Our Planet

Text：Saeko Imai

In the summer of 2020 I moved near the ocean. I went to the sea within walking distance, and the seawater was so beautiful, I was fascinated. Humans lose their words when they encounter something very beautiful. After that, the temperature rose, and when I entered the sea with my goggles on, the light shined on the seabed and the fish swam, and it was a beautiful and scary world. I have loved the ocean more than ever.

When you love something, your heart feels “happy” without logic. This project began with the thought that I would like to weave this “love” for the ocean (input) with children in some form (output).

 

Everyday, I felt that the children wanted to sing and dance, but they tended to be shy and reserved, and I felt that they should be able to enjoy expressing themselves more in their daily lives. At the same time, the play of “being something different from yourself” such as pretending to be a princess or a hotel (wo)man was developing, so I felt this was a good opportunity. Let’s make a musical! The idea came to me. Moving our bodies to music is the most fun thing, and I felt that a musical had a lot of room for us to explore our “likes”. I also decided that the song we would use for this project would be Under the Sea from the Disney movie Little Mermaid. I decided to use the song because the beat is very lively and it gives me the feeling of “fun” that I was looking for.
However, not everyone wants to do theater, and a musical cannot be created by actors alone. To make it easier for each of us to explore what we like, we have divided the class into Dancers’ Team (dancing), Creators’ Team (creating), and Actors’ Team (acting). The first four rehearsals were set up so that students could move back and forth between the teams so that they could have more time to find their own way of expression. Some of the students said, “This is what I want to do” from the beginning. But there were also some who went back and forth for a while, wondering what they wanted to do. One month to go until the show! Practice has begun. Here is the process of exploration from the person in charge of each team.

First, the adults presented a musical of their own creation. We thought it would be difficult to imagine without a model.