Innovators Showcase 2020 – Featuring Kunoichi Productions
Through the Innovator Incubator, PlayGround supports the launch of brand-new artist-driven innovative theatre companies and the development of innovative new works for the stage. This year-long intensive program culminates in an annual new works festival, the Innovators Showcase. This year, we have taken the opportunity of digital theater in a pandemic age and expanded our programming to allow all our second year cohort the chance to produce and present their own projects of whatever scope they pleased. Resultantly, this year’s 2020 Innovator Showcase is a robust three weeks of live-streamed performance, developmental readings, digital web series, and live panels on artistry and activism all free to watch from the comfort of your home!
In this post, we feature the launch of Kunoichi Productions and their debut production of The True Tale of Princess Kaguya written by Ai Aida, directed by Keiko Shimosato Carreiro and co-directed by Nick Ishimaru.
The brainchild of longtime friends and artistic collaborators Ai Aida, Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, and Nick Ishimaru, the mission of Kunoichi Productions is to create bold, innovative multidisciplinary theater with Japanese aesthetics, blending the ancient and the modern, using both comedy and philosophy, while fusing Eastern and Western theatrical elements. “Kunoichi” means “female ninja” or “female warrior.” They produce thought-provoking original plays with Japanese aesthetics, breaking traditions, taboos and gender/cultural assumptions; casting new light on old ideas or old stories; and engaging and challenging our audiences artistically, intellectually as well as politically through the fusion of different art forms – poetry, music, movement, visual arts, storytelling and puppetry. Kunoichi is committed to supporting local artists with diverse backgrounds and talents, working and growing with them in an experimental, collaborative environment, and to bringing a fresh, multicultural perspective to the Bay Area and beyond.
A modern matatheatrical retelling of the Japanese classic folklore ‘Kaguyahime’, translated ‘The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter’, Kunoichi’s debut production The True Tale of Princess Kaguya explores the life of a princess called Kaguya, found as a baby inside the stalk of a shiny golden bamboo. Deviating from the original tale in which a beautiful heroine becomes an object of male gaze, Kaguya is a rebellious tomboy revolting against princessly traditions, rejecting all male suitors, and reaching for an identity all her own. Featuring puppetry, shadow puppetry, folk music, kamishibai storytelling, and animation, this interstellar fable for the modern age questions how a Princess can break free of the permeating reach of patriarchy to become a truly independent individual.