In his keynote presentation, TADASHI UCHINO explores the alternative form of ‘theatre as assembly’ in Japan, with specific reference to a small scale yet politically refreshing transnational performing arts festival called Theatre Commons, where workshops and lecture-demonstrations are the main features.
CR: Good morning everyone! Good morning indeed. Thank you for being here at 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning. Particularly since some of us were here all day yesterday. It’s a tiring, although happily tiring day because there was a lot to work through, process, think about and consider. Many questions I think appeared in my dreams last night although i’m not sure how.
I’m very, very delighted to be introducing Professor Tadashi Uchino this morning because what he has chosen to talk about takes us onwards with some of the questions and discussions that emerged yesterday. For the benefit of those who were not here yesterday, the range of panellists, keynote and the discussions afterwards took on questions and stuggles about locating dramaturgical thinking, let alone, the dramaturg. As well as raising concerns about some of the ethics that are involved in, not just performance making, but thinking through the choices, decisions and the approaches that are being experimented and reiterated in performance making. Of course the sphere is becoming less defined, for better and for worse, and the histories and the ways of thinking through the histories are also becoming more open to critique, to questioning, to disagreement.
This question of theatre in the public space, in the public sphere - theatre not just in the public sphere but as has been articulated, theatre as the public sphere, as the public space is of increasing interest to us in ADN and the platform of the festival. We are part of a festival in ADN, we are a part of SIFA and a couple of years ago we engaged in dialogue with the previous festival director Ong Keng Sen in his festival dramaturgy in a keynote interview, which I am happy to say will be a published at the later this year as a edited transcript. So this question of theatre as assembly, radical dramaturgy in theatre commons, looking at a particular festival in Japan as a case study is so apt. Thank you.
To briefly introduce professor Tadachi Uchino, who is a widely known performance study scholar, whose border crossing informs a lot of his writing, a lot of his thinking, a lot of his work. This border crossing is between Japan and US, Japan and Europe, Japan and other parts of Asia, in particular India where he has done a lot of thinking and writing about the interdisciplinary, the “intercultural”, working with academics, artists, activists. His publications speak to this breadth of participation, research and thinking.
I won’t go through the list of his publications, there are articles, there are books. But I will say that when I first read Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium which was published in 2009 by Seagull Books, I thought, I hope one day I can write like that because it weaves his story and his journey as a performance scholar with the landscape of theatre making in Japan and how these two things informed the perspectives and the lenses that he has derived and developed. So, thank you for that book, and other books, but in particular I would encourage you to look at that simply because yesterday we had another way of expressing that in Janet’s keynote. The intersections of a personal choice and the random and chance encounters with then a discerning and conscious approach to putting these things together.
So the format is that the keynote will be about 40 minutes, after which we will take questions and we will take the dialogue from there. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming professor Tadachi Uchino.
TU: Thank you Charlene. I wasn’t expecting that she was going to raise such high expectations of me. Basically I am a critic, which means I talk about other people, what other people are doing and articulate what is happening in a theoretical framework. In that sense it is very traditional. Yesterday there was the issue, the intergenerational thing. I am probably following Janet. I was a Richard Schechner’s student in the middle of the 1980s and am still a contributor to TDR. Richard has retired from NYU but he is still editing TDR when I am still contributing. Although I don’t really contribute much because I am now choosing to write mainly in Japanese, not in English.
Today I will only be talking about the theatre festival that started in 2017, curated or dramaturg by Soma, Chiaki. Do you all know her? Soma, Chiaki. Chiaki Soma was the artistic director of the festival in Tokyo. The big one? She lost that job and now she is doing this very small scale festival which I think is very important in many respects. Not only because we will be losing money, after the Olympics. The public funding will be decreased, we have to be thinking in the radical terms of reinventing the format of the festival.
I am also acknowledging Florian Malzacher who is a curator/dramaturg in Germany. He is mainly managing Nature Theater of Oklahoma somehow in Germany, a US spaced theater company but he has written this article Theatre as Assembly: Spheres of Radical imagination and Pragmatic Utopias for last year’s Taipei Art Festival and I asked him when he will be publishing the article. It is not published yet but he gave me the final version so I have to acknowledge the article as I am using a lot of that.
“Any theatre that understands itself as a space of assembly is inevitably confronted with the task of having to avoid false participation”, that is the continuation of Janet’s in that she was talking about socially engaged arts and participation, “at the same time reclaim the idea of participation as such. A participation that aims for more than merely replacing one mode of tutelage with another.”
