///John Calvelli (Associate Professor, Communication Design Pacific Northwest College of Art

CANDIES was an extraordinary performance. It was moving, funny, serious, difficult, easy, complicated and so engaging. It was performance crashing against dance, virtuosity crashing against bluntness, sensitivity crashing against rage. It was Shirotama but it was also everyone else bringing their own stories and experiences. Shirotama is an artist that has a deep vision but one that doesn't get in the way of creating an entertaining show. Behind her work you sense her steely convictions, but she remains flexible and open, and able to collaborate with her whole team. I expect YUBIWA Hotel will be even more weird and wonderful the next time around.

- To Shirotama and Michimoto.
You both lit up our lives this year in Portland. I wish you the best in making YUBIWA hotel more weird and wonderful, and hope to see you in Portland again.

///Mark Russell (Independent Producer, Guest Director of T:BA06-08)

YUBIWA Hotell was one of the most successful events we presented at PICA TBA06. It was a beautiful and affecting show and really struck a chord with the Portland OR audience. The image of the YUBIWA Hotel cast doing their stomping
smoking dance at the end will stay with me forever.

///Tadashi Uchino (Critic)

It is difficult to talk about Yubiwa Hotel. Whatever the performance is, I cannot think of any other company that makes me realize my gender more (I am a “male”, anyway). Of course it is difficult, because Shirotama Hitsujiya doesn’t show us how deep she is conscious of Gender / Sexual politics. If her performances are very conscious of these politics, it is easily possible to treat them mechanically and automatically. But in case of YUBIWA Hotel, they don’t let us do so. Their weird performance which seems weak, too self-conscious, poor, beautiful, and namely, good and not good, suggests their various dominated aesthetics towards intensity, laughter, message, melodramatics and loss of strength. But these are never unified. Perhaps, what we see from their performance is the desire for unification and/or distinction with historical images of “girlishness”, which was plied up throughout the process of going back and forth between fiction and reality. But surely this is not enough to describe them. Whenever I see their performance, I always feel to be questioned, as “by the way, how about you, "males", then?”

///Laurence Kominz (2006, Portland State University)

YUBIWA Hotel's CANDIES - girlish hardcore

Portlanders were very fortunate in September, 2006, to be able to see the work of one of Japan's most inventive performing artists--"CANDIES: Girlish Hardcore" by Shirotama Hitsujiya, artistic director of YUBIWA Hotel. The piece is a series of vignettes, fusing theatre, dance, masks, and pantomime. CANDIES explores women's lives and their relationships with other women--mothers and daughters, elementary school friends, adult women friends and rivals in love, older women beginning to confront death together. The piece begins with a drunken bride and death at a wedding, then leaps to childhood "cute," with performers skipping in a circle and singing songs, wearing cartoon-like animal masks and elementary school rucksacks. The connections between girlish cuteness and sexuality, so essential to Japanese pop culture today, are explored in this piece, but certainly not explained.

For me, contemporary Japanese performance is very much about unforgettable images on stage that create powerful emotional responses. In CANDIES these images are all about ambiguity, uncertainty, and transformativity. In one scene a naked woman, with her back to the audience seems to excrete a viscous liquid into a pan on the floor. It turns out to be pancake batter, which is then cooked, and two other characters feed each other and enjoy the meal--a conversion of apparent waste into sustenance and communion. The concluding scene was just as striking though less positive.
All five women performers, clothed and wearing wonderfully expressive animal masks, removed masks and clothing in a strip routine, ending in g-strings, all the while smoking cigarette after cigarette. The music was upbeat and fun, but their movements rhythmically monotonous and harsh. What should have been a joyous dance, came across as the hard work of the sex trade. Is this the inevitable end result of innocent girlhood that we witnessed earlier? In CANDIES Hitsujiya and her company showed me that although women's love, friendship, teamwork, beauty, and play are wonderful treasures, they last only a few moments, inevitably replaced by rivalry, cruelty, destructive sexuality, and loss.

///Amery Calvelli (PICA board member)

How do you feel about YUBIWA Hotel in seeing "CANDIES" in Portland?
A story of tradition was told through nuance and metaphor. My mind was gently escorted from an arranged marriage 'escape' to that moment of realization, the kind when your heart stops a beat, because you realize that what your intuition has told you is actually true. Death comes. Life ends and memory begins. We carry on.

Have you inspired anything from YUBIWA Hotel?
I can't say that I've produced anything related to this. But, there were particular things that stick with me: the way the sticks were assembled and gathered (thrown) onstage, the spider, frog and rabbit stitched on the giant cloth balls, the way the strip dance continued to the beat...methodically breaking down barriers by continuing on. It's four months since I saw the piece, but these things have stayed with me. I want to take my lunch to work in a red backpack.

- Message to Shirotama, Michimoto and YUBIWA people
How do we know what we are? We only know what we think we are. We learn from the place we live. And then, you see a story that is built with layers and layers of meaning...things that you realize your place of existence has not taught you to understand. It is a gift to have my balloon of expectations punctured. Like a pinata, many candies and treats come out.

///Katsuhiko Sakaguchi (Critic of Performing Arts)

Power of Sisterhood

Woman or Man, beauty or dirty, good or bad, normal or abnormal, usual or unusual, young or old − Shirotama Hitsujiya has unconcernedly risen above the differences, the distinctions and the borders. She doesn’t intend to destruct these elements that construct this whole world, as if these elements may exist in certain another category in her sense. Rather, because of that, behaviors of characters of YUBIWA Hotel seem to be more violent, or refreshing.

However, distinction, or relationship, or conflict between elder and younger sisters, has always been included casually in their works, as if it is something really precious. Even “Nowhere Girl“ which was performed in 4 years ago, was a story of long adventurous journey of sisters. Like multiplication after cell divisions, many elder and younger sisters appeared on stage. Young sisters are always little bit coquettish, and say “I’ve been always together with you, elder sister, since I was born”. Since then, sisters in YUBIWA Hotel keep playing with each other, sometimes killing each other, and of course loving each other. From YUBIWA Hotel works, we guess that power of sisterhood may represent every hate and love of our world. And it is Shirotama Hitsujiya who gives us fantastic hope that the sisters might kindly undertake every hate and love of the world.

Nevertheless, don’t be careless on them, who seem to be absolutely innocent. Love and hate always turns the table very easily. And, from the young sister’s point of view, every elder sister is nameless. Sisters in YUBIWA Hotel are mostly nameless too. Don’t be teased. Taking advantage of namelessness, they trespass into anywhere and anyone as they please. Be conscious of us. So many mines are buried under the ground. Do they intend to destroy the world? Or, want to save the world? But elder sister might say; “Destruction or salvation, what’s the difference?”