Burying Fangs in the Earth--The Wolf House and the Stage of Silence (early 1970s)

Burying Fangs in the Earth--The Wolf House and the Stage of Silence (early 1970s)

Takadanobaba around 1970. A small theater was quietly dug up in the ground in Totsuka 4-chome. The name was Wolf House. It was a stage built by men without a theater company, who dug into the ground without talking about money or passion, but only because they "couldn't betray the company.

It was a time when underground theater was flourishing and the red tents and back alleys were the main battlegrounds of expression. Heretics such as Shuji Terayama and Juro Karo fled from the "system" and went out into the field to shout their words. The wolf house was an extension of this. However, it was not a beast roaring on the ground, but a place for wolves hiding underground and sharpening their fangs.

When standing in the empty underground theater after a night's performance, the creator would say, "I can hear the old wolf's heart pounding. I can hear the old wolf's heartbeat," he says. That sound, echoing on the unlit stage, was a voice from outside the system, the voice of a soul that had been delved into.

The wolfshed is a collection of vows and silences of those who have no place in the surface world. It is a theater that blooms only in the darkness, not in the light. The cry of the anti-surface buried under civilization. This is still alive on this underground stage.