My Husband is a Spaceman
Completely delightful. Lit up with a romantic, care free humour that can only inspire the highest of spirits Time Out Critics Choice
Beguiling. Tongue-in-cheek techno-trickery, Idiosyncratic, and gently innovative, this is a delightful trip to an imaginative universe where - among other attributes - one hour feels like a mere five minutes. The Evening Standard
A beguiling blend of insightful, contemporary comment and fanciful, timeless storytelling. Metro
A Theatrical romantic comedy with moments of profundity and dazzling invention...both hilariously funny and oddly moving ...encapsulates the play's fine balance of humour and tragedy perfectly. Go See. What's On
Kazuko Hohki is such a droll story-teller. Herald
About the Show:
A multi-media solo show, the third part of an absorbing trilogy following Toothless and The Shining Princess.
It tells the story of a Japanese office lady who is content with her single lifestyle, having abandoned any expectation of meeting Mr Right. This is before she encounters Robin, an English University fellow, who she meets in Tokyo. They fall in love, get married, and move to England. But married life is not what he expects. Every night the eccentric Englishman locks himself up in a room upstairs in their house. My Husband is a Spaceman is derived from an old Japanese folk tale of love between a peasant and a crane based on Kazukos experience (to some extent) of a cross-cultural relationship, loneliness and how to survive it. One of the most personal and affecting performers you are ever likely to see.
Creative Team Created and performed by Kazuko Hohki Directed by Arlette George Directorial and script editing help by David Woods (Ridiculusmus) and Tom Morris (Associate Director, Royal National Theatre), Music accompaniment by Christopher Koh(Angharad David), Music by Clive Bell, Christopher Koh and Tim Hope
Type of Show:
Story telling, live music, animation, Live Art, Mixed Media, Humour
Venues & Audience:
End on spaces, preferably with raked seating. Suitable for small - midsclae spaces. Suitable for all ages.
Running time:
1 hour, 15 minutes
Education & Workshops:
Kazuko is keen to engage with professionals, students and amateur artists in communities and venues and therefore offers a series of tailor made one off workshops and residencies to accompany the creation and presentation of her work.
INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS :
Space Performing Area - Minimum size: 8m x 8m. Seating layout - end on Set Two self-standing screens at the back of the performance area. Projector onto stage left screen. Props & Equipment To be provided by the Company: Video Camera (PAL) X 2 MDV video player (PAL) x 2 X 2 Black & White free standing screens Required from/to be provided by the venue: Video Projector (PAL)* + projector cradle Vision Mixer (Ideally Panasonic MX50, PAL) Simpler mixer can be used e.g. 3 sources (channels) for visuals with stereo trucks for sound. * Tripod for video camera* Facility to fly or mount projector including cradle Power extensions long cable to connect camera (on stage) to vision mixer (in the control room/area) and vision mixer (in the control room) to the projector. phono to phono cables. Have used XLR connection fixed in venue on some occasions Lighting board, Sound desk & Vision mixer must all be in the same area as all 3 are to be operated by one technician * if it is not possible to provide such items then please let us know immediately International Freight (to be transported with the Company) X 1 Case (props + set): dimensions: 40cmx70cm, weight: 11kg) X 1 Cases (props + set): 22cmx60cm Height 40cm, weight: 6-8kg each X 1 army bag containing screens for projection (35cm diameter 92cm, height weight 13 kg) Minimal personal baggage for team of 3. Lighting Basic lighting rig. The company will provide lighting plan in advance. The venue will be expected to pre rig the lighting, before the Company arrives. Sound To be provided by the venue: x 1 C.D player to be plugged into House PA for pre & post show music. x 1 Good quality PA with reverb unit for vocal x 1 vocal microphone (SM58 or equivalent) x 1 microphone for violin (for some larger spaces) x 2 on-stage monitors Laundry Costumes need to be washed and dried after each show.
