I Want it to Feel Like That Bathhouse in Spirited Away

Recently, a colleague asked:

What do you want arts and culture to look like? Super open. Go.

My response to his prompt on that particular day came rather quickly.

I want it to feel like that bathhouse in Spirited Away.

Maybe my response came at a time when I needed a bit of dreaming, but as the days have gone on (and on), I’ve continued to roll around inside my answer. Spirited Away, the 2001 animated film by master animator, Hayao Miyazaki. If you haven’t seen it, it’s the story of a girl who gets separated from her parents, crosses a bridge, and ends up in a magical bathhouse. Turns out many people have different theories as to what this film is about, but I can’t help but revel in my own investigation: what is it about the bathhouse in the film that could suggest a reimagining of theatre in this moment?

There’s a part of me that has always wanted theatre to be something else. In a harsh way, I’ve wanted it to be more welcoming. Very plainly, that’s about more situations where I see myself in the performances, and where I relate to the stories being told. On a cultural level, though, there’s this underlying, hard-to-articulate thing about how the stories are told, how there’s room for different ways in which narratives can be delivered that don’t rely on our dominant ideas of how stories should unfold. A space where new possibilities for interpretation and experience exist, just like that bathhouse in Spirited Away.

The thing about the bathhouse in the movie is—even if you’ve never been to a Japanese bathhouse—you get this space. You might not know who you’ll meet or what will happen once you’re inside, but there’s a familiarity to it. In the film, the main character knows it immediately. Once inside, she meets all sorts of other characters—some she recognizes and some she doesn’t. There’s a wildness to it, and she must navigate each new relationship through a dance of languages, both verbal and physical. She still understands the rules, but she has to break them in order to get what she wants. 

It strikes me that this is the potential for live theatre right now. In this moment of pressing pause, we have an opportunity to discover in what new ways we will tell our stories moving forward, broken off from the old stories and the old ways we used to tell them. I can’t quite see what this looks like, just as the main character in Spirited Away couldn’t quite see into the world of the bathhouse from the other side of the bridge. But, like her, I’m ready to cross it and figure it out.