Since the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2000, concepts such as participation and assembly have been updated. Judith Butler, who participated in the movement herself, made headlines in some quarters when she published Performative Theory of Assembly. It’s interesting that the Japanese translation of “assembly” is basically “集合”, “assembly” in Chinese characters. But translators use the Katakana, the Japanese syllabary used mainly for foreign words, indicating that the concept of Butler’s assembly is different from the ones used in the past political movements. This is because since the anti-nuclear movement that began with the nuclear accident, Fukushima Daiichi 2011, there has been a growing understanding that the meaning of public demonstrations and assembly has entered a phase different from that of conventional political demonstrations and gatherings.
Florian Malzacher tries to weave Butler’s assembly back into proven methods of theatre begins his argument in his Theater as Assembly by quoting Butler, this very famous quote from her speech: “It matters that as bodies we arrive together in public. As bodies we suffer, we require food and shelter, and as bodies we require one another in dependency and desire. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and its voice. We sit and stand and move as the popular will, the one that electoral politics has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here, time and again, persisting, imagining the phrase, ‘we the people’.”
While generally agreeing with Butler’s thinking, Malzacher argues that his idea of theater as assembly is decidedly different from Butler’s to the concept of will of the people as embodied in the act of gathering itself. So in only the fact that the body is there while maintaining the sense of the otherness of the other, because:
“Theater is not only a social but always a self-reflexive practice, despite the fact that conventional approaches have been neglecting this. Theater is a paradoxical machine that allows us to observe ourselves while being part of the performance. It does not create an artificial outside of pure obscurity but neither is it able to lure its audience into mere immersive identification. Theater marks a sphere where things are real and not real at the same time it creates situations and practices that are symbolic and actual at once. The social spheres, the assemblies it can create, offer the possibility of being a part and at the same time watching oneself from the side. Perhaps alienation, in fact it is not an invention, it is a discovery of what constitutes our theater. Not all theaters admit it, or even try to make, consequently, the use of it.” (Malzacher).
In other words, Malzacher says that theater is essentially a liminal assembly practice with self-reflexivity as a key. But there are not many contemporary theater practices that presupposes or aspire to acknowledge this. This is because traditional theatrical performances and their conventional approaches ignore this aspect and that is why [12:08] had to voice it. The key here is the concept of participation which, Malzacher continues, has become a real issue in our time. It is not only art in contemporary participatory art within the categories of SEA but also participatory theatre, the numbers of which are increasing at least in Europe.
“Without the will and used participation there is no assembly and yet what does that even mean in a time where we are permanently forced into putative participation within an all inclusive capitalist system that has rendered the term almost useless. A pacifier which perversely delegates the responsibility for what is happening to citizens that cannot influence it. And doesn’t able the system to continue more or less undisturbed in its task of self-maintenance.” (Malzacher).
Malzacher says that for those of us who have already always been part of the capitalist system where participation is allowed only as a consumer, the question naturally arises of whether participation is possible as a known consumer. The question is not a false participation or placebo involvement but how we can create a theater participation as Butler’s sense of assembly. [14:00] Malzacher citizens during the kinds of recent popular performances that seem to shed the critical light on social issues, only end up within a vicious cycle in which false participation, consciousness makes you realise that you are partly responsible for the problem that is occurring. But because you can’t actually change anything, you can only get involved in the continuation of the system that is at the root of those social problems.
Instead, Malzacher says that the proper way to participate has to include the possibility of participation in the process of shaping the future society.
“Participating in the powers that be” (Malzacher).
I started to get very interested in Malzacher’s theory of Theatre as Assembly because an actual assembly was being held in Scene/Asia workshop, an assembly project in Theatre Commons Tokyo, TCT hereafter, from 22 February to 11 March 2018. It is considered to be one of the most advanced exploration of the possibility of theatre practice in revising and reinventing the form of theatre itself in a performing arts festival.
When I was trying to figure what TCT’18, the second instalment of TCT was all about, what was the underlying theoretical and philosophical foundation and implication, Malzacher’s Theater as Assembly so naturally came to my mind. Soma Chiaki, the director of TCT, writes:
“Those who have the privilege of a platform to speak from, impose overblown language and grand gestures upon us. Simplifying and polarising how a complex world.”, it's nice she’s not only talking about Trump, “And so in order to see the world in all its complexity, surely we must go to the other way and commit to expressing ourselves subtly, which anyone is capable of doing. As a result, we can disrupt the boundaries drawn with sweeping gestures and see the nuance in the world. More than ever, we need theatre acts that perform those functions.”
She continues quite impressively for me, for those including myself, who cares about the notion of Theatre as Assembly.
