World Theatre Festival Shizuoka 2025
The scream

In 2016, I was spending my days rehearsing for a performance in the rehearsal room of the Opera House in Oslo, the capital of Norway. Taking advantage of a break in the schedule, I went to see together with my fellow performers The Scream of Edvard Munch, a painter who is a source of pride for his hometown. The work, which powerfully reflects a sense of anxiety about life and death and radiates a strong inner cry, stirred up memories of my own heart.

Humans scream.
Loudly, softly, with their eyes, and in their hearts.

How many cries have I heard? How deeply has the time I spent glimpsing the abyss of flamenco, with its mixture of cries and whispers, and the sighs that accompany them, seeped into my life as a dancer? It is a great moral that I have chosen flamenco as my creative territory. Caracol, Mayrena, Paquera, Camarón, Fernanda, Chocolate... The cries that stole my soul.

I want to write another page of the cries and sweet whispers of my predecessors that have been etched into my heart. It is the “now” that shouts out the path of suffering that artists follow, the sense of discomfort and absurdity that fills our everyday lives, “love and death” and “anxiety”.

Shoji Kojima