The Water Station

by OTA SHOGO

Directed by Héctor alvarez

California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles 2022

The Water Station by Ota Shogo uses silence and slowness to craft a meditation on the disenfranchised. Created in 1981, but inspired by Shogo’s experience as a refugee at the end of World War II, this wordless, slow-tempo piece confronts the audience with a flow of survivors fleeing an unnamed cataclysm. Despite the bleakness, each character’s encounter with a fine thread of water liberates something in them: grief, memory, repressed desire, hope. Shocked by the agonizing slowness of George Floyd’s death, I wanted to create a version of Shogo’s piece for our current moment, one where slowness becomes a magnifying glass with which to examine brutality and the interplay between silence and trauma.