Book review - Tadashi Suzuki: Culture is the Body

The SCOT-Suzuki Company's performance of The Trojan Women followed by an audience meeting to launch Tadashi Suzuki's book Culture is the Body, with the author. 

Tadashi Suzuki: Culture is the Body 

(translated by József Jámbor and Sándor Fazekas, SZFE-National Theatre, Budapest, 2023)

Tadashi Suzuki, who in 1976 established one of the world's largest international theatre centres in his remote rural village of Toga, Japan, is not only one of the world's most important theatre directors and the founder of the International Theatre Olympics, but also an epoch-making thinker. Culture is the Body, which includes his writings on the theory of theatre and is finally available in Hungarian, is a radical approach to the fundamental issues of our time. His philosophy and training method is not limited to the preservation and renewal of the traditional Japanese theatre genres of Kabuki and Noh, but also responds vividly to the disconcerting issues of 20th century Western European theatre culture. The writings in this book are more relevant than ever: Tadashi Suzuki's creed of maintaining an active intellectual dialogue between Europe and Asia is probably the only programme for theatre-makers in the 21st century that stands a chance.

(24 March 2023)