When Rio Sekiba dances, she energetically puts her whole body into her performance, while an audience that she cannot see claps in rhythm.
Dancing on stage was not something Sekiba, an actress who is totally blind, had thought possible. "I can understand that a person who cannot hear can dance, but how can I?" she thought after being approached to dance in the stage play "The Tempest: Swimming for Beginners."
Performed by actors with disabilities from Japan, Britain and Bangladesh, the play is being staged in Higashi-Ikebukuro, Tokyo. The work, created by overcoming the "tempests" of disability, language and distance, conveys the importance of accepting each other's differences and living together.
"I myself thought that blind people could not be good at dancing," the 24-year-old Sekiba said after Wednesday's performance. "But when I tried dancing, and I found it was fun. I hope this dance will break down preconceived notions held by people with disabilities."
Jenny Sealey, a British director with a hearing impairment who was co-director of the opening ceremony at the 2012 London Paralympics, is the executive director who is working online from Britain because of travel restrictions during the pandemic.
Her original plan was to stage a bold reworking of Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, in May of last year. However, the tempest of the coronavirus pandemic threw the plans out of whack, and the content was drastically revised.
It evolved into a play-within-a-play, in which performers with disabilities such as deafness, blindness and physical impairments appear as themselves and talk about their disabilities, before taking on the roles in which they were cast.
As it is rare for people with different disabilities to appear on the same stage, when someone speaks during rehearsals, their words are translated into sign language, and from that into spoken languages. For conversations with Sealey, an English interpreter is provided. The project overcame many difficulties one by one -- for example, sign language can differ from country to country-- before finally being completed somehow in the midst of the pandemic.
The five foreign actors, three from Britain and two from Bangladesh, appear through videos projected on screens from their home countries. The seven Japanese synchronized their performances with the videos, making it seem they were interacting in real time. On stage, sign language is overlapped with voices so that everyone can understand, and spoken lines are put into sign language.
"I hope people will enjoy seeing us as we really are," said Hiroe Ohashi, 50, the stage director for the Japanese side who also appears in the play.
In a statement, Sealey praised the way the cast has overcome the barriers put up by the pandemic.
"The cast have thrown themselves in this stormy way of working, a storm created by the pandemic," she wrote. "It is a very authentic response to the global situation and a testimony that artists will always make art in any situation."
The play is sponsored by the British Council and other institutions. The performance is being held at "Owlspot Theatre" until June 6, with the number of visitors limited to less than half of capacity. For more information, visit the theater's website.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
