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Aya Ogawa

AYA OGAWA

  
Nationality:    USA
email:    n/a     Website:    n/a

Literary Agent:    Antje Oegel International  

Aya Ogawa is a Brooklyn-based writer, director, translator and performer. As a playwright and director, her play Serendipity was the winner of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival and finalist at Humana Festival. Eating Dirt was produced at SoHo Rep, and she directed it for Theaters Against War at HERE. She directed her play A Girl of 16 in its world premiere, hailed by The New York Times for Ayas stunning visual sense. She wrote and directed oph3lia (nominated for Outstanding Ensemble, New York Innovative Theater Awards) which the New York Times called Compelling& Harrowing& Great theatre and Backstage described as riveting. Her Artifact was presented as a work-in-progress at the PRELUDE 07 Festival as well as in the PERFORMANCE MIX Festival. She is currently developing a new piece with the Foundry Theatre and Adhikaar, a human rights organization dedicated to serving the Nepali community in the U.S. She has been commissioned to translate numerous Japanese plays into English, including works by Pappa TARAHUMARAs Hiroshi Koike; Chong Wishin, Kunio Shimizu,Yoji Sakate, Kobo Abe, Takeshi Kawamura, Keralino Sandorovich and works by the Tokyo-based performance company YUBIWA Hotel. She has translated Five Days in March, Air Conditioner, Enjoy, Free Time and We Are the Undamaged Others by Toshiki Okada. Time Out New York called her translation of Enjoy effortless, idiomatic translation (surely the process of rabbinical focus) in its English language premiere production by The Play Company; and her translation of Five Days in March was hailed as a miracle of transposed idiom by the Village Voice in the production by Witness Relocation. Aya has performed nationally and internationally. She originated and performed numerous roles with the International WOW Company including JR Oppenheimer in The Bomb and the title role in Alices Evidence; and Time Out NY hailed her performance as Chomsky in The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky by the Butane Group. International credits include her role in the world premiere of the award-winning Emperor and Kiss with Rinko-Gun Company, Tokyo; she was selected as part of the artist team representing the U.S. at the International Theater Institutes 2006 Congress in Manila, for which she co-created and performed in The Borges Project; and the European premiere of Young Jean Lees Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven at the Vienna Festival. She also worked as a generative artist and performer in Ifdentity, a collaborative project produced by the International Theater Institute for its 2008 Congress in Madrid. In 2005, with her collaborators, she has formed a performance company called knife, inc. whose mission is to create works that explore the multiplicity of experience of living in an international context. The work is designed to investigate the moments of crisis, the collision of the past and the future. The company seeks a modern, international language of art. The companys work is a home for this search. (www.knifeinc.org) She was the recipient of an Artistic Fellowship at New York Theater Workshop (where she is now a Usual Suspect), Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, and HERE Artist Residency. She is also a recipient of the Space Grant at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and two Swing Space grants at the LMCC (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council). She is a 2006 recipient of the Urban Artist Initiative Grant for Individual Artists administered by the Asian American Artist Alliance, a 2008 grantee of the NYSCA Individual Artist Theater Commissioning Grant and Axe-Houghton Foundation.

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below is a list of Aya Ogawa's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

         Enjoy         Five Days in March         Halycyon Days         Ludic Proxy         oph3lia         Sonic Life Of A Giant Tortoise, The

Enjoy

Enjoy
From acclaimed Japanese director/playwright Toshiki Okada, Artistic Director of the internationally-lauded chelfitsch theatre Company, comes a chronicle of post-college ennui and 21st Century relationships in Japan's Lost Generation. the static lives of several self-obsessed GenX comic book store clerks are thrown out of balance by the presence of a younger female co-worker, who rightly makes them question the meaning of their lives in a shifting socio-economic landscape. Written in the hyper-colloquial style Okada has become famous for, this play is presented for the first time in English in a translation by Japanese American playwright Aya Ogawa, and was met with massive critical praise upon its New York premiere.

