關於 metal working terms ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

《親密戲導演》

American Theatre，2018年11月號。
《演員的親密戲》

擷自內文：
「性愛場景，如同設計武打場，或是舞蹈動作一般，需要同樣細心編排的動作設計，特別是在這個 #MeToo時代。 」

「我在研究所時期也是演員，所以我有親身體驗—那種來自同事的不恰當經驗，一起跟我上台的人，或是導演完全不知道該怎麼處理這些(親密戲)場景，所以他們索性就完全不處理。」Sina說 「如果你有一個比較年長的導演，碰到親密戲他會跟你們說:你們就做吧，就試看各種可能。所以你們就開始在性愛場景中即興，這是非常不舒服的經驗，而且大多數時候非常令人受傷。」

「親密戲的指示，從來沒有在演員Emily與她的女搭檔編排動作設計遇到困難時出現(她們當時在編排一個充滿戲劇衝突的雙人愛情戲)，即使Emily之前演過同性間的愛情戲，她仍然發現自己舉步維艱， 而她的導演除了不斷對著她們大吼舞臺指示「洶湧的情慾」以外，毫無建樹。兩位演員根本沒有辦法自己演完這場戲，而她們發現到了排練最後階段，她們的導演對著她們大喊「就做吧。時候到了。」

「劇場的一切都是假的，」Sina說，「那是一個由演員搬演的假故事，我們必須永遠記得這點，你不應該因此失去自我，你必須在自我跟所做事情之間取得很好的平衡。是的，你必須把自己奉獻給角色，但你也必須要在適當時候離開。」
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
前言：
自己日常閱讀時發現這篇文章，其中許多觀念頗為受用，花了幾天翻譯出來，希望能給台灣帶來不同觀念交流、分享，人家對身體以及一切相關觀念，已經好前面了。

雖為英文系畢業，但仍非專業翻譯，謬誤之處歡迎指正。

歡迎轉貼，請勿用做商業用途。
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
正文：

Intimate Exchanges
Sex scenes require as much careful choreography as flight or dances, especially in the #MeToo era.

《交換親密》
性愛場景，如同設計武打場，或是舞蹈動作一般，需要同樣細心編排的動作設計，特別是在這個 #MeToo時代。

Adam Noble had been teaching an advanced scene class for just one month when he faced a startling encounter with sexual assault in acting. A student came to him asking for a new scene partner, saying she thought the man she had been working with, on the final scene between Stanley and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, had tried to rape her.

Adam Noble在他的進階場景分析課上遇到一件令他膽戰心驚的表演性騷擾事件，一名學生跟他要求更換場景搭檔，她說她的搭檔企圖在他們一起工作《慾望街車》最後一景Stanley跟Blanche的戲時，企圖強暴她。

Noble immediately offered to serve as a mediator for the two students, who had been rehearsing alone in the young man’s dorm room, in order to clarify what had happened. The situation was resolved as a misunderstanding, and the two were able to continue working together. But for Noble, who had staged his first theatrical flight in 1992, the incident served as a wake-up call.

Noble立即以協調者身分為兩位同學提供幫助(他們一直單獨在男同學宿舍房間單獨排練)，以求能夠釐清事實真相。後來發現整起事件其實是個誤會，兩位同學也因此能夠繼續一起順利工作。但對於Noble來說—他從1992年就設計了他的人生第一場舞台打搏鬥戲—這起突發事件有如一記響鐘。

“We were sending these kids off on their own devices with no foundation for how to approach this stuff,” he recalled. The lack of resources for both students and teachers regarding the staging of intimate scenes was apparent.

「我們讓這些孩子在完全不具備如何處理理這種事的相關基礎知識時候，就放手要他們自己發展，」他這麼回憶。「因此，老師與學生雙方都缺乏排練親密戲的必須知識，這件事是顯而易見的。」

Noble developed a method called Extreme Stage Physicality to provide students with a framework to address what he called in an article for The Flight Master maginize “scenarios of intense physicality” with comfort and confidence. He began teaching ESP to high school, undergraduate, nd graduate students across the country. He found that the methodology was effective for all ages, and the number of reported incidents and problems dropped to zero.

