Ever Deeper: Why Suzuki's Method of Actor Training is relevant now.

This post is about the Suzuki Company of Toga Summer Season 2025. It is an aside from an article I am working on, about comedy in Greetings From the Edge of the Earth (Sekai No Hate Kara Konnichi Wa) made by SCOT with director Tadashi Suzuki.

At 86, Tadashi Suzuki is still a significant and influential icon of Japanese Theatre. Kamome Machine's director Yuta Hagiwara suggested that Suzuki might be for his generation of contemporary Japanese theatre makers like Peter Brook is to his equivalent in Britain. Suzuki's writing and approach is a important reference point though Hagiwara will have seen only the later productions. Suzuki was the first to make a radical departure from the naturalistic Stanislavski-inspired approach to theatre in the 1960s in Tokyo, founding the Waseda Shōgekijo with Betsuyaku Minoru [1].

Like many other laboratory theatre makers of the '60s [2], Suzuki went on to set up a company base far beyond the centre of mainstream theatre, for him it was to be the mountains of Toyama. Over the last 50 years Togamura has attracted theatre luminaries from Jean-Louis Barrault to Robert Wilson to visit this remote location and witness the extraordinary experiments in actor-centred theatre.

A chapter in a new book about theatre director Tadashi Suzuki asks why he is relevant now. Theatre scholar Tetsuya Motohashi proposes that Suzuki's productions with SCOT have a digital quality, that they are digitaru-teki (デジタル的). (Narita et al 2024, pp218-219)

This is a surprising reading given Suzuki's comments on the negative social and physical impact of spending so much time hunched over screens enthralled by social media. His system privileges the live performance relation between actors and audience, amongst actors and between the actor and a tangible performance space. This is what I have emphasised in Physical Theatre classes over the years. But Motohashi is referring to the way that affect emerges through an intricately layered stage image. I'll come back to his ideas in a moment.

Initially with PhD students and in the last couple of years with undergraduates and MAs at the University of Salford we have been exploring acting techniques for Motion Capture (MoCaP). Last year, I offered some exercises derived from the Suzuki Method of Actor Training as as a way to explore spatial awareness and physical control in the MoCaP studio or "Volume". This was part of the Acting for Motion Capture module at the University of Salford led by Dr Darren Daly working with MoCaP technical specialists Connoll Pavey and Jake Louden [3].

I had reservations, though, especially watching the work that was ultimately produced on screen. You'll be able to visualise the style of movement in a typical video game, especially the kind in which human characters are rendered as "realistic". On screen the vague eye movement of the avatars seemed out of sync with the attention given by actors, and the articulation of limbs lagged. As Mark Evans (2019) has pointed out, attempts to recreate the realism of sweating skin and rippling hair only increase the un-reality of the avatar. The organic actor's contribution seemed wasted, certainly different to the slack movement of the figure on the screen.

But this year many more students have signed up for sessions and as animation technology develops and the creative space opens up I believe that the actor's physical strength, imagination and presence will have a bigger role in the collaboration with tech. That's certainly happening this year, and we are finding that MoCaP production processes, acting requirements and Suzuki staging have much in common.

Watching work by the Suzuki Company in Toga this summer confirms Motohashi's reading of digitaru-teki aspects. Putting it simply, just as the scenography is a Total Theatre composition from language, body, lighting, audio and staging in space, (Narita et al 2024, 218) the MoCaP involves a composition and layering with image capture, movement, programming, animation, and audio. (Evans 2019, pp158-169)

Dionysus created a sense of site-specific immersion (Dionysus/ディオニシオス, 24th August 2025, Toga Sanbo Theatre). Sight lines were broken by the beams and upright pillars of the Toga theatre's 'praying hands' (gassho zukuri) architecture. Sometimes I could only hear a voice or see a fragment of an actor. Lighting beams shot through grill-bars breaking up the floor space into lines and grids, leaving lines of shadow on performers. Actors recited in a mesmerising incantation in Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese and American English, and though I could only follow snippets of text, meaning wasn't lost. Movements were clearly isolated, rhythmic and repeated, breath created a layer of 'text' and the minutest gesture was fully invested. The director's attention to details and the actor's control of movement drew all my attention. I was scouring the performances as if I could see it from multiple perspectives, like a video player that freezes a scene to rotate the axis of movement. This was a deep immersion for me, though I was actually sitting on a low step in a row of people, craning, trying to avoid blocking the view of people behind. I was detached, again like the player, but also wrapped in the sensation of stage action.

