Río Kishida

Kishida nació en 1946 en la prefectura de Nagano , Japón. En 1974, se graduó de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Chuo . Estaba cualificada para ejercer la abogacía, pero optó por unirse a la compañía de teatro de Shūji Terayama , Tenjō Sajiki (Galería del Techo). Colaboró ​​con Terayama, a quien consideraba su mentor, en la escritura de Shintokumaru ( El niño venenoso ), The Audience Seats y Lemmings . Aunque Terayama había colaborado con varias personas, Kishida fue la única de su compañía que colaboró ​​con él en varias ocasiones. No está claro quién escribió qué partes de las obras. ^{[ 3 ]}

Kishida, con el permiso de Terayama, fundó su propia compañía, Because of My Older Brother Theater, y escribió sus propias obras, independientes de Tenjō Sajiki, en 1978. Kishida quería centrar sus obras en las mujeres y los problemas a los que se enfrentaban. Tras dejar Tenjō Sajiki en 1981, Kishida cambió el nombre de su compañía a The Kishida Office. No fue hasta después de la muerte de su mentor en 1983 que se consolidó como artista independiente de Tenjō Sajiki y se liberó de la influencia de Terayama. ^{[ 4 ]}

En 1983, The Kishida Office se convirtió en The Kishida Office & The Optimists Group tras fusionarse con la compañía teatral de Yoshio Wada, The Optimists Group. La obra de Kishida, Itojigoku ( El infierno de los hilos ), se estrenó en 1984 y ganó el Premio Kishida de Drama en 1985. Después de 1993, volvió a escribir obras de forma independiente con su compañía, The Kishida Rio Company. En ese momento, se interesó por el arte coreano e incluso invitó a actores coreanos a crear obras bilingües con los actores de su compañía. Su obra Tori yo, Tori yo, Aoi Tori yo (¡ Pájaro, pájaro, pájaro azul! ) trata sobre la destrucción de la lengua y la cultura coreanas debido a la ocupación japonesa de Corea.

While working with the Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen, Kishida rewrote several of William Shakespeare's plays for performances in multiple languages. In 1997, Kishida wrote Lear and Ong Keng Sen was the director of the play. She wrote her own version of Othello in 2001 called Desdemona. Both Desdemona and Lear were written with characters from all around the world and different backgrounds including a noh actor, a Burmese puppeteer, and a Korean musician. Kishida became the lead organizer of 3rd Asian Women's Theatre Conference after Kahoru Kisaragi died in 2001.

She died on June 28, 2003, at a hospital in Okaya. Each year on the anniversary of her death, members of her theater company hold an event called RIOFEST, where actors and companies come together and perform Kishida's plays.^[5]

Knock was one of her collaborative plays with Terayama. Many people collaborated in creating the play that experimented with multiple authorship, but Kishida was responsible for writing a large portion of the play, including the public bath sequence. Knock was one of Tenjō Sajiki's largest street performances. The sequences of the play were dictated by a "time schedule", but actors were free to say their lines whenever they wanted to. The actors body movements were also regarded as being more important to the performance than the spoken dialogue.^[4]

The play Thread Hell takes place in a silk thread factory, which is in reality a prostitution house, in 1939. The story revolves around 12 women, all named after Hanafuda cards, and two girls named Mayu (meaning cocoon) and a girl referred to as School Girl. Mayu comes to the factory in search of her mother and has no memories. After she finds her mother amongst the workers at the factory, Mayu becomes infuriated that her mother chose to be a prostitute and abandon her role as a mother to Mayu. In a fit of anger and an attempt to cut all connections with her mother, Mayu kills her mother. The play criticizes what little power women have in a traditional family oriented household. The silk thread factory represents a family house and the women are a part of the house, but do not have full membership and rights that the rest of the family have.^[6] The factory can also be seen as a metaphor for the Japanese state where the links (threads) between women are not recorded in the national family record (koseki).^[7]