Noble後來發展出了一套他稱之為「極端舞台形體」（ESP)的技巧，他對《The Fight Master》雜誌表⽰這個技巧提供了一組完整架構給學生使用，讓他們在「激烈的肢體情境」中可以感到安心並且擁有自信。他開始在高中、大學、研究所教導這套ESP技巧。他發現這套方法適用於所有年齡層，後來這些單位的性騷擾通報數量為零。

“For me as a director, it had to work for aggression, and it had to work for intimacy,” Noble said. “ It had to work across the board for those moments when the body steps in to fill the void, whether it’s violence or intimacy. Theres’s a point where the text and the words are no longer enough and the body steps in. There had to be a way for them to work on it safely.”

「身為導演，我認為在工作時，必須涵蓋侵略性以及親密性這些面向，」Noble說，「這些都必須要被全面地工作到的，特別是在那些時刻，當你的身體必須要介入來填補空缺的時候，會有那麼一個點，光靠文本跟台詞已經不足以支撐而你的身體必須要介入，在這時候必須要有一個安全工作的方法。」

That way would later be referred to as intimacy choreography, a term first used in 2006 by Tonia Sina, creator of the Intimacy Directors International. While studying movement pedagogy, including flowing and mime, Sina was helping to choreograph intimate scenes in student-directed plays and found what she described as “a hole” in choreography and no resources to help with her work.

那套方法，後來被「國際親密戲導演工作坊」創辦人之一Tonia Sina稱為「親密戲形體排練」。當 Sina在鑽研動作教育學時—其中包含小丑與默劇—一面幫忙在學生執導的劇目中擔任動作設計，就在這時候，她發現了在動作設計這個領域中的「空缺」，而這方面，她發現自己完全沒有任何資源可以幫上忙。

For her thesis he created a technique to help actors improve the conditions of their work as well as the results. Published in 2006, “ Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sensuality” drew from her own experience as an actor. While attending graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University, Sina’s personal life was disrupted due to the lack of structure provided for staging intimate sscenes. While rehearsing Picasso at the Latin Agile, she and her acting partner staged a love scene together, alone-a standard practice for such scenarios- with unnerving results.

她在她的論文創造了一套技巧，來幫助演員精進他們工作的狀態以及成果。2006年，她從自身演員經驗出發，發表了《親密接觸:表演中的親密性及其感官性》。大學就讀維吉尼亞聯邦大學時，Sina的私生活就因為沒有一套擁有完整架構的技巧來排演親密場景，而深受其苦。在排練Picasso at the Latin Agile 時，Sina跟她的表演搭擋需要排練一段愛情戲，而且是獨自排練—一個司空見慣的情況—然後最後結果卻令人不安。

“The second our lips touched it was not rehearing,” Sina recalled. “It was just kissing. We both felt it. We both knew. It ended up spiraling. We ended up leaving our parters for a month and we had a showmance. It caused a lot of mayhem in our personal lives because we couldn’t let these characters go. We didn’t have a safe way to do the intimacy, and we didn’t have a safe way of coming out of it.”

「當我們的嘴唇碰在一起時，那就不是在排練了。」Sina回憶道。「那就只是單純在接吻而已。我們都感覺到了，最後越演越烈，我們都因此而跟各自伴侶分手，在那個演出期間我們的私生活真的變得很混亂，因為我們都不肯放下我們劇中角色。我們沒有一個安全的方法來做親密戲，也沒有一個安全的方法來離開它。」

The two dated for a month, but their romantic relationship ended shortly after the show closed. And while Sina’s experience was consensual, there are many cases in which an intimacy director could have prevented non-consensual encounters and abuses of power, especially for young women in the industry.