As Motohashi has also observed, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, the affective experience is informed by the particular audience member's situation prior to the show. In my case, it had been a convoluted and long journey to get to Toga and this anniversary event for the company coincided with a significance 'return' for me personally. But more of that later.

To restate - the principles underpinning the SCOT performance can be explained as a techne, or technology to 'capture' and enhance the figure in the virtual space of the stage. Elsewhere I have discussed transposing Viewpoints to the terminology of online performance (Talbot & Dormann 2022), and using screen composition terms as a way of choreographing heritage performance (Talbot 2007, 2024). Similarly, Motohashi uses digital editing terminology to nail his idea:

[…] layer after layer is built up with vivid precision, as if the stage being created by advancing frame by frame [...] rather than a theoretical shift in meaning, there is a sensually striking vividness in the image as it transforms moment by moment.

(Tetsuya Motohashi in Narita et al, 2024, pp218-219, translated)

The Suzuki Method of Actor Training (SMAT) focusses on

• The Production of Energy

• The Calibration of Energy

• Control of Breath

• Balance

• Engagement of Voice-Body

• Awareness of the Other (the ensemble, the group).[4]

It incorporates many traditional principles from Japanese performer training and Suzuki adapted these and devised original exercises in collaboration with Noh actor Kanze Hisao (1925-1978). SMAT is a rigorously grounding if not spiritual process, and this has been valuable for students in a busy, distracted MoCaP volume.

Takayuki Suga summarises Suzuki's objective in working with actors based on SMAT processes as giving expression to ideas "that you have to hold your tongue about" in other contexts, towards a theatre that expresses and gives order to pent up energy and burning desires. It is designed to draw these hidden feelings out of performers (Narita, op cit 245). SMAT combines the foundation of a personal physical history, an idea that since 2015 has been called 'the culture of the body'. This combines with daily training exercises as part of regulated ensemble practice. The technical and administration staff also join in this practice. The productions exposes and stages the culture of the body 'in/as itself', with all its accumulated frustrations. The method is adaptable as a foundation for other work and companies and productions. It is not limited to post-dramatic work although the signature 'thick' embodied voice of Suzuki actors may not be appropriate to all genres of theatre. (Narita et al. p252-4)

My own experience of the Suzuki Method of Actor Training was in two phases from 1996-1997. I first trained with Ellen Lauren and J.Ed Araiza in Derry as part of the International Mime Festival, and then with Ellen Lauren, Leon Ingulsrud, Anne Bogart, and other SITI Company members at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, at the Intensive Summer school. Incredibly it's taken me nearly 30 years to see the SCOT company's stage work live. It was a wonderful coincidence then that this year's SCOT festival highlight was Ellen Lauren's performance as Agave in Dionysus. She has collaborated with Tadashi Suzuki on this role alone since 1991.

Agave enters late into the play, an adaptation of Euripides The Bacchae. She is Queen and mother of Penteus who has succumbed to the Dionysian spell and lunacy. The anticipation of seeing her had been building throughout those 20 minutes. I was disorientated. The architectural space was intentionally broken by beams and pillars. I couldn't see the projected subtitles translating Chinese and Indonesian. Lauren floated like a ghost on suriashi, a Noh-like foot slide. I could only see half a body; moving like a memory or avatar. This happens in the Motion Capture volume, by the way: bodies fragmented by programming glitches create wonderful improbabilities; a twisted back-to-front hand suddenly leaps into position. Agave is holding out the head of her prey. It's a lion, she thinks, not seeing what she has killed while hunting. I was struck that Lauren, aged 71, is still so strong. She can arch far back while crouching, pulling upright without using her arms for support. When it finally dawns on Agave that she has executed her son, Lauren's eyes are red and then the whole-body trembles, before collecting itself upright in a horrible stillness. This stillness is also a key to Suzuki's methodology: affect churns in and around the actor, a picture of Stoicism - "90% on the inside, 10% on the outside" is the SITI training mantra. Admittedly I was in awe, and a committed fan, but this churn is perhaps what made me dizzy.

