Now is the time: Free your mind to leave the house.｜Tokyo Festival 2020 highlights the appeal of Tokyo's diversity of values. — Part II —

The real world and the virtual: A "freeze-dried" relationship?

"This is still really just an experiment, so I can't say for certain that it will go smoothly.
I'm experimenting with the possibility of influencing the physicality of other performers and the audience through virtual methods."

"As an allegory, during Japan's Heian period, people would write letters in order to confide their feelings. Readers would also get emotional or excited by waka poems. Europe didn't have paper at that time. To record something, they used ink on parchment or similar. It required money and labor, so they would sing a song beneath the window of the person they loved. In other words, singing beneath the window was physical, and writing a letter was virtual.
"However, lovers during the Heian period felt that letters were sufficiently physical. Just reading a letter reminded them of the smell of their partner, of the nights they spent together, and so on.

"Technology is one of the reasons that could happen. But in this case, it was just paper and writing brushes. When people smoothly with a brush dipped in ink, their energy state is expressed by the written characters. Whether they feel hesitant about being too bold or they have the courage to speak their mind, the condition of the writer's physical body is expressed in those characters. The reader is able to read that flow of energy, evoking the same physical response in his or her own body.

"I call that 'freeze-drying (laughs). It's like, you just add water to restore it to its original state. Technology was more advanced than in Europe.
"Another reason was the literacy of the letter recipients. During the Heian period, people were trained from childhood to be able to read the writer's flow of energy.

"In other words, the combination of technology and training created a phenomenon in which you could be physically impacted by something as virtual as a letter. That's why I think, from now on, technology and literacy are needed if theater or dance is going to be performed virtually.