Notes:
Original Playwright - Toshiki Okada

1st Produced:

Organisations:
the Play Company

1st Published:

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Translation - Experimental, Dark Comedy

Parts:
Male:  6            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Five Days in March

Synopsis:
Director Dan Safer and his Witness Relocation ensemble will apply their pop-culture dance/theater style in adapting this revolutionary Japanese work for American audiences. Five Days in March by Toshiki Okada is set in the days before the U.S. began its war against Iraq in March 2003. Minobe meets Yukki at a rock show. their awkward conversation leads to five days of wild sex in a love hotel. Azuma sells Miffy a ticket to a bad movie. Miffy thinks Azuma doesn't return her feelings, so she decides to move to Mars. Yasui and Ishihara go on an anti-war protest. the police escort's uniforms elicit more comment than the war itself. Oblivious to the imminent invasion of Iraq, these hipsters obsess over the details of their lives, perfectly capturing the irony and impotency of Generation Y in Japan today. the story unfolds through actors who slip in and out of character while also narrating and playing out scenes. Productions of Witness Relocation combine dance and theater with the energy of a rock show, exploding contemporary culture into intensely physical, outrageous, poetic, and sometimes brutal performances in order to question the assumptions of the modern day experience. This unique fusion of forms connects Witness Relocation to Okada and his chelfitsch company of Japan: both are known for crossing and combining disciplines and for being equally adept at theater and dance.
- nytheatre.com

Notes:
Original Playwright - Toshiki Okada. Translated by Aya Ogawa, Adapted by Dan Safer

1st Produced:

Organisations:
Witness Relocation

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Translation

Parts:
Male:  4            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Halycyon Days

Synopsis:
Halcyon Days, by renowned Japanese playwright and director Shoji Kokami, receives its English language premiere with this production at Riverside Studios. Also directed by Shoji Kokami, the text is translated by Brooklyn based, Tokyo born writer, director and performer Aya Ogawa. Examining the cult popularity of suicide websites in contemporary Japanese culture, the play looks at a decade where world conflicts are sensationally streamed on twenty-four hour rolling news channels using terms like 'collateral damage' and 'human shields'. Even terrorist organisations boast about their achievements on YouTube, and chronic depression is catered for by the increase of 'informative' suicide websites. Are people becoming more jaded with their real existence? Has life lost sanctity and meaning? Halcyon Days is a dark comedy that follows the story of three people and one ghost who meet on a suicide website. Will they become another statistic in an increasingly worrying trend or, beneath the will to die, can they find in each other a reason to survive. Well, apart from the ghost . . . he's already dead.

Notes:
Original Playwright - Shoji Kokami

1st Produced:

Organisations:
W-Squared Productions

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Translation

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Ludic Proxy

Synopsis:
Nina recognises the town in a video game as the one that had to be abandoned after Chernobyl. Maki is pregnant and living on the outskirts of Fukushima. In a technology saturated world a woman contemplates her future

Notes:
-

1st Produced:
WalkerSpace, New York     01 Apr 2015

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Drama

Parts:
Male:  1            Female:  5            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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oph3lia

Synopsis:
Dreams and reality converge in Oph3lia, as Shakespeare's Hamlet inspires a haunting collision of cultures. Aya Ogawa's original script explores different facets of Ophelia in contemporary contexts, interweaving three distinct stories that center on themes of isolation and disconnection. An immigrant woman embarks on a mysterious journey through New York where she discovers that she can go through life without ever uttering a word. In a Christian international school in China, where the students have formed their own hierarchies within the school walls, the arrival of a new teacher and a transfer student sens the fragile microcosm spinning. Cultures clash in a theater producer's office: in the maddening mix of languages in the world of entertainment production, compromises of artistic integrity punctuate the struggle in the creation of art, and the interpreter bears the brunt. oph3lia is a multilingual, multi-disciplinary production developed through a collaborative process with a culturally diverse cast of 13 performers from Japan, the Philippines, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. the piece incorporates video, music, live singing, and choreography.
- press release

Notes:
-

1st Produced:

Organisations:
HERE Arts Center and Knife, Inc

1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play Drama

Parts:
Male:  6            Female:  7            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Sonic Life Of A Giant Tortoise, The

Sonic Life Of A Giant Tortoise, The
Their lives seem perfect but underneath the surface things are different

Notes:
Original Playwright - Toshiki Okada

1st Produced:
Jack    

Organisations:
PlayCo

1st Published:

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Translation

Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  2            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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