Oriza Hirata

Oriza Hirata (平田オリザ) is a Japanese playwright, director, and academic.

For the majority of his life, he has been best known for his work in theater and creating what he has coined, “contemporary colloquial theater,” or as theater critics call it, “quiet drama.”

Oriza Hirata graduated from International Christian University as a part of their Humanities division.

Contemporary colloquial theater is a theatrical style Oriza Hirata founded as an answer to the “boisterous and festive nature of 1980s Japanese theater.” This style emphasizes colloquial Japanese language use that is designed to sound distinctly typical of the linguistic tendencies and patterns of everyday Japanese speaking.

As a result, his plays oftentimes feature multiple characters talking at once, sentence fragments, inaudible speech, and an understated, "normal" speaking tone.

This style informs his plays stylistically, both in language and plot, in the sense that Hirata emphasizes realism throughout.

However, Hirata has preferred his own stylistic title of "contemporary colloquial theater" because he thinks that relatable terms like Shingeki or realism "sounded too much like the Western drama that [they] emulated."

Hirata's style is partially due to his identification the impact of Western style was having on Japanese arts.

As a reaction, he has sought to create an artistic style more representative of typical Japanese language and culture.

In 1983, he formed the Seinendan Theater Company, which he established in order to practice contemporary colloquial theater.

As a playwright, he founded the Seinendan theater company in 1983 as a way to push his acting style into the greater Japanese and international theatre scenes.

Hirata has worked closely with international actors when translating his work to preserve the Japanese identity of the speech, which has particularly resonated with French audiences.

This style also tends to emphasize a small, intimate set of characters—usually represented by the actors playing the role of a family—to serve as a “microcosm of Japanese society as a whole.” Japanese theater scholar, M. Cody Poulton, describes Hirata's style as an emphasis of the Greek idea of ethos, "the prevalent tone of sentiment of a people or community; the genius of an institution or system."

After working at Obirin University as a theater professor, Oriza Hirata moved to work for Osaka University, where he collaborated in the scientific fields of communication-design and robotics.

Hirata has participated in designing university classes that emphasize the communication environment for different fields in order for them to perform more successfully.

"There are design elements and organizational elements that can encourage better communication in the doctor’s office, such as the positions of the doctor’s and the patient’s chairs, the color of the walls, the lighting, and these elements can create an environment that encourages the patient to ask the doctor questions and bring out answers that can reduce medical/diagnostic error."

For robotics, Hirata used his theater experience to attempt to make robots that act similarly to humans.

While his work has been used to generally fulfill this role, he has also brought his work in robotics back to the theater, where he has incorporated robots in plays to explore themes of humanity.

His play, I, Worker uses two robots as main characters to explore this very idea.

He has collaborated with robotics expert Hiroshi Ishiguro for his theatrical experiments using robots.

Shortly after beginning his career as a playwright, Oriza Hirata has had a prolific international career—both touring his work around the world, as well as staging foreign playwrights work at his own theater in Japan.

In 1984, Seinendan settled into using the Komaba Agora Theater as their main base of operations.

Hirata remains as the theater's primary artistic director and has continued to play a major role in the theater's management.

Hirata's first play, Citizens of Seoul (ソウル市民), first premiered in 1989, and has remained one of his most famous plays.

6 Years later, in 1994, he debuted Tōkyō Notes (東京ノート), which is still considered his magnum opus.

As a playwright, Hirata has continued to write and direct plays both at Komaba Agora theater, as well as theaters in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of Asia.

He is also known for doing international collaborations both in Japan and all around the world, where he has worked with a multitude of playwrights and artists to introduce his own work to new audiences, as well as introduce foreign work to Japan.

Hirata worked at Obirin University for six years as a professor in their theater department before moving onto Osaka University, where he works in their communication-design and robotics departments.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Hirata's work started to garner international attention.

With the help of Japan's Saison Foundation, a grant-making foundation that supports Japanese Theater, and Manhattan's Nonprofit organization Japan Society, Hirata's most famous work, Tōkyō Notes was debuted in the United States in October 2000 in New York City.

Japan Society's theater series, Japanese Theatre NOW, has helped bring a number of contemporary Japanese dramas to the United States, Hirata's being notable since Tōkyō Notes was one of the first.

Since then, Hirata's work and company have traveled much of the world, including France, Belgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Korea, China, Australia, and Brazil.

Hirata says that he believes he has "done the best work in France," where "the people in France have been very enthusiastic about [his] work."

Both in France and Belgium, Hirata has collaborated with international actors and directors to bring his theatrical work to an international audience, as well as creating new commissioned work as both a playwright and director.

Hirata has also collaborated on many international works inside of Japan, using his theater to stage plays by playwrights from France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the United States, Korea, and China.

Hirata's admiration for the French theater scene can be seen with these collaborations as well, as he has tended to stage more French plays than any other country he has collaborated with.

A year after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Hirata submitted a 10-minute play, along with 18 other American and Japanese artist, to be performed and documented in an event called Shinsai: Theaters For Japan.

The event happened that the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City.

Hirata's play, entitled "Sayonara II", tells the story of a partially-broken robot who is asked to read poems to the people who died after the disaster.