Ishikawa Chie (Priest), Jamaluddin Latif (Cadmus), Ellen Lauren (Agave), Ten Chen (Pentheus). Instagram 'curtain' snap by audience.

Perhaps Motohashi's image of digital tracking is what makes me mentally flick through images from training 30 years ago, then fast forward to the deeper connection with SCOT culture in this remote place. Scrubbing backwards again: before my time to when Suzuki established the company base; it took up to 10 hours to get here from Tokyo along a Narrow Road into Deep Snow. The problem was knowing where to pee he told us, laughing. My long journey had forced me to slow down my excitement and anticipation. After a last minute change of schedule in the UK, I hurtled to Japan by plane, and onto the Hokuriku Shinkansen from Tokyo. And then a stop-start minibus journey along the vertiginous bends up the mountain.

I was camping on site and this gave me a chance to meet and talk with other festival goers around the fire, in the pop up bar and queues for shows. In particular Yoshiyuki Omori, from the Yoshimoto Entertainment Agency was kind enough to look after me and introduce me to many other directors and researchers. Interaction was easier than in Tokyo, and I am grateful to the director Hirata Oriza and SCOT staff for helping me get last-minute tickets.

Pumpkin Dancers Hatekon I & III SCOT 2025. Hatekon I. Encore, snap RT [5]: ​

Yoshiyuki coached me on the questions that I had decided to ask Suzuki. I wanted to know more about his approach to staging the comedy in his production Sekai No Hate Kara Konnichi Wa (Greetings from the Edge of the Earth). Anticipating digital sampling, this is a collage production that has been assembled and adapted since 1991. It offers a yearly snapshot of Japan's postwar condition, and is constantly evolving depending on the combination of actors and personalities in the Toga company. It is presented in three parts, some in dedicated theatre spaces but always culminating in the Open Air Theatre at Toga. This is a festive event with up to 600 people queuing to experience work punctuated by fireworks in an amphitheatre overlooking a lake. Afterwards Suzuki and the local mayor smash huge Saké barrels and share these (and local pumpkins) with the audience.

At various points in this high-altitude show, performers in wheelchairs scoot along the hanamichi (a bridge across the lake) at speed. The lower body is the base structure for SMAT exercises. In Hatekon all the male chorus, aside from 'priests', are in wheelchairs. This is a comment on a metaphorical sickness that has overtaken postwar society.  It takes immense strength and control to manoeuver these on rain-soaked boards, or along a hanamichi hot with the ashes of fireworks. The actors are in perfect unison. As they enter they make comically exaggerated flourishes with their legs. This production is playful and postmodern but is no less forceful than 'classical' works like Dionysus.

Dionysus is the wonderfully intense counterpoint to the carnival of Hatekon I-III It was the last piece of my brief visit, before I descended the mountain back to the Toyama plain. The experience of witnessing the theatre work brought many loose ends together for me, and solved things only partially understood from the training. It has consolidated my own attempts to share these principles as aspects of my own workshops and modules. What is more thrilling is that the experience has resolved an 'itch' and provides a clearer focus for future work. I know from the response of a lively audience at Suzuki's Talk that many theatre-makers, teachers and researchers are annually inspired in their independent work; this is not a network of Suzuki replicants.

I have been refreshed and re-energised by meeting Suzuki and then reading his latest outputs - a biography and a new set of interviews. His sense of humour in response to my question has pushed me to look for meaning in my own devising, writing and teaching including the most recent work to develop a training process for Motion Capture and Performance Capture actors.