Get in & Get Out Get In:
6 hours Get-out: 1 hour Technical assistance required for duration of get in & get out Running Time 1 hour, 10 minutes (no interval) Cast/crew 2 performers, 1crew Dressing Rooms Two dressing rooms/spaces required with access to shower/toilets, an iron, safe locker. Please provide tea/coffee-making facilities in the larger dressing room.
PRESS CUTTINGS:
Evening Standard (Rachel Halliburton)
³Lord, love a duck Those who practise rhyming slang may have cynical comments to make about a woman who fancies a duck, but an altogether more subtle humour is on offer in this beguiling show. Kazuko Hohki, founder of Japanese band the Frank Chickens, uses her surreal love story to point up some of the absurd clichés dogging the way in which the British and the Japanese view each other. Hohki¹s curious blend of storytelling and tongue-in-cheek techno-trickery has long been a favoured dish on the BAC¹s menu. Last year, she presented an eclectic, electronically-aided meditation on her mother¹s death; now, she takes the audience on a mysteriously magical tour through icons of stiff-upper-lip Britishness, ranging from Brief Encounter to a cup of tea. A violinist sits to one side of the performing area, while on the other side a large screen displays filmed animated sequences. As a rocket takes off on the screen, accompanied by an upward glissando on the violin, Hohki steps centre-stage in her designer black suit and starts to tell a traditional Japanese tale about a man who falls in love with a crane (the bird, please note, not the construction-site mechanism). The ensuing narrative is spiced up by Hohki¹s deliciously ironic humour. She herself poses as a naïve Japanese office-girl who dreams of an English lifestyle constituting endless cups of tea and discussions about Shakespeare. Shortly after, she develops unrequited desires for a duck and an English anthropologist who comes to her doorstep, and an encounter that starts with a questionnaire leads to a marriage proposal. Hohki uses Japanese paper theatre techniques, and other faux-naïve animations for this understated performance interspersed with songs about love, clothes, and space creatures. Idiosyncratic, and gently innovative, this is a delightful trip to an imaginative universe where among other attributes one hour feels like a mere five minutes².
The Guardian (Alfred Hickling) ****
³Kazuko Hohki is best known as half of the Japanese cabaret anarchists Frank Chickens. Here she speaks frankly about a duck. My Husband is a Spaceman is an improbable tale about mating with a mallard, a personable lecture-demonstration in the Japanese art of gimmicks. Hohki¹s narrative, developed in association with London¹s BAC and Japan 2001, is introduced as half-traditional and half-true. She reveals that her major ambition as a young girl growing up in Tokyo was to become taller, hairier and less hygienic. In other words, she hoped to grow up European. The piece describes how she made the transition and takes its place alongside the fringe favourites Toothless and The Shining Princess as the final part of a loose trilogy investigating the experiences of a Japanese woman living in the UK To make it to England Hohki dated a duck or rather, she went out with a peculiar English anthropologist who turned out to be a cosmic being in webbed-footed form. A likely story, you may think. But this is a rather clever conflation of two venerable Japanese traditions, the Kamishibai Ya and the office lady, or OL. Kamishibai Ya ancient Japanes storytellers pushed little bits of paper around a frame to illustrate their narratives; OL¹s push little bits of paper around the office photocopier and blow their salaries in the designer outlets of Tokyo¹s trendy Shibuya district. There¹s a bit of both in Kazuko Hohki. One moment she croons karaoke lullabies to Shibuya shopping sprees, the next she employs the Kamishibai Ya favourite about a peasant who married a crane to explain how she got hitched to a duck. Her presentation has a delightfully flimsy, home made feel, although she also uses witty video sequences. There¹s also the danger of technology letting you down, however at one point the projection screen collapsed. ³As soon as I came to England, my background disappeared², she improvised, without missing a beat.²
Time Out - Critics Choice (Maddy Costa)
