Let me play you

Part of the ongoing Birthday Project — a long-term practice of finding and performing people who share my birthdate of January 25, 1997 — Let Me Play You follows Kota, who, like me, was born and raised in Tokyo over the past twenty-nine years.

Born to a Senegalese mother and a Japanese father, and now with a French stepfather, he attended international schools and speaks English more fluently than Japanese, moving between the inheritances of France, Senegal, and Japan.

Though we grew up as neighbors, our lives unfolded in parallel rather than in contact. On the threshold of turning thirty, Kota joined the project to work through a past he had not yet been able to overcome.

Over months of shared time we searched together for the scenes that needed to be enacted, and returned to them — performing and re-performing them until his life could pass through my body.