Yukio Shiba
Playwright, Director, Artistic Director of “mamagoto”
Born 1982 in Aichi Prefecture. Member of the Seinendan Theater Company Director’s Division. Resident Artist at Steep Slope Studio. Lecturer at Tama Art University’s Department of Scenography Design, Drama, and Dance.
Recipient of 2004 Sendai Theater Town Playwriting Award for Do-Domino, written while a student at Nihon University College of Art. Recipient of the 2010 Kishida Kunio Playwriting Award for Our Planet.
Shiba’s plays bring a new perspective to universal themes. Major works include Repetition and Continuation, a one-person show that loops to present a large family one member at a time; AYUMI, a play that depicts the entire life of a woman as actors walk across the stage; Our Planet, a rap musical that juxtaposes the approximately one hundred year span from birth to death of a human being with the 10 billion year span from birth to death of a star; and Morning Girl, a one-person show that stages a single moment from a morning. Shiba has recently increased his activity outside of Tokyo, through national tours of repertory performances, collaborative new works with local community performance spaces, new children’s theater pieces, and participation in international art festivals.
From 2013 to 2015, Shiba created multiple performance pieces in Yokohama at ZOU-NO-HANA TERRACE, a combination rest space and art space. The pieces from this Theater ZOU-NO-HANA project took advantage of the possibilities of performance in a public space by incorporating the flow of people and time into their theatrical structure.
As a participant in the 2013 Setouchi Triennale, Shiba went to the island of Shōdoshima in Kagawa Prefecture to create new works. During his stay on Shōdoshima, he created performances that directly involved both island residents and tourists, focusing on performance pieces specific to a unique time, a unique place, and a unique group of people. Since then, he has returned to Shōdoshima every year. In July 2015 he staged a production of his renowned play Our Planet in a temporary performance space created in the gymnasium of Shōdoshima High School.
Scripts from previous performances are available for free download on the mamagoto theater company website.