他們兩個交往了一個月，但隨著戲告一段落感情也就馬上結束了。儘管Sina的案例是當事者雙方都心甘情願，仍然有非常多的例子不是如此，在那樣的狀況下其實親密戲導演是有大把機會可以防止這種違反自身意願的接觸，以及權力的濫用，特別是對業界年輕女性而言。

“While I was in grad school I was also an actress, so I was experiencing it firsthand- situations that had been completely inappropriate from co-workers, people who had been onstage with me, director and there’s a sex scene and they say, ‘You guys just do it. Just try something.’ So you’re improvising a sex scene with your partner. That’s extremely uncomfortable and very victimizing at times.”

「我在研究所時期也是演員，所以我有親身體驗—那種來自同事的不恰當經驗，一起跟我上台的人，或是導演完全不知道該怎麼處理這些(親密戲)場景，所以他們索性就完全不處理。」Sina說 「如果你有一個比較年長的導演，碰到親密戲他會跟你們說:你們就做吧，就試看各種可能。所以你們就開始在性愛場景中即興，這是非常不舒服的經驗，而且大多數時候非常令人受傷。」

Alcoa Rodies, co-founder of Intimacy Directors Internatial, witnessed and was a victim in such scenarios throughout her career. After almost chipping a tooth when a scene partner decided to intensify a kiss onstage, she was told, “ That’s part of the profession. Get used to it.” Knowing there were hundreds of other women who would gladly take her spot in a show if she left, Rodis thought she had to accept that kind of behavior for the rest of her career.

IDI共同創辦人Alcia Rodis在她自己生涯中，親眼見過幾個案例，並且，也曾經有過身為受害者的經驗。在她的對手演員決定在場上把吻戲變得異常激烈時，她的牙齒幾乎都要裂了，儘管如此，她還是被告知「這行就是這樣。早點習慣吧。」因為Rodis清楚知道如果她選擇離開的話，會有其他幾百位女性會搶破頭想要她的位置，她一度以為她必須要在整個職涯中接受這種狀況。

“We sort of learned that’s not the case, and we don’t have to just take it. We can actually be part of the process and work together,” Rodis said.

「我們後來知道其實並不是這樣的，我們不需要逆來順受。我們其實可以在整個工作過程中同心協力地工作。」Rodis 說。

Sina and Rodies, along with co-founder Siobhan Richardson, created the Pillars, the core protocol of IDI’s work and teaching. A codified process, the Pillars consist of Context, Commumication, Consent and Choreography. (They recently estabished a fifth pillar, Closure, to assist actors in walking away from a character after a performance.) Not having this process, Sina said, can be damaging and dangerous.

Sina跟Rodis，以及創辦夥伴Siobhan Richardson發明了「骨幹」這個IDI在工作及教學上的核心要素草案。其中包含：文本、溝通、同意以及動作(近期還加上了第五個骨幹:收尾。來幫助演員在戲結束之後順利離開他的角色。)Sina說，沒有這些幫助的話，是有可能帶來危害的。

“None of it’s real-it’s theatre,” said Sina. “It’s a fake story that is being portrayed by actors, and we have to keep remembering that. You shouldn’t be losing yourself. You need to have some semblance of yourself and some awareness of what you’re doing. Yes you can commit to the character, but you need to come out again.”

「劇場的一切都是假的，」Sina說，「那是一個由演員搬演的假故事，我們必須永遠記得這點，你不應該因此失去自我，你必須在自我跟所做事情之間取得很好的平衡。是的，你必須把自己奉獻給角色，但你也必須要在適當時候離開。」

IDI currently recommends four certified Intimacy Directors, with 16 candidates in training to become certified. Currently only established movement teachers, choreographers, and directors who have worked directly with a founder are able to apply for training. The organization also offers workshops for actors, directors who want to learn basic consent and choreography, and for stage managers and choreographers wanting to learn more about intimacy direction. In August 2018, a 10-day International Intimacy Pedagogy was held in Illinois.

