HKAPA

Tadashi Suzuki is the Founder and Director of the Suzuki Company of Toga, Chairman of the Japan Performing Arts Centre, Artistic Director of the Mitsui Festival in Tokyo, and the creator of the Suzuki method of actor training.  For over two decades, Suzuki has created distinctive multi-lingual and multi-cultural theatre productions that blend contemporary sensibilities and concepts with traditional theatre forms.  Starting with the works of avant-garde Japanese playwrights, Suzuki achieved one of his most important performances in On the Dramatic Passions, the crowning piece of his first phase.  Since then the Company has had notable successes with Suzuki’s free adaptations of such classical works as King Lear, The Three Sisters, Clytemnestra and The Trojan Women.  In these works the structure of the original play is rearranged and transformed; character identities are often fluid; and time itself also becomes a fluid dramatic element.  Suzuki’s intensely physical, firmly structured and ritualistic production style has won acclaim from audiences and critics throughout the world, most notably in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, Athens, New York and Los Angeles, where the Company was a highly praised participant in the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival.  Despite its frequent tours abroad, the Suzuki Company still spends half the year in its home village and hosts a summer arts festival, bringing other notable experimental groups from around the world to Toga, where the Company and visitors are trained in the now famous Suzuki method of acting.  Mr Suzuki regrets that owing to his heavy commitments in the summer festival for which he is responsible, it is not possible for him to join us today.  Our Head of Acting of the School of Drama, Mr Fredric Mao, will receive the Fellowship on his behalf.