He wanna be a good tennis player. is an autofictional solo music theater work created and performed by Koki Sakakihara. The project is built upon a simple yet unusual premise: the artist must genuinely pursue becoming a tennis player in real life, and that pursuit functions as a necessary condition of the artwork itself.
Rather than presenting a fictional narrative, the performance draws directly from the artist’s ongoing experiences. The desire to become a tennis player is not merely a subject matter but an active commitment that shapes both the work and the life of its creator. Songs, video, spoken text, and performance are combined to reveal the tensions between ambition and doubt, self-mythology and reality, success and failure.
Occupying a space between concert, theater, and performance art, the work invites audiences to witness an unfinished process rather than a completed story. By foregrounding an aspiration that may never be fulfilled, the piece asks whether the act of striving itself can become meaningful, and whether the pursuit of an ideal can be affirmed regardless of its outcome.
This 30-minute presentation is an excerpt from a larger ongoing performance project.