"Completely delightful. Lit up with a romantic, care free humour that can only inspire the highest of spirits’
Time Out Critics Choice
"gentle, affectionate and humorous"
The Independent on Sunday
"Delightfully forthright. A complex and fascinating exercise in modern tragic-comedy."
The Times
"a beguiling blend of insightful, contemporary comment and fanciful, timeless storytelling."
Metro
Before her performances at St James centre for Creativity, Kazuko Hohki will make herself available to the public in an …inprogress session at the ActionBase Studio. By utilising fragments from her forthcoming performance, she will demonstrate her approaches to the act of performance and to the generation of performative material.
For seat reservations (Lm2) contact Victor Jacono on 99 28 84 12 or 21 66 64 53, or by email on victore@maltanet.net
Tickets (Lm 4 and Lm 2) are available from St. James Cavalier, Valletta. For booking information please contact the booking office: phone 21 22 32 00 or 21 22 32 16 or email boxoffice@sjcav.org
is a multi-media solo show that tells the story of a Japanese office lady Keiko who is content with her single lifestyle, having abandoned any expectation of meeting 'Mr Right'. This is before she encounters Robin, an English University fellow, who she meets in Tokyo. They fall in love, get married, and move to England.
But married life is not quite what she anticipates. Every night the eccentric Englishman locks himself up in a room upstairs in their house. “My Husband is a Spaceman” is derived from an old Japanese folk tale of love between a peasant and a crane using songs, digital animations, puppets and the tradition of 'Kamishibai' (paper theatre). The story is based on Kazuko's experience (to some extent) of a cross-cultural relationship, loneliness and how to survive it.
One of the most personal and affecting performers you are ever likely to see.
Download music from the performance:
Chic Chic Shibuya
My Husband is a Spaceman
Looking For Me
The...inprogress Series is unique. Its events help one sense that Performance is more than mere illusion, sensory gratification, or an entertaining evening out. If Performance is sincere and genuine, it allows for huge insights into the mysterious nature of what we call Human Creativity.
Launched a couple of years ago at Actionbase Studio, the …inprogress Series has presented such artists as Anthony Calleja, the Kiraly Piano Quartet, pianist Caroline Calleja, British actor Mat Frazer, Indian Mohini Attam dancer Mavin Khoo and others.
At Actionbase Studio the Performance phenomenon is studied in research programmes whose growing networks involve international performance groups, universities, academies. Its ongoing research provided the seeds and the launching pad for a major EU-funded programme, EMA-PS, which in October 2007will launch a university of Malta based European Master’s, running in conjunction with universities in Paris, Rome, Leicester and Poznan. The Master’s programme aims to form researchers who will investigate Memory Processes, Learning Systems and Creativity. In this scenario, the …inprogress Series approaches musicians, actors, dancers, sculptors, painters about to appear in public and it invites them to discuss their creative processes openly with the public, illustrating their discussion by preview fragments of their forthcoming performance.
The …inprogress Series enables one to start glimpsing what there might be behind great art. Talent helps, yes. “Genius” helps even more... but Beethovens and Mozarts are rare commodities, so the miracle of Human Creativity cannot be sought only in elsewhere. Over 80 years ago, the great Russian theatre master, Konstantin Stanislavski, wrote “I had lost interest in genius; what really interested me was to see whether I could devise a system that could help those not born with genius to come close to genius”. The beautiful truth is that creativity stems from total dedication, excitement, hard work, love, mutual respect, and a true thirst to never stop discovering. It is from all that, then, that the miracle of Creativity can, sometimes, with patience, hope and humility, take place. And from that point onwards, one never looks back – one suddenly find oneself, literally “in a flash”, living the joy of “Creativity”. It is small wonder that the etymological sense of the word “Performer” is, precisely, “somebody who gives himself totally and completely”. It needs a leap of faith for one to believe in that, and it needs still more for one to put it to practice.
The various research programmes going on at Actionbase look into the roots of all this, and the …inprogress Series is one of the instruments employed for the purpose.
Kazuko Hohki will be leading a day workshop on Sunday 3rd December 2006. During the workshop, participants will be working on the development of a theatrical piece based on personal stories and multimedia work. Participants are required to bring along a photograph, a story and a favourite piece of music on CD. All the material must be connected to the same personal story. The workshop will enable participants to experiment with various source materials within a multimedia environment.
The workshop to be held at St. James Cavalier from 10am till 5pm is limited to 15 participants and the registration fee is Lm5. Interested individuals are invited to submit a brief artistic CV by Wednesday 22nd November to euproject@sjcav.org or Kazuko Hohki Workshop, St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Valletta.
Selected participants will be informed by Friday 24th November.
was born in Tokyo and came to England in 1978. She is a musician, animator, director, performer and storyteller who describes herself as a live artist because she adopts a multi-artform approach to making her solo theatre shows. Before making her acclaimed solo work, Hohki founded the Japanese female pop performance group Frank Chickens in 1982, which had an independent chart hit with We Are Ninja and has released five albums and toured world wide.
Kazuko has toured with the Duckie’s Olivier Award winning "C’est Vauxhall / C’est Barbican", including performances at Sydney Opera House Studio, London’s Barbican Centre, Greece, Birmingham’s Fierce! festival and Manchester’s queerupnorth festival.
She has also made a documentary feature called “The Good Wife of Tokyo” or Channel 4 with Kim Longinotto - about Japanese contemporary women in real life, featuring Frank Chickens and her mother. The film was shown on Channel 4 TV (1993) and also at various international film festivals. She has presented her own TV series “Kazuko’s Karaoke Club" for Channel 4. She has also published four books in Japan about her life in London.
www.kazukohohki.com
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