Josh Kenji is a Seattle-based actor, singer, and multi-disciplinary artist. We sat down with Josh to talk about his life early love of music, his teaching philosophy at Freehold, and how growing up in two different countries—Japan and the U.S.—has helped him as an actor.

I know that you grew up partly in Japan and partly in the U.S. Can you talk about what that was like, and if living a peripatetic life had any impact on your pursuit of the arts?

I was born in Tokyo. At age three I moved to Boston. At age eight I moved back to Tokyo. Age 12 or 13, moved over here, to Bellevue, and I’ve been around Seattle and in Seattle since. 

That’s hard [to pinpoint where the interest in theatre came from], because a lot of different things got me into acting specifically. I think one is the music background. So when I was three, I started playing violin in Boston. Then when I moved back to Japan, I was playing piano. And then when I moved over here, that transitioned to choir, which transitioned to musical theater, which transitioned to being on stage, and then getting curious about acting. I think I picked up my first acting book in high school. Stanislavski’s books I read during high school. And that’s I think where that acting bug started. 

I think people who have to switch contexts a lot [tend to have] a greater sense of awareness of social norms and social codes. The way you behave with other people is just so different in different cultures. So that kind of translates to acting in some ways where, when you’re in a play that’s set in contemporary times, it’s very different from a period play set in a very different time. So there’s a lot of context switching that I do as an actor. I think growing up I got really used to that. 

 

Do you think that the arts, and music, was sort of an escape for you? Something that was consistent amidst your moving around quite a bit?

I totally think music was. I think art in general was—I was also really into visual art, going to see different exhibits, going to museums. And also reading—I really liked reading as a kid. I think that also was a big escape from context switching, a way to solidly connect to something consistent. And unfortunately, that was Harry Potter for me. But yeah, I definitely enjoyed escaping to an imaginative place, which definitely has translated to acting work, because it’s the same kind of muscle that you’re tapping into when you’re working imaginatively as an actor.

 

So you’re in high school, and that’s kind of when you start acting. Did you continue studying in college? 

Yes, I did. I was still heavily into music. I decided to go to UW, and I entered as a music major in voice performance, partially because my voice teacher started teaching at the university, and I really trusted [them]. That was a huge reason why I went to UW. In addition to it being in the same place where I had been the last four or five years. 

So I started as a music major. I’d initially gone in trying to convince myself that I wanted to do music and architecture. My parents wanted me to have a less performing arts direction that I could also go in, and that was architecture for me. 

But then, as soon as I started taking architecture classes, I enjoyed them [but not as much as the arts]. So then I started taking acting classes at UW, and then got into the Drama Performance track. And then UW added a musical theater program—and when I looked at all the requirements for it, it was just an addition of dance classes, and so I added that on and had that as a third major. 

I graduated after five years because I took some time doing internships. Also, because it was like a crazy amount of credits. Like, all my academic advisors looked at the amount of credits that I had, and they said “I’ve never seen anyone with so many credits. I don’t know if you’re allowed to do it.” But I did.

By the end of college, I started to get kind of turned off by musical theater a little bit, and particularly just the musical theater scene in Seattle. So that’s when I started to take Robin’s class and started to study Meisner. So that’s kind of how I got to where I am in terms of training.

 

So what happened after you finished college?

So coming out of college I started auditioning for things. I think it helped that I kind of slowly started while I was in college, doing some stuff around town and slowly starting to get to know people. I was going out to see a lot more theatre and getting to know people who were involved in theatre in Seattle. Coming out of college, I did one of Keiko Green’s plays at Sound Theater [“Nadeshiko”], and working on that I made friends with other Seattle theatre people around town, which then got me invited to auditions. I feel like going into the pandemic, I was building a lot of momentum. I had like several projects lined up. I had training lined up, so [the pandemic] was definitely a big, jarring halt to a lot of it. 

I had a summer training program that I was really looking forward to, and I also had a workshop that I was really excited for, but then the pandemic hit. During the pandemic, I was taking classes online. But Zoom acting classes aren’t the same. They are kind of what they are. Maybe some things they can be helpful with, but it’s definitely [more difficult because] you don’t have another person, right? So it’s definitely hard.

 

You’ve been teaching at Freehold for a few years now. Did you have any teaching experience prior to working here?

Yes. So for like five years, I was a yoga teacher. I used to teach yoga while I was in college. [After college] I stopped because I had a lot of feelings about teaching, and what the responsibility of a teacher was in the context of yoga. And then [there were] just issues of how I felt about the yoga industry community in Seattle. 

So I stopped. I will say it did make me really hesitant about teaching at Freehold, because I didn’t want to come in and be like, “Oh, I’m the instructor. You do what I say.” I don’t want to come into a dynamic that doesn’t feel collaborative, or a dynamic that wouldn’t be led by curiosity. [I wanted a dynamic] where the students would feel like they were in charge of their work and they were in charge of whatever they were getting, So, that was a big hesitation when I was asked to teach. 

And that was mostly because of my experience in the yoga teaching world. So I used to teach at a place called Yoga to the People, which, during the pandemic, they were all shut down. They were all shut down for a good reason. There was a Vice article about it, but in some yoga teaching schools and communities there’s a lot of top down ways of asserting power in those educational structures. And I think that’s the thing that ultimately kind of made me turned off by yoga teaching. And then there’s also creepy behavior.

 

After having a difficult experience with how yoga was taught, how do you create a class where people feel empowered to take control of their own work?

That is a very good question. I think a lot of my experience with acting classes previous to taking Robin’s class [Robin Lynn Smith’s Meisner class at Freehold] had always felt like there was an element of you’re doing what the teacher says because they say so. 

And I feel like I try as best as I can [to not do that]. Because at the end of the day, everyone has to kind of discover what works for them, and if they’re told what to do, even if it works one time, it’s not a consistent tool that they can practice. So ideally, everything that’s being learned is coming through each student’s own life experience and their own point of view and their own worldview—what matters to them, their own beliefs—and it’s being filtered through themselves, and not by way of trying to [follow] a recipe.

There are times where [being told what to do] is useful. [In previous classes I’ve taken] using action verbs was a pretty commonly taught and used thing. And it can work for a lot of people, and it can work for a lot of circumstances and text, [but] in my experience of doing it, it becomes a little formulaic and kind of heady and less instinctive and impulsive. 

Because without being able to work on your impulse and what things mean to you, you’re just trying to match a description. Like, “Now I’m chastising. I’m going to sound like I’m chastising and make it look like I’m chastising,” as opposed to actually going through what is making you act that way; what is hitting you so strongly that it is making you do something. 

So that’s also kind of where I try to start, which also helps because the Freehold curriculum is kind of built that way. It’s not built like, “Here’s a scene, here’s your action verbs, and you’re gonna go play each of these verbs,” which I think doesn’t set up a student to know how to act. I think it sets up a student to indicate, and so that’s where I feel like the Freehold curriculum is helpful, and it makes it a lot easier for me, as someone who is very wary of being prescriptive to someone else’s practice. Does that make sense?

 

It does. Thanks Josh

Thank you.