Research Trip in Indonesia: Prologue
We’re starting a new series sharing our experiences during the group research trip to Indonesia in September 2022, penned by Yukari Sakata, a member of the Asian art project TERASIA: Theatre for Traveling in the Age of Isolation. This short article is a preface for that.
Hello. I’m Yukari Sakata. I usually live in Tokyo. I do all kinds of work, but today, I’m writing this piece as one of the directors in TERASIA.
Now, you might be wondering:
What is TERASIA？
…If you’d like to find out, feel free to put my article aside for a moment and check out this page! Once you peek in, you’ll see at a glance what TERASIA is all about. We're about to hold a mini-festival titled TERASIA Online Week 2022 + Onsite in November, full of theatre performances, music, and talks.
Or, if you prefer, take a look at this photo below. Everyone in this picture is a TERASIA artist. We’re a mixed bunch—Japanese, Thai, Burmese, Indonesian—but you can’t tell where we’re from just by looking at our faces. People like them, as well as so many other people who aren’t in this picture, are making art everyday, somewhere in Asia. That’s TERASIA.
Photo: Ryohei Tomita
By the way, this photo was taken in Jakarta on September 8th, 2022. For me, it was such a moving moment. TERASIA started out as an online collective in 2020, just after the so-called “first wave” of the Covid-19 pandemic swept over the world, when Japan declared a state of emergency in the country, and people were trying to stay home as much as possible. And at long last in 2022, as summer was ending and the rainy season was starting, we had our first chance to meet up and fool around together—really a dream come true.
My stay there was from September 2nd to the 13th. Some people stayed for much longer or shorter, but on average, everyone spent about eight days together. It became a rich and rewarding trip. Each member shared what they’ve been working on for the last few years, and we had a passionate discussion about our direction for the future. We met new people, walked around, ate meals, and created together. New ideas were born from those interactions, which led to even more creative projects. Looking back now, I still feel that those days were such a rare delight and a luxury.
Even as I write, the TERASIA members, who are all artists, are creating their own projects wherever they are in the world. In a nutshell, we’re going full throttle. I mentioned the Online Week in the beginning. Now our members in Myanmar, Indonesia, and Vietnam are busy developing their new performance pieces to get ready for the showcase.
For this year’s Online Week, the team in Japan will be presenting their previous work, TERA in Kyoto (2021). This play, which I directed, will be available to watch online for a limited time of ten days from November 4 – 13, 2022. If you haven’t seen it yet, we’d love to share it with you! The performance of the actor Miho Inatsugu and the musician Kyojun Tanaka is, to put it mildly, intense. Curious? Check it out from the link below👇
Don’t worry, the Japan team isn’t just sitting around! I’ll be taking on the writing for this essay series on the Indonesia research trip on behalf of the other artists from across Asia. I’ll be sharing our experiences in Indonesia from my perspective on an irregular basis, so I hope you’ll enjoy them.
Now, it’s time to show you the very first video from Jakarta: a lunchtime scene from when we visited the studio of Teater Kubur (“graveyard theatre”) for the first time. All the food on the table was so delicious as we shared the meal with everyone together, listening to the troupe member TJ-san’s favorite Japanese song, “Kanpai” (Cheers).
Translation: Yui Kajita
The research is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP 22K13002.
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