IDI最近推薦了四位經過認證的親密戲導演，陸續還有其他十六位正在培訓。目前，機構只提供專業的、並且曾和創辦者共事過的動作老師、編舞以及導演可以申請接受培訓。IDI有提供工作坊給演員及導演學習「同意」與「動作」的基礎概念，另有舉辦工作坊，給有意願了解更多關於「如何給予親密戲指示」的舞臺經理與動作設計。2018年8月，他們在伊利諾州舉辦了為期10天的國際親密戲教育學工作坊。

Along with the Pillars, another crucial aspect of intimacy directing is recognizing and respecting traumas in one’s colleagues. All IDI-certified choreographers have completed state-offered metal health certification courses.

除了「骨幹」之外，另有一個至關重要的概念：辨識並且尊重同事的創傷。所有IDI的動作設計都完成了由州政府認證的心理健康課程。

“None of us are therapists, and none of us are counselors,” Rodis said. “But we know what to do if someone is having a metal health crisis, and we know what resources to give them. Because of the nature of the work we’re doing, and because some of us are so new, we’re getting further education on trauma.”

「我們都不是心理治療師，我們也都不是諮商師，」Rodis說「但是，我們知道當有人心理出現危機時該給他們什麼資源。因為就我們現在所做的工作本質上來說，我們都是新手，所以我們有必要持續在創傷這個議題上進修。」

While recognizing that theatre professionals are just that- professionals hired to tell a story- the founders also understand that that job can involve actors putting themselves through traumatic experiences night after night.
“We know what you’re doing is different than going to the office every day,” Rodis said, “If you’re playing Lady Macbeth every night, after a while it’s going to wear on you. So we also offer resources on how to close out at the end of every night.”

正因為知道劇場這個職業就是由一群受聘的專業演員來講一則故事，創辦者清楚的認識到這個工作可能需要演員讓他們自己日復一日、夜復一夜的經歷那些創傷。「我們明⽩你的工作不同於朝九晚五的上班族，」Rodis說，「如果妳每天晚上都在飾演馬克白夫人，過一陣子這個角色其實是會影響到妳本人的，正因為如此，我們也提供方法讓你在每晚演出過後把角色給關起來。」

One such resource is the ability to discuss sexuality and sexual experiences openly and without discomfort- a shift from the norm in American culture, which, as actor/director/teacher Claire Warden observed, has little problem with violence but tends to balk when it comes to sex, leaving directors feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed.

其中一個資源，就是擁有能力來討論性以及性經驗而不會感到不適。談論性這件事，不同於具有多重身份(演員、導演與老師)的Claire Warden觀察到的一個美國文化現象:談到暴力時大家都沒問題，不過一但談到性的時候大家都顯得有點畏畏縮縮的，這其實讓導演們都覺得不舒服與尷尬。

“We’ve got this really skewed view of sex and sexuality and intimacy, and an obsession with it,“ Warden Said, “ A lot of shame, judgment, power, and confusion lies around it, which has made it uncomfortable and awkward to talk about openly.” The root problem, she said, may be that “sexuality and intimacy have kind of blurred into one.”

「我們對於性與親密的相關議題有一種扭曲的觀念，同時卻又深深為其著迷」Warden說，「這同時又有許多羞愧、判斷、權力以及困惑參雜其中，因此讓它成為一個公開談論時會帶來不適與尷尬的議題。」根據她說，其實真正根深蒂固的問題是，我們把「性」與「親密」混為一談。

Intimacy direction was never mentioned when an actor we’ll call Emily(not her real name) was performing in a dramatic two-handler and struggled to choreograph a love scene with her female scene partner. Having never performed a same-sex love scene before, Emily found herself at a loss, and her director- whose only technique was to yell the stage direction “Rolling heat!” Repeatedly- was no help. The two actors were unable to stage the scene on their own and found themselves onstage at the end of rehearsal with the director yelling. “Just do it. It’s time.”