³The final instalment in Kazuko Hohki¹s loosely autobiographical trilogy is, she says, Œpart true and part traditional¹. It¹s also part fairy tale, part karaoke session and part cartoon hour, fairly kooky and completely delightful. Hohki begins with a homage to the Kamishibai Ya, Japan¹s traditional travelling storytellers, relating a magical folktale in which a peasant unknowingly marries a crane. But where the Kamishibai Ya used pictures to illustrate the action, Hohki has created a film of origami figures waddling disjointedly, unfurling and re-forming, which plays on a big screen beside her. This proves the perfect preface to her own story, in which Hohki, a secretary of Office Lady obsessed with designer clothes and English tea, saves a duck from a Chinese restaurant conspiracy and ends up marrying him in the form of an English anthropologist who learned Japanese from an ancient textbook. It¹s this concentration of detail sometimes quaint, sometimes sharply amusing that makes Hohki¹s show such a pleasure. As a child, she says, she read Winnie the Pooh and decided the English must be clever if even the stuffed toys could engage in serious discussion; when thwarted in love, the Japanese can¹t turn to crossroads because there are 2000 letters in the alphabet and the attempt would hasten mental breakdown. Visually, too, the show is full of treats. She opens a briefcase to reveal a beautiful model of her office in Tokyo, and later presents a tiny replica Œin bonsai-garden style¹ of her husband¹s house. The whole thing is punctuated with songs in Japanese and English and lit up with a romantic, care free humour that can only inspire the highest of spirits.²
Metro
³Kazuko Hohki¹s final piece in her trilogy exploring the experience of a Japanese woman living in England is a beguiling blend of insightful, contemporary comment and fanciful, timeless storytelling. It begins with a traditional Japanese tale, told by way of projected graphics, about a man who falls in love with a peasant woman, who in turn threatens to return to her original form as a crane if he looks upon her at certain times. Later, utilising such handmade methods as tiny paper theatres, Hohki ( right ) echoes this story, telling of her marriage to an English following bizarre meeting involving ducks. Hohki¹s hour-long piece has the feel of personal scrapbook. It is saved from winsome indulgence by the humorous acuity of her ironic reflections on how Japanese people see the English and vice versa, and the enchanting surrealism of some of her digressions, including an animated fashion sequence, love songs about spaceman, and free form narrative anecdotes. The motif of birds with its attendant theme of flights, runs through many of her stories, as do the themes of longing and love, while violin player adds an occasional soundtrack of pathos and beauty. At time muddled but always touching, this is a charming and idiosyncratic dramatic collage of the silly perceptions that separate different cultures and the universal things they have in common.²
What¹s On (Mark Espiner)
³Proving that not all Japanese comedy is obliged to feature Bert Kwouk even if he is Anglo- Chinese) Kazuko Hohki¹s surreal one-woman show is lo-fi gem from start to finish. The narrative style of My Husband Is a Spaceman, which follows on from her earlier Toothless and The Shining Princess, is inspired by the ³Kamishibai Ya² or travelling paper theatre man, who regaled the young Hohki with illustrated tales to musical accompaniment. If this all sounds obscure and boring think again: our heroine has upgraded the paper drawing to digital animation and composed number of Haunting ballads which compliment the visuals perfectly. Hohki plays a disenchanted office girl who marries a mysterious English anthropologist ( represented to brilliant effect by a large false nose) and is whisked back to Blighty with her head full of Shakespeare and Brief Encounter. But matrimonial life doesn¹t quite work out as planned and the chance rescue of a duck may have more cosmic consequence than first imagined. Ostensibly a love story with an off-kilter musical gloss, the piece also has perceptive things to say about identity, both social and cultural, and the nature of personal fantasy. Buoyed along by Hohki's gently satirical wit these issues never seem forced or overemphasised. Japanese men are as easy read as " an open pamphlet ' whilst her rose-tinted visions of England, displayed on-screen in kaleidoscope of rolling meadows and stately homes, develop a hypnotic, almost hallucinogenic power. At The centre of the production is the charming figure of Hohki herself. Polite, naive, insecure yet ironic, spiky and occasionally smutty, she commands the intimate studio space with understated, wide-eyed authority, never afraid to leave tantalizing pauses or pick out individual members of the audience for good natured mockery. Her performance is a very quiet tour des force. A Theatrical romantic comedy with moments of profundity and dazzling invention: the superimposing of Hohki's sullen form in selected scones of Brief Encounter is both hilariously funny and oddly moving and encapsulates the play's fine balance of humour and tragedy perfectly. Go See²
