I.D Essay Book - When I was a Child Star (Part 1)

This is a pretty long essay from the I.D Essay book so I've divided into sub-sections, it's like that in the original essay so it doesn't jar too much. The essay is a bout 50 pages so I think I'm justified ha, ha. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, here's the first part.

Note: 80,000yen is roughly £550.

When I was a Child Star

The Very Beginning

When I was 8 years old I entered a youth theatre group.

From when I was very small I was raised on going to see various plays through my father’s work, so it was natural for me to be drawn to the stage. Musicals especially for children, difficult and absurd plays, Japanese dance, foreign opera, recitals and monodramas – whether I understood what was going or not I saw every possible type of play.

My father is a stage lighting planner. So sometimes I was taken to the rehearsal rooms, and I often got to see plays, not from where the audience sits but from the ‘Lighting Box’ where the light technicians work. The back stage staff in black clothing rushing around behind the flamboyant stage, the thick make-up the actors wore which would startle you if you looked closely, the magnificent looking stage props which were actually made from painted wood and cloth, I knew about all of this even as a child.

Because I knew this, my dream of “I want to be an actress!” was more than just a wish but was something I felt I could aim for in reality. I have seen countless times the actors who would make mistakes, get angry and cry in the rehearsal rooms many times over and then seemed to undergo a sparkling transformation into completely different people on stage. Sweating, losing one’s voice, getting angry and crying one’s eyes out, and then on top of that putting on a performance…even so, they seemed pretty happy. I felt that there was surely some kind of special power flowing out from the top of that stage. That mysterious place that they came back to, no matter how much they suffered, when I realised what I was doing I too had began walking towards it.

These feelings came to a head when one day I saw the advertising flyer of a certain large youth theatre company that came with our newspaper. Not an as audience member, not from the lighting box, this time I want to see the theatre from standing on the stage. My parents said afterwards that, “Well, we knew you would say something like that some day but it was a bit earlier than we expected”. The day of the audition to join the group came quickly and then some days afterwards the letter to say I had passed arrived.

But. I was shocked when I heard the amount of money that would be needed to join the troupe. Separate to the actual membership fee, there were various teaching materials that would need purchasing amongst other things, and the letter read ‘so please send 80,000yen, ok?’ Back then I was a pretty stingy child (although at present this has mellowed somewhat) so “They never said anything about it being so expensive! I quit, I quit”. I withdrew without losing any sleep over the matter.

It was a sum vastly different to the monthly costs of the calligraphy and swimming classes that I was going to at the time and I was truly surprised by it. I’d thought of it as just one other new thing I would be learning, but I suddenly found that I was feeling like it was going to be more of a pain in the neck then I had expected. I wanted to say, well if it’s like that then just buy me a game boy! But after I’d forgotten about the whole thing, a person my father knew suggested, “It’s pretty modest but there’s a theatre group I know of that does things properly, how about going to have a look?” That group was the Childrens Theatre Group Komadori.