October 28, 2010
The City as Stage
Japan’s marquee performing arts showcase, Festival/Tokyo, looks to “disrobe” theater
By Metropolis
Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on October 2010
Photos: © Skinners
The popularity of Haruki Murakami notwithstanding, Japanese literature remains a mystery to most of the world. When it comes to contemporary theater, even Japanese themselves are mostly in the dark. Aside from the select few to witness a rare performance abroad and a small band of domestic theater buffs, Japanese theater may as well not even exist.
Into this breach steps Festival/Tokyo, launched last year “with the aim of competing with other major cities around the world in the field of creation and distribution of arts and culture”—to quote onetime playwright Governor Shintaro Ishihara. F/T was also a major feature of the Tokyo Culture Creation Project, intended partly to boost the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympic games.
Over the month-long fall ’09 and spring ’10 seasons, more than 120,000 theatergoers witnessed all manner of performances, from new works by emerging shogekijo (small theater scene) playwrights such as Shu Matsui to acclaimed pieces from the likes of Berlin company Rimini Protokoll.
From its base at a disused high school that’s been re-christened the Nishi-Sugamo Arts Factory, F/T sprawls across Ikebukuro to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, Owlspot Theater and other venues. The idea is to give the fest a local identity, something like Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival.
This time around, the theme of the 208 performances is “Opening up new possibilities in theater by ‘disrobing’ it.” In program director Chiaki Soma’s formulation, this means stripping theater of its traditional elements. “Drama, text, narrative, actors, body, theater building, stage—what is the true face of theater that is revealed to us when removing even only one of these unique ‘theater robes’?” she asks.
Spanish director Roger Bernat answers this question in The Shape of Me by ditching actors and theater altogether and directing his audience to a public square in front of Ikebukuro station, where they participate in a meticulously planned narrative. Japanese playwright Akira Takayama’s Port B company takes a similar tack in The Complete Manual of Evacuation—Tokyo, dramatizing the likelihood of a major earthquake in Tokyo by sending the audience to designated evacuation points.
Another approach to ‘disrobing’ theater is to rob it of the traditional linear narrative. Director Shiro Maeda attempts this in Going on the Way to Get Lost (see sidebar), as do Chinese playwrights Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang in Memory, their eight-hour documentation of the Cultural Revolution.
The festival also includes a new symposium series that will consider theater’s essential role as an art: the public sharing of personal expression. “On what grounds can a private expression be shared and sustained as something of public belonging?” asks Soma. “It is a basic premise, and of absolute necessity for a cultural project receiving public funding like F/T… to confront the ‘publicness’ of theater.”
For a festival that gets more than half of its roughly ¥360 million budget from public sources—closer to the publicly funded European arts model than the philanthropic American one—this is more than an academic question. Without a Broadway or West End of its own, and with its native kabuki and noh theater traditions pickled in formaldehyde, Japan desperately needs a jazzy platform like Festival/Tokyo to welcome new international theater and to introduce the playwrights of Japan’s shogekijo movement to the wider world.
Total info: http://festival-tokyo.jp
International Flavors
A selection of foreigner-friendly F/T performances
The following English works, English-captioned Japanese-language pieces, and dance performances can be appreciated by anyone. For speakers of other languages, F/T also features works in German, Spanish, French and Chinese.
Public Domain
Find out what theater looks like without actors or a stage. Spanish director Roger Bernat invites his audience to a square in front of Ikebukuro station, where they are given a set of headphones and told to follow directions. Each set of 150 spectators becomes the cast, forming “micro communities” that “expose underlying social patterns and tell a tale that Bernat carefully orchestrates.”
Ikebukuro Nishiguchi Park, Oct 30 & Nov 6-28 (every Sat, Sun).
This Is How You Will Disappear
French director and puppeteer Gisele Vienne explores contemporary concepts of beauty in her latest piece, which debuted this July at the renowned Avignon Festival. This Is How You Will Disappear—a collaboration with “fog artist” Fujiko Nakaya, video artist Shiro Takatani (of Kyoto performance group Dumb Type), writer Dennis Cooper and music unit KTL—pits three archetypes of beauty against each other in a fatal meeting in a forest.
