Toshiki Okada

Biography

Toshiki Okada was born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1973 and is a director and author. He formed the theatre company chelfitsch in 1997. In 2005, his play “Five Days in March” won the prestigious 49th Kishida Drama Award, and “Air Conditioner”, was a finalist at the Toyota Choreography Awards 2005. From 2006-2007 he worked as the director of Summit, a yearly theatre festival, which is arranged by the Komaba Agora Theatre Tokyo. In February 2007 his collection of novels “The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed” debuted and was awarded the Oe Kenzaburo Prize. In 2008 he developed “Freetime”, a production which was co-produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Wiener Festwochen, and Festival d'Automne (Paris). “Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech” was a co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. After the catastrophe in Fukushima Toshiki Okada left the metropolitan area of Tokyo in summer 2011 and moved to west Japan. His production “Current Location” premiered in Yokohama in 2012 and was performed at HAU Hebbel am Ufer as part of the festival “Japan Syndrome”, just as “Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich“. The coproduction “Ground and Floor” was shown at HAU in 2013. In the same year, he was a guest as part of the series “Phantasm and Politics”. While his stories and plays continue to be published in Japan, his works have also been translated into many languages and published abroad. He was recently commissioned to direct his works in a repertory program at the Munich Kammerspiele for three seasons starting in 2016.