“Theatre Commons Tokyo is conceived as a project to present ways, modest effective ways, of seeing the world in all its grandeur and gradation, while returning to the origin of theatre, or theatres, as its name suggests the harnesses [16:55], the common of collective wisdom of theatre, restoring the theatre as a collective space to the heart of society. It is too small to be called a festival, too dispersed to be called a theatre. At first glance, it may appear to be no more than a bunch of performances, screenings, workshops, lectures and dialogues held in one part of the city. However, once the sum total of experience generated is given the label, Theatre Commons Tokyo, the project becomes apparent.”
In the first quotation, Soma’s original phrase is lost in translation. Its literal translation would have been “theatre as apparatus” that she says “performs those functions”. I want to paraphrase it as a [Florian Malzacher? 17:40] Theatre as Assembly because for me, TCT’18 emerged as an attempt to recreate what Soma calls, the origin of theatre, or theatres.
In the meantime, Malzacher says:
“The way theatre is conceived as a public space that gives room for radical imagination as well as pragmatic utopias. A manifold and not seldom contradictory in the aesthetical as well as the political positions. But what unites them is the aim to expand the field of theatre, to push its means and possibilities. To find ways of engaging with the social and political issues by our time, and by this also giving inspiration to activism and political thinking beyond the artistic realm.”
Malzacher was apparently speaking from or in Germany, where the public theatre or municipal theatre culture or cultures has taken stronghold in its sociocultural soil. Insisting quite rightfully that “the ways theatre is conceived as a public space are manifold”. He takes up some recent cases that he considers has the potentiality as a theatre as assembly.
For instance, this is from the General Meeting - Milo Rau, who is making all sorts of scandalous news in the world in recent years and I just thought that his The Congo Tribunal which is quite, I think if you have a chance, you will have to see that film - of Schaubühne in Berlin in which he quote: “60 delegates from all over the world have gathered to debate-” this is a quote from the home page “- to debate on where we stand as a global community and what needs to be done socially, ecologically, technologically, politically with an aim to create a charter for the 21st century.”
This is the Artist Organisations International, 2014. This is from the website. Florian Malzacher was the dramaturg for this project. This was a project devised by Jonas Staal, Joanna Warsza and Malzacher himself for the HAU Theater in Berlin. “It brought together 20 representatives of organisations founded by artists whose works confront today’s crisis in politics, economy, education, immigration and ecology. It explores the current shift from the artist working in the form of temporary projects to building long term organisational structures.”
This is Rimini Protokoll at the World Climate Change Conference in 2015: “Generally follow the concept and rules of the official nations framework convention in the climate change 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21). 670 audience members represented the 196 participating-” this is a simulation of the COP 21, inviting the audience members to think through what actually happened in COP 21.
This is Le Théâtre des Négociations by Bruno Latour who recently came up with the interesting idea of the actor-network theory, not in the theatre theory but actor theory. It is a scientific philosophy guide but he is now interested in making performances. He was collaborating with theatre directors and so this is what he did.
“Inviting some 200 students from all over the world and many more spectators, this simulation of the international conference mainly aimed at creating visibility was about including in climate negotiations those entities directly impacted by global warming. Indeginous people, young people, forests, oceans, endangered species and polar territories but who have no possible way of having their voices heard. “
So this is again, a simulation, it's fiction but it’s not fiction, it’s real and it’s not real at the same time.
Those are some recent examples of theatre as assembly by Malzacher, for which some Malzacher is actually very critical of as no actors, often those who are affected - well i’m not really sure if I should use the word “stakeholders”. “Stakeholders” sounds very political, economical. In Japanese, there is a word called “toujisha”, one who is implicated in it. And because there is no English translation for tojisha, there is now the academic discipline called tojisha studies. It is not stakeholder studies, I don’t think that stakeholders should be studied, so whoever is affected by the post-capitalist, post-industrial predicaments, or who was actually traumatised by the tsunami or whatever.
Malzacher wrote that real politicians, real art organisations were gathered and they have to be actually discussing in the fictional manner. But actually, some of them will be taken up later, will change the entire climate of the art organisations surrounding, happening in Berlin. These people are going to the theatre or even on to the stage, thereby, in some cases, making it possible for them to explore the possibility of actually transforming some of the specified predicaments of the late capitalist society. They may not necessarily make use of what Soma calls “overblown language” but to many of them, this project seems important or atleast resorting to grand gestures of taking up seemingly global planetary issues, very euro-centric idea that they are leading the world.