Nishi-Sugamo Arts Factory, Oct 30-Nov 3.
Ray of Light, Shards of Mirror
Dancer/choreographer Ikuyo Kuroda has been pushing the members of her all-female Batik company to the limit for almost a decade now. For her F/T piece, she takes on perhaps the most consequential relationship of all: the mother-child bond. Kuroda asked her dancers questions about “meeting your mother” and demanded that each performer, this time including men, answer through physical expression. The results are documented through dance, video and dialog.
Nishi-Sugamo Arts Factory, Nov 9-15.
Skinners—Dedicated to Evaporating Things
Saburo Teshigawara is perhaps Japan’s most famous contemporary dance figure outside the world of butoh, creating visually arresting works that combine meticulously wrought choreography, stage designs and lighting. With his new piece, created specifically for F/T, he blends leading postwar composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s Études pour Piano with original “noise sound” and gives himself, frequent partner Rihoko Sato and the other members of his Karas Company the task of dancing to it.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, Nov 27-28.
Old Air-Conditioner
For the fall ’10 season, F/T has launched an Emerging Artists Program, selecting eight works from 80 applicants across Japan. Yudai Kamisato’s Old Air-Conditioner is the only one to be staged with English captions. Known for the humor of his Kishida Drama Award-nominated Haircut-san, the 28-year-old Peru-born director portrays the pathos of an aircon that lacks a trendy, eco-friendly low-energy function.
Theater Green, Big Tree Theater, Nov 23.
The Blue Dragon
Yanick Macdonald
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, Nov 11-14.
Shiro Maeda
The up-and-coming director is ‘Going on the Way to Get Lost’
Courtesy of Gotanndadan
Shiro Maeda’s new play—still in the works as we sit down to an interview—takes up the concept of “sense of place.” Considering that Maeda still lives and works in the Gotanda building where his parents once operated a factory, this comes as no surprise.
“I live on the second floor and my folks on the third,” Maeda says during a conversation on the first floor, where he runs his Gotanndadan theater company. “They used to make belt conveyers. It wasn’t unusual around here at the time I was born, but as I grew up, land became expensive and factories fled to China.”
Going on the Way to Get Lost is Maeda’s attempt to express his experience of becoming a stranger in his own land. “I am born and raised in Tokyo, but I don’t know the city myself,” he explains. “For example, if you go one street over from your regular route, the area is unknown.”
Entranced by the shogekijo movement in his teens, Maeda began to write plays in high school, founding Gotanndadan in 1997 at age 19. With more than 40 productions under his belt, he received the prestigious Kishida Drama Award in 2008 for Isn’t Anyone Alive?, a piece in which corpses gradually pile up on stage.
Maeda’s works have been described as absurdist, and viewers may detect a kinship with legendary French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. But these are inferences that he rejects. “Western interviewers often perceive my work that way, but for me the pieces are rational,” he says. “Maybe it’s because they come from a monotheistic background, whereas Japanese are used to the multiple realities of Buddhism and Shintoism.”
“I don’t like philosophy very much,” he continues. “The language tends to be so logical that it’s difficult to grasp. People who want to understand the essence of things gravitate toward philosophy, religion or art. I chose art.”
As to how Going on the Way to Get Lost fits in with the theme of Festival/Tokyo, the 33-year-old Maeda is noncommittal. “I heard about it afterward,” he says. “I didn’t create my play with it in mind and don’t have any desire to ‘disrobe’ theater.”
At this point, an F/T representative leans over and elicits a round of guffaws, explaining that when the organizers asked Maeda for a comment about his approach to theater, he answered dryly, “Theater is something I sometimes do.”
Busy with recent television and film work, including a well-received NHK drama called Kaimono, Maeda does in fact have less time for theater. Yet he’s still enthusiastic about participating in F/T. “Festival/Tokyo is brand new and hasn’t really taken root yet—it’s more an assemblage of unrelated events in Ikebukuro,” he says. “But I hope it develops an identity, and that taking part will become something special.
“When they first approached me, I didn’t know what F/T was, but it would be great if it becomes an international attraction in the way the organizers wish. For the benefit of Japanese theater, I want to help make that happen.”
Going on the Way to Get Lost will be performed with English captions at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, Nov 5-14.
