Ludvico Private Girls' Academy (troupe)
For the Garden inspired by the troupe, see: Ludvico Private Girls' Academy.
Ludvico Private Girls' Academy (私立ルドビコ女学院), often abreviated as "Ludojyo" (ルド女) is a theatre troupe founded by Sakuragi Sayaka (桜木さやか).
Saint Ludovico Academy[edit | edit source]
Ludvico Private Girls' Academy was preceded by "Saint Ludovico Academy" (聖ルドビコ学園), a theatre troupe founded and led by Sakuragi that was active between 2004 and 2013. It performed plays with connected stories centered on the fictional Saint Ludovico Academy,[1] but unlike Ludvico Private Girls' Academy, the casts of Saint Ludovico Academy's plays were not exclusively female, and regularly included male instructors at Ludovico and boys from a different fictional school, Saint Antonio Academy.[2]
Sakuragi, in addition to writing and directing the plays, portrayed a fictionalized version of herself, who acted as the student council president of Saint Ludovico Academy. Another recurring cast member was Hayashi Shuji (林修司), whose fictional version was a soccer team captain at Saint Antonio Academy. A primary draw of Saint Ludovico Academy's plays was its interactive format, where the audience was invited to participate as fellow students of the two schools.[1]
Ludvico Private Girls' Academy[edit | edit source]
After Saint Ludovico Academy disbanded, Sakuragi formed a successor troupe, Ludvico Private Girls' Academy, and remained as the troupe's playwright and director. Similar to Saint Ludovico, the stage plays performed by this new iteration also maintained a permanent cast of characters, as well as the permanent setting of Ludvico Private Girls' Academy. However, the plays themselves did not always follow a single storyline, with Sakuragi noting that each storyline was its own "parallel world".[3] Furthermore, the new troupe's stage plays had exclusively female casts, and did not include the audience as characters. Sakuragi continued to appear in the plays, though this time playing Akutsu Maaya, a "special teacher" of Ludvico.
Assault Lily x Ludvico Private Girls' Academy[edit | edit source]
In 2015, Obanazawa Kenei attended one of Ludvico's stage plays, and was reported to be incredibly impressed by the performance. The similarity of the all-girls school featured in the play and Assault Lily's Gardens inspired Obanazawa to approach Sakuragi about a collaboration, proposing that Ludvico's setting and characters be adapted into the Assault Lily universe.[4] In 2016, the Assault Lily × Ludvico Private Girls' Academy collaboration was launched with the premiere of Schwester's Prayer, a stage play that while set in the Assault Lily universe, retains the setting of the all girls' school of Ludvico, as well as many of the existing characters from the troupe's stage plays.
The collaboration produced five stage plays, as well as two collaborations with the live theatre franchise "Jinro 'The Live Playing Theater'", between 2016 and 2019. Furthermore, six action dolls based on the plays' characters were produced by AZONE International. Following the launch of the Assault Lily Project in 2020, a partnership between Assault Lily and the multimedia enterprise Bushiroad, the Ludvico series of stage plays were completely reworked, and though the Assault Lily × Ludvico Private Girls' Academy collaboration originally only included the plays featuring Ludvico's setting, Sakuragi remained as the playwright for the multiple new series of stage plays that originated from the Assault Lily Project, with Hayashi Shuji likewise remaining as the plays' stage director and/or executive producer.[2]
External links[edit | edit source]
- The Ludvico Private Girls' Academy official website
- Ludvico Private Girls' Academy's Twitter account.
- Saint Ludovico Academy's blog, last updated in 2013
- The Saint Ludovico Academy website (archived)