YORU will be presented as a part of Nightwood Theatre’s Groundswell Festival

2018-2020

• Since 2018, the project has been supported through Theatre Gargantua’s Side Stream Cycle.

Background

My parents separated when I was a child and my father died of cancer when I was a teenager. Because of an estranged relationship and his early death, my connection to my Japanese identity was denied into my adulthood. It has only been in the last few years that I have had the threshold to look back and understand who my father was as a man and where I came from. I started studying Japanese and then went to Japan with my brother for the first time in the spring of 2018 and met some of my family for the very first time. I recovered many writings of my father, and discovered he wrote under a pen name, Echigo Donten (越後 曇天). All of this uncovering and slow research has been life changing. The desire to understand what my father’s DNA and culture means to me informs the creation of 夜 YORU.

夜 YORU was initially inspired by my first work, THE QUEEN IN ME, in order to expand the latter. Now that my artistic practice includes creating projects and space for equity seeking artists, I’m striving to do this by re-imagining what opera could be, taking opera and replanting it into multi-disciplinary theatre where it can grow beyond the industry’s systemic limits.

The first attempt at this expansion of THE QUEEN IN ME created a completely other narrative that wanted to be told with the focus being the many polarizing and precarious identities that I continue to hold within myself as an artist including:

• my ethnicity (Japanese and German)

• sexuality and gender identity, perception and expression

• musicality (taiko player and opera singer)

• lineage (my father’s influences and mother influences)

• masculinity / aggression / strength

• femininity / submission / vulnerability

夜 YORU allows me to argue these inherent binaries which reflect my complicated and evolving journey dealing with:

• gender dysphoria and presentation

• not being recognized as fully enough of one or the other identity or attribute

• familial and cultural/societal acceptance

• professional and personal discrimination and safety

夜 YORU is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts as a part of a larger grant, the Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants for Theatre Creators, and the Toronto Arts Council Playwright’s Grant.