親密戲的指導，從來沒有在演員Emily與她的女搭檔編排動作設計遇到困難時出現(她們當時在編排一個充滿戲劇衝突的雙人愛情戲)，即使Emily之前演過同性間的愛情戲，她仍然發現自己舉步維艱， 而她的導演除了不斷對著她們大吼舞臺指示「洶湧的情慾」以外，毫無建樹。兩位演員根本沒有辦法自己演完這場戲，而她們發現到了排練最後階段，她們的導演對著她們大喊「就做吧。時候到了。」

Emily recalled that “when it came time to do it in performances, fight director friends of mine ho came to see the how said, ‘That look incredibly uncomfortable for you both. You looked like you were in pain and it was obvious.’’’ Her friends asked her where the intimacy director was. Emily had never heard of such a director, saying, “ I wish I’d known about it at the time when all the yelling was happening.”

Emily後來說，「後來真的演出時，我有個舞台搏鬥導演朋友來看演出，到了所謂的『就做吧』片段時，他說『那看起來對妳們兩個都極其不舒服，妳們看起來超痛苦，而且非常明顯。」她的朋友繼續問她親密戲導演在哪。Emily那時從來沒有聽過有「親密戲導演」這種導演，她說「我真希望在所有的吼叫發叫的當下，我能夠知道『其實有親密戲導演』這件事。」

Emily now a director herself, said she is carful to ensure that her actors are comfortable when staging intimate scenes. “I am hyper-aware of my actors’ sensitivity and I’m constantly checking in with them: ‘Are you okay? Are you comfortable with this? Let me know if you’re not comfortable. We don’t have to do this. We can do something else.’ And my actors thank me for it. They’re not used to that.”

現在身為導演的Emily表示:「在排練親密戲時，我總是對我的演員的感受保持超級高的敏感度，我會不停的詢問他們『你還好嗎？你對這個覺得自在嗎？如果有不舒服要讓我知道。我們不一定要這麼做，我們可以有替代方案的。』我的演員總是對此心存感激，他們對這樣的工作方式其實還不是那麼習慣。」

Uncomfortable situations can present themselves with or without directors in the room. Often scene partners are encouraged to stage the scenes on their own, outside of rehearsal, a practice that can lead to feelings of fear and helplessness. Sina was kissed inappropriately- a kiss that hadn’t been choreographed or rehearsed- in front of an audience of 500 people and had to be in character as she received it.

不舒服的狀況不論導演在不在場都有可能發生。通常演員們會被鼓勵私下自己排練，其實，這麼做很容易引發恐懼與無助感。Sina曾在500位觀眾面前被不當的親吻—一個沒被事先設計或是排練過的吻 —而她在被親的同時還要想辦法讓自己「待在角色裡」。

“There are times where it’s, ‘Kiss, but don’t kiss until previews.’ It’s the worst,” Rodis said. “At best it’s a bad story, at worst they start grabbing you, ‘be in the moment.’ That’s the definition of assault.”

「有時候的情況是親，但是在試演前不會真的親，那種是最糟的。」Rodis說，「當那種狀況發生時，你能得到最好的結果是一個爛故事，最糟的結果是你開始被這件事給抓住還要『待在當下』， 這其實就是侵犯的定義。」

Along with establishing the definition of assault, IDI training also defines consent in clear, unquestionable terms that differentiate between that and permission. A director can give permission to touch another actor, but only a fellow actor can give consent.

除了建立侵犯的定義以外，IDI還以清清楚楚、不容模糊的語彙界定了「同意」與「允許」的差異。 導演可以「允許」演員去觸摸對手，但只有對手演員自己才可以真的表示「同意」。

“The conversation is always very professional and technical, so when we’re talking about parts of the body, it’s the biological name of the part of the body.” said Warden. “And we as intimacy directors never ask anything about and never inquire about the actors’, directors’ or anyone else’s personal sexual life, history, story, proclivities, etc.”

「所有的討論都是非常專業的，當我們必須要談論身體的部位時，我們都會用生物學名稱。」 Warden說，「身為親密戲導演，我們絕對不會去問任何演員、導演或是任何人的個人性愛生活、歷史、故事或是性傾向...等等任何事情。」

The language doesn’t change when the workshops contain students, Warden said, though she may move more slowly.