University of Salford

Footnotes

[1] At the 2025 British Association of Japanese Studies Conference Dr Brian Powell (Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies, Oxofrd University) wondered whether Betsuyaku is widely remembered any more. A recent publication of his plays in English is encouraging.

[2] For example, Eugenio Barba who established his company in the town of Holstebro, Denmark. The company's 50th anniversary was in 2014.

[3] For a review of experiments at the University of Salford see Daly, D. (2024), below. Finding agency in the imagined body through Unreal Engine’s Live Link performance capture. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15(2), 270–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2024.2366115

[4] Kameron Steele discussed these points in an interview in American Theatre Podcast on the publication of his 2015 translation of Suzuki's writings: Culture of The Body (Theatre Communications Group. (2015, 11 June) "American Theatre.'Offscript: Kameron Steele and the Worm'" [Audio Podcast episode @40:20]. In American Theatre. <https://www.americantheatre.org/2015/06/11/offscript-kameron-steele-and-the-worm/>

For more on the method see Barbe, F, & Diedrich, A. (2022). Nobbs Suzuki Praxis: Example Training Formats. Theatre Dance Performance Training Blog.< http://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/2022/11/nobbs-suzuki-praxis-nsp-example-training-formats/

>[Accessed 21/9/24]​

and

Lauren, E. 'In Search of Stillness: Capturing the purity and energy of not moving is the roof of the invisible body'. American Theatre. 2011 (Jan).

<https://www.americantheatre.org/2011/01/01/in-search-of-stillness/> In London in 2024 Lauren ran a workshop on SMAT and its value for Speaking Practice <https://www.londonperformancestudios.com/viewpoints-and-speaking-practice>

[5] Pumpkin Dancers Hatekon I & III SCOT 2025: are named as Maki, Risa, Marie, Atsuko, Akari, Ruka*

*There are only 5 names and 8 dancers, They are not names in order. Not all are listed in the programme​. They dance to Komadori Sisters Koi ni Hakushu, or Give A Big Hand to Love (my translation), 1965.​

References

Daly, D. (2024). Finding agency in the imagined body through Unreal Engine’s Live Link performance capture. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15(2), 270–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2024.2366115

Evans, M (2019) Performance, Movement and the Body. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Narita Ryuuichi, Motohashi Tetsuya. 2024. Suzuki Tadashi speaks on Suzuki Tadashi: The World Is Not Only Japan, Japan Is Not Only Tokyo, Encountering the World in Toga Village. Suzuki Tadashi ga kataru Suzuki Tadashi wo kataru: sekai wa nihon dake de wa nai, nihon wa toukyou dake de wa nai, Togamura de sekai ni deau (鈴木忠志が語る鈴木忠志を語る：世界は日本だけではない、日本は東京だけではない、利賀村で世界に出会う). Tokyo: DokuShoNin.

Suzuki, T (2025) Life as a Novice: My CV. Shoshin Shōgai: Watashi No Rirekisho (初心生涯：私の履歴書）Tokyo:Hakusuisha

__________(2015) Culture of the Body The Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki. (from materials translated by Kameron Steele). Theatre Communications Group.

Talbot, R and Dormann, C (2022) Teleplay: Approaches to Virtual clowning for Dementia Care' , in: The Practical Handbook of Dementia, PCCS Books, Monmouth.

_________ & Waterfield C (2007) 'Fact & Fiction On collaborative interpretation, or how to engage with the visitor and Talbot' (2007) 'Foot in Both Camps: Parody, Pastiche & Living History' in Ludicresearch/Notes and Links. <https://rtalbot9.wixsite.com/ludicresearch/notes-links

Works cited

Dionysus, Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), dir Tadashi Suzuki, 1991-2025.

Greetings from the Edge of the Earth I, II, III (Sekai No Hate Kara Konnichi Wa I, II, III), SCOT dir. Tadashi Suzuki, 1991-2025.