Consumer products promise a lot. Sometimes so much that you may feel positively ill. Toshiki Okada’s piece ‹SUPER PREMIUM SOFT DOUBLE VANILLA RICH› just about stays within the limits of good taste in the strip-lit, gleaming microcosm of a 24-hour convenience store in Tokyo, known as the ‹Smile Factory›. Inside this bland yet luminous land of plenty, daily activities and rituals involuntarily result in relationships between the workforce and the customers. The checkout staff speculate about when the manager last had sex with his wife, and a female customer is reduced to despair because the store has run out of her favourite ice cream. What are the repercussions for a society when its dreams depend on a range of products? The director and author Toshiki Okada (*1973) is one of the leading voices of a generation of artists who strive to highlight the increasing apathy after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. He has developed a ‹theatre of alienation› in which movement and language appear to be largely independent of one another. With a display of sluggish physical movements and a soundtrack of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, the choreography has grotesque elements to it. As capitalism spirals out of control, the choreographed movements create a wonderful, yet completely futile dance. ‹Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich› had its world premiere in May 2014 in Mannheim as a remittance work of the Festival Theater der Welt. Directing and concept: Toshiki Okada Actors: Makoto Yazawa, Hideaki Washio, Tomomitsu Adachi, Shingo Ota, Shuhei Fushino, Azusa Kamimura, Mario Kawasaki Stage scenery: Takuza Aoki Costumes: Sae Onodera (Tokyo Isho) Stage manager: Koro Suzuki Sound: Norimasa Ushikawa Light: Tomomi Ohira Musical arrangment:Takaki Sudo Production: chelfitsch Theatre Company, remittance work of the festival Theater der Welt 2014 Coproduction with: Theater der Welt, Mannheim; KAAT (Kanagawa Arts Theater); LIFT - London International Festival of Theater; Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, Lissabon; CULTURESCAPES, Basel und Kaserne Basel. Japanese with German and English subtitles, running time 110 min. Click HERE to see the trailer.
