18 Facts About Toshiki Okada

Toshiki Okada is a Japanese playwright, theater director, novelist, and founder of the theatrical company chelfitsch.

In 1997, Toshiki Okada formed the theatrical company chelfitsch in collaboration with dancer, Natsuko Tezuka.

Toshiki Okada has written all the scripts and directed all of the company's productions.

In 2015, Toshiki Okada was nominated for the 28th Mishima Yukio Prize for his novel adaptation of his play, Current Location, which was first staged at the Kanagawa Arts Theatre on April 20,2012.

Toshiki Okada leads workshop programs with theater students in Japanese universities during his free time.

Toshiki Okada's works represent the "lost generation," the generation that is most affected by the Japanese recession in the 1990s.

Rather than directly addressing recent social issues in Japan like Ai Nagai and Yoji Sakate, Toshiki Okada focuses on connecting to his audience's sense of alienation by separating speech and movement in his plays.

Toshiki Okada's works are distinguished by the use of fragmented and abbreviated idiosyncratic language in the vernacular of Japanese in their twenties, which is deliberately inarticulate, drawn out, and circular.

Actors are one single entity to the image; in addition, Toshiki Okada uses "the performance's disjointed elements of language, movement, design, music, and more" to signify the "image" in his plays.

Toshiki Okada's works are heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt technique that detaches the audience from the action in the play.

Toshiki Okada refers to the theater as a place for performers to interact with the audience.

Toshiki Okada's characters are often labelled only "Actor One," with the same "character" played by more than one performer.

In 2013, Toshiki Okada collaborated with Hebbel am Ufer again to produce Ground and Floor, which had its premiere in Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels along with an eight-country European tour.

In 2014, Toshiki Okada was invited to present Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich at the Theater der Welt festival in Mannheim, Germany.

Toshiki Okada made his American debut in 2009 with a seven-city tour of Five Days in March.

Since then, Toshiki Okada's works has been produced numerous times in New York, where he has received generally favorable reviews from various media outlets such as New York Times, nytheater now, Time Out, and The Village Voice.

Also in that year, Toshiki Okada had his first English-language world premiere with Zero Cost House, which was a collaboration with Pig Iron Theatre Company, as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.

In 2014, Toshiki Okada returned to New York with The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise, which was staged by the Play Company and performed at the JACK Theater.