Theatreworld Internet Magazine(Clare Peel )
³Japan fever seems to have really kicked off in the capital this month, with cutting-edge design showcasing at The Barbican in the JAM 2001 exhibition, the basement at Selfridges taken over with Tokyo kitsch and now the award-winning Japanese 'cult punk goddess' (programme notes) Kazuko Hohki premiering 'My Husband is a Spaceman' at BAC. The play, which explores the experiences of a Japanese woman who moves from Tokyo to England, completes Hohki's trilogy, the first two parts of which, 'Toothless' and 'The Shining Princess', both won critical acclaim (Time Out Critic's Choice in October 1999 and June 2000 respectively). This, part three, is the love story of a Japanese office worker, an Anglophile who endearingly believes that all English people drink tea and discuss Shakespeare cum mid-afternoon, and a mysterious English Anthropologist. The multi-talented Hohki transports her audience from 'chic chic Shibuya', a swanky district of Tokyo, where the heroine of the story entertainingly muses on such life-arresting issues as designer shopping and the pivotal role in an office of the tea-maker, to her romantic post-wedding idyll in sedate Middle England, where she discovers that her husband is not all that he was originally cracked up to be. At one point Hohki wonders: 'I know I should be happy because we never fight. But who is really loving me tonight?' A good question. Our narrator peppers her telling of the love story with video snippets and digital animation - a modern-day take on the primitive style of story-telling of the Japanese 'Kamishibai Ya' of her childhood. (The 'Kamishibai Ya' is a type of travelling paper theatre man, who uses simple illustrations to complement his stories.) In the programme, Hohki writes: 'I want to keep the naiveness and rawness which Kamishibai Ya had, to achieve the similar excitement I experienced from his stories.' Her low-tech, high-tech approach seems to achieve this with particular success, and the audience certainly seemed absorbed and entertained. Music (mostly by Clive Bell), notably some hauntingly beautiful live string playing, and song, including a fabulously sultry rendition of a 'traditional' Japanese Karaoke number, 'Shibuya Love Story', are also used to illustrate Hohki's tale. This innovative, off-the-wall, one-woman piece is hard to define, and the overall effect is an appealing mixture of the Surreal, the Seductive and the Soporific...with a dose of gentle comedy thrown in for good measure. Hohki's quirky Surreal approach is heightened by such witty references as a Dalíesque hat and nose, worn to represent her Anthropologist husband, and by some excellently produced, dream-like video sequences (mainly by Hohki, with some sequences by BAFTA-winner Tim Hope). Our narrator's endearingly gentle delivery and the apparent naiveté of the tale add to the seduction of the piece, as well as creating an almost hypnotic atmosphere - something that is aided by the intimacy of BAC's small Studio Two and the dim lighting for Spaceman'. An engaging, moving and clever production².
5star review in The Glasgow Herald. (Mary Buchanan)
"This is one of those shows where you can't help laughing, simply because Kazuko Hohki is such a droll story-teller. Yet, even as you are chortling at her descriptions of life as a Japanese office-lady, you feel something bringing an unexpected lump to your throat. As she confides quietly her dreams to you, Hohki spirits us well beyond world-weary cynicism. She favours lo-fi art forms - hand-made animations and little paper modelsS±Here is a style that celebrates simplicity and directness, but in ways that reveal sophisticated truths about different cultures, personal aspirations, and the compromises that we choose you make in pursuit of happiness and fulfilment."
My Husband is a Spaceman International Touring Information For Further Information. Please contact Joanna Crowley, Producer C/O BAC, Lavender Hill, Battersea, London, SW11 5TN Phone: +44 (0)20 7223 0086 Fax: +44 (0)20 7978 5207 Email: jo@kazukohohki.com