Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech: a 3 part intercultural study

In the end, because one of the players bombastically kissed the audience, I realized Hot Pepper may have been more interesting than I suspected. This conclusion came only in retrospect. Why… did I have to work so hard and …stew so long to get it? …to get that it may not be more complicated than this; around the world, folks connect over corporate office culture. Good or Bad, discuss:

Part one: Trad. styled music. Tempo offsetting speech tempo. (nice one!)

Hot Pepper, an office temp’s guide to ‘hosting a going away party’ is hardly glanced at, but its rules followed through and through. Form and protocol rejected and yet adhered to - conversations grasped, extending and repeating because, ‘not much happens of note or inspiration in office culture’. You connect over the protocol of ‘how to mark a departure’. When you leave only then do you reveal …anything.

I wonder if my own ignorance of forms and protocols, of traditions and practices played a part in my feeling annoyed? Could it be that the juxtapositions of English text, Japanese spoken word, lighting design and movement would have been far more accessible to an initiate…or at least a language speaker?

I wish I could pick up on details like the images on the hand fans the players were using. I suspect they alluded to an aspect of Japanese culture and might have been something to consider. Who or what were those figures depicting?...a goddess? an advertisement??

I may be too ready to overlay my own narrative imperative.

Part two: American music. Sexual interplay.

Was the aggressivity modeled on a ‘western’ template?? Was the players evident amusement contrived or choreographed? Chances are good that Chelfitsch Theater is a seasoned enough troop to have made those choices consciously.

I am grateful to the many folks with whom I have had conversations since the show, deconstructing and re-combining in our own way Hot Pepper’s gestural language (eg: walking on heels vs. walking on toes = are we really tiptoeing around the issues or just walking funny). I am also grateful to my taxi-driver. He taught me that inter-cultural connectivity can actually be effective and efficient. He taught me this while he worked to understand his dispatcher – each of them heavy on the accent, thick and patchy over the scritchy citizen’s band radio.

Hot Pepper was in some ways, hard work to take. Is *that what it is like to work in ‘corporate culture’? I think maybe I was left wondering for too long if there was too much to pay attention to …or if I am ignorant.

Part three: The music free jazz. The questions existential.

While I cannot say I enjoyed the show, I do very much appreciate the way how, in the end, small gestures of kindness were rendered, strange and beautiful:

A woman in her favorite pair of high-heels, black, sharp and shiny, gave her farewell speech to the gathered office workers. She described a great length the poetry and poignancy of a moment …the moment when her heel was poised over a cicada…in stretched out time…and a squished creature lay dead on the door mat. It seemed that the experience she had with the bug may have possibly led to insight and I say…to …

filteredlightbeamsofgiggles!!!...
”in with the human/cicada lunch-plate soap-dishwashing connection!...”!