Kazumasa Kawasaki

Color emerges through the effects of light and shadow. As the stage expanded from small-scale activities to a larger platform, I likened the conflicted feelings—being manipulated by the adults around them—to the diverging light and shadow, and to the situations within the constructed collage. While depicting the past that one does not want to deny, and the longing for a future that was originally expected, I aimed to express how the people around them and the self gradually come together, using the contrast between the front stage (the dazzling stage) and the back stage (the dark street corner) to portray the future that will become visible even more from here on. The stage was actually handmade in an analog format as a box of roughly 300 mm in circumference, and the collage was attached to that three-dimensional form. In particular, apart from the chorus, I paid close attention to which direction yama is moving toward within the frame, and to what the shadows and the stones are. Because the theme is introspective, the influence of German films from the 1920s to 1930s (German Expressionism) is strongly reflected.