語彙的使用並不會因為工作坊有學生而改變，Warden說，只是她會教的更慢而已。

“A lot of what we’re saying for adults is still, ‘That is not real. None of this is real.’’’ said Sina. “In rehearsal, we don’t add acting to it until the very last minute, We choreograph it like we do anything else. Just do the moves so everyone knows what’s happening. Then they can add the emotion to it when the actors are ready and they feel they know the choreography well enough. And if you can get that to happen for minors, it separates the sexuality from the choreography and allows them to treat it like it is: choreography.”

「即便我們跟成年人都一直在強調『這都不是真的，這一切都是假的。』」Sina說。「排練的時候，我們不到最後一分鐘是不會加上『表演』的。在最後關頭之前。我們都像是處理其他素材一樣，做形體動作讓大家都知道會發生什麼事。一直到演員們都準備好了，對動作都夠熟悉時，他們才會真的帶入感情去演出。如果你能夠讓這些未成年先開始這麼做，慢慢的所有人就能夠把性跟動作設計分開來來看，然後以正確的眼光看它:動作設計。」

The inability to treat intimate scenes as simply choreography is a problem Sina has observed at numerous drama competitions, where students without sexual experience or knowledge, let alone the ability to separate themselves from the characters they were playing, have performed sex scenes. These situations can be traumatizing for people without the knowledge or resources to handle it.

Sina在無數個戲劇比賽上觀察到一個問題，學生們往無法把親密場景當成動作設計一樣來處理，這群學生們沒有性經驗或是相關知識，想當然就無法在性愛戲中把自己跟扮演的人物切割開來看待。這種狀況是非常有可能讓人受創的，特別是對那些沒有相關知識，或是資源來處理這種狀況的人。

“If they’re not being led through it properly, it can be very, very dangerous,” she said. “It’s illegal in our country to do anything sexual with a minor or have two minors do something sexual in front of an adult. It’s very thin line between choreography and a crime when you’re dealing with minors.”

「如果他們沒有被好好引導的話，那真的非常非常的危險。」她說，「根據我們國家的法律，讓一個或多個未成年人在成年人面前做出帶有性愛意味的事情是違法的。所以面對未成年時，在『動作設計』跟『犯罪』之間其實只有一條非常模糊的線。」

Demand for IDI services and training has spiked in the past year, since the #MeToo movement has exposed abuse in the entertainment field, including theatre, and the issues of consent and empowerment in the workplace (not to mention outside of it) have become central.

自從去年#MeToo運動開始後，對IDI這個機構的服務與訓練來說，他們面臨了重要挑戰。在娛樂產業(包含劇場)的職場上(更別提職場外也是)，現在，關於「同意」與「權力」的議題都變得重要無比了。

“At the moment there’s so much need and demand and only so many of us to go around,” Warden said. “I cannot be in every single room and play out there, but what I can do is empower actors or directors or even stag managers to go into a room and say, ‘I would like to offer a way of talking about this.”

「目前來看，親密戲導演的需求與實際從業人數是不成正比的，」Warden說。「很顯然的，我不可能出現在每一個房間裡指導，但我可以做的是賦予演員、導演甚是舞臺經理權力，讓他們能夠在每個房間替自己發聲『我想要提供另外一種工作方式』。」

Also encouraging to Warden is the increased awareness among young students.

對Warden來說，令他欣慰的是年輕一代學生中對這件事情有意識的人數越來越多了。

“My hope, my intentions and my dream is that the next generation of actors, writers, and directors come out with a very different understating of respect and consent with their bodies and each others’ bodies,” Warden said. “And that leads us into an even more free and safe way to creat deep, authentic, risky stories.”

「我的願望、我的本意、以及我的夢想都是下個世代的演員、作家、以及導演都能夠對他們自己以及他人的身體，有一種非常不同於現在的理解、尊重、權利，」Warden說，「這可以讓我們以更自由，同時也更加安全的方式來創造出具深度、真誠、精彩的故事。」

Carey Purcell, New York city-based reporter

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….