Underground Airport　Waleslab project 2014

“Red dragon and soil traveller - the traveller’s diary, the prologue 1-“

Hello, everyone! This is my first post of our project on this site.

We are a theatre company called Underground Airport basing in Tokyo, Japan. We create theatre pieces reflecting a certain social problems in the world, more specifically in Japan, and making a fantasy story. (It is not necessarily political.) We love the beauty of theatre arts and using that, we try to bring audience experience as if they are traveling a new place. Please visit our website at www.uga-web.com for further information. Some of the contents are in English, and you can also find some videos and photos of our works.

We are very privileged to announce that we get to participate in Waleslab project this summer thanks to NTW. We appreciate this opportunity and we are so determined that we will make every minute of our stay meaningful. Thank you, National Theatre of Wales!

This time, three of our company members are going to visit Wales and participate in the project; I am a director/script writer, Yasuro, and along with me, our technical associate/creator, Shuya, and our dramaturge, Chinatsu will be joining the project. We are excited very much.

So now, we would like to talk a little bit about our project. Our first goal is to research and to develop a piece called “Red dragon and soil traveller.”  This is going to be a small story which will be created basing on some facts and the legend we have found so far about Wales.

So…What is this story “Red dragon and soil traveller” about and why we want to create it?

On developing our project, we firstly started to think why we should visit Wales. As we continued to research, we have come across the fact that a Japanese multinational engineering and electronics conglomerate company Hitachi had bought the UK nuclear project from a German company called E.On and RWE, and will build the new power station in the Wylfa nuclear power station on the island of Anglesey, North Wales.

We were quite surprised to hear that news especially because it was after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 which has actually resulted in exposing massive amount of Japanese people to radiation to a greater or less extent.  (Hitachi is actually the company who built 3 of the first 4 Fukushima reactors incorporating with GE.) Some research say that we have been continuously exposed to radiation to some extent through our food although there has not been any official information approved by the Japanese government. Moreover, the sea around the Fukushima power station has been largely polluted by the highly radiated water from the plants.

When the disaster happened, we were all in Tokyo and we just simply couldn’t stop watching TV news of the incident. Of course, the earthquake itself and the massive tsunami that followed were tragic enough, but the Fukushima nuclear disaster was even more frightening. Although the power plant was about 230km away from where we were, we were very much concerned about people living there and how it was going to affect all of our lives.  We can still remember the intense atmosphere all over Japan at the time. We three actually visited Fukushima area 9 months after the disaster, and saw some towns where a lot of people had left. It was a shocking experience for all of us to see places where they stop being alive.

We can be said that we are the victims of a nuclear power plant in a way, even though we can’t deny the fact that we also benefit from it. And at the same time, we are the people from the country whose company is going to sell it after that much disaster, which we find ironical.

Also, as we continued researching, we have found a story of the Walsh red dragon. In the legend we found, the red dragon who is a symbol of water had fought with the black dragon who actually causes earthquakes in the region. In the legend, the red dragon won the fight and it buried the black dragon deep under the ground, which brought Wales peace.

Finding those facts and the legend of the dragons made us think that we could try to create a story which could possibly give us a chance to re-think about our own future. We are thinking that the red dragon appears in the story as a symbol of motherland and the whole story could metaphorically symbolize the reality of our own. By creating this original story which also reflects our own experience and thoughts, we hope to create a starting point of a new communication around the issue for all of us who are incessantly being asked for a judgment on everything in this civilized world today

Therefore, on developing this story of our own, we decided that we need to hear from people who actually live there and what they think about this whole thing because we think we have something in common that we can share. So first of all, we think it is crucial that three of us will become actual travellers and walk on the soil of Wales, have a conversation with people from Wales with different positions and values, get to know about them, share the same time together. And doing that, maybe we could make some kind of small art creation or a performance to keep our footage alive, which we would like to call “the traveller’s diary”

We would like to take every opportunity to make a rich communication ground through developing our story in Wales.

[ Our project at Wales lab ]

-Research and development of our original story, “Red dragon and soil traveller”.

-Share our thoughts on our “travel” online as “the traveller’s diary”

1) Visit Trawsfynydd area and the Anglesey Island, and meet people from various backgrounds, get to know them, have a conversation with them. Visit some related sites.

2) Keep a record of our travel (writing, filming, photo…)

3) Make some small art pieces out of our experience possibly using images, words, body, crafts, and so on.

4) Share our “diary” at the last day meeting.

We are still planning which places we want to visit and who we would like to meet.  If you have any suggestions, please leave us a comment. We appreciate it so much!

We are very honored and excited to take a part in this project! Once again, as a closure of our first blog post, we would like to thank NTW!

Talk to you all soon!

Warm regards from Tokyo

Underground Airport