Furthermore, there are some occasions Malzacher calls pre-enactment, instead of reenactment, in which a possible future political movement is rehearsed, which, if one context goes wrong, may be taken as mere boasting or self-aggrandiosation. In Japan, such grand scale theatre as assembly projects are, anyway, not possible because of its historical conditions and sociocultural context. If we were to assume that theatre assembly is in the first place, to quote Soma, “to see the world in all its complexity, surely we must go to the other way and commit to expressing ourselves subtly”. Then, from there, we should find various ways to materialise Malzacher’s theatre as assembly, theatre as a public space where there is room for radical imagination and pragmatic utopias or theatre as assembly.
I was going to introduce Soma but I don’t think I have time so I will just skip that part and go to the third, Theatre Commons Tokyo 17/18.
I thought of TCT’17 as the preliminary stage where Soma lost the festival Tokyo and the funding was very difficult for the first instalment of the idea of the Theatre Commons. It was not that clear what she wanted to do but all these seeds were planted in different places. And so I will mainly talk about TCT’18, the second one.
It was the first occasion for us to get the real glimpse into what Soma calls her project that if you actually go through everything that she curates, you will see what she is getting at. It was the first occasion for me to sense what Soma means by the word “the project”, which is the sum total of the experience participating works generate. In other words all the presentations were stealthily [26:15] or more properly put, dramaturgically interwoven to be there for the audience members to experience and be asked to articulate on one’s own, while going through different status of audience, viewer, participants, subject, positions.
TCT’18 was a very well ventilated programme that has nothing to do with overblown language of course, while it expanded at a scale compared to TCT’17. In fact, various discontinuous fragments constituting global gradation scattered around the world were transformed by participating artist’s radical imagination, to use Malzacher’s words, into works, actual works, tangible works, and by mediating the physical/conceptual experiences or participations in various modes, the programming was made to give the audience a glimpse of pragmatic utopias, but an opportunity of self-reflexivity through non-coercive intellectual and affective [27:22].
I am going to introduce some of the works that were put there. This is from TCT’17. This is the viewing of the Port B, Takayama Akira’s project in Taiwan, this was done in lecture performance style and the Chim Pom did what’s called Chim Pom theatre but it is mostly retrospective, their work.
This is TCT’18 S.Beckett Happy Days. Looks very conventional, Beckett, that which seems tell of us [28:03] to be a passive observer of the performance, seems to have been. But it didn’t happen in the traditional theatre space. It was put into a very unique space called the former Noguchi room in the Mita campus of Keio University, Tokyo. It was designed by the famous artist Isamu Noguchi and Yoshiro Taniguchi in 1951 soon after the war and was relocated with Kuma Kengo’s new design in 2005 at the top floor of one of the Keio University’s campus buildings.
As a mysterious house floating among the buildings of Tamachi, Tamachi is where the campus is, I quote the website. In this unique space full of signifying sighing [28:50] and sensible and sensitive gradations, where intimacy and strangeness coexist, conventional theatre concentrated on the part of the viewer was kindly denied. This was site-specific theatre performance, not a conventional site-specific performance in which the night view of Tokyo’s high-rise office buildings through the window was inevitably visible if you are watching the evening performance. If you were watching the matinee you can’t actually see it because it is very bright. While the performance of the high quality Beckett play, as a classical of the 21st century, being performed in front of our eyes.
This process of simultaneous de-theatricalisation and re-theatricalisation of the space did not allow the spectators at the scene to feel at ease with the cliche of the theatre audience and each of us had to self-reflect and invent our own, in particular, physical and intellectual involvement with the space time of the performance.
There are two film video works being used in the theatrical setting. The works were shown to the audience members sitting in the darkened room as if in the movie theatre or in an ordinary theatre space where real performance happens. So works that were originally produced as visual art works which assume to be shown at an exhibition space, and/or within a white cube where the spectators are expected to watch and leave as they wish.
One of them was The Tempest Society by Bouchra Khalili which premiered in the documenta in Germany in 2017, and the other one was Piraeus/Heterochronia by Fujii Hikaru. These were shown in a very theatrical setting although the content is very important. I don’t think I have the time to go into the details but again, you have to be a kind of theatre audience to be there and you are expected to see it from the beginning to the end. That does not necessarily happen in a visual art setting.
There’s also the workshop that happened. This is Koizumi Meiro’s We Mourn the Dead of the Future in which will be made into the very interesting video art work for TCT’19. I wasn’t there for the workshop, I was held one day and it was raining very heavily and I couldn’t be there. But if I have I would come back to that too because there is a continuation. The workshop that is made into the work for next year’s theatre commons.
The work here is another workshop for the kids, Hello, Atmosphere by Artemis, a Dutch company.
I think lecture performance is a sort of break-through, at least for me, in terms of theatre as assembly because of its form of diversity and the context of Japan’s performance culture. Lecture performance format began in anglo-american, this is according to Uwaki Kyoko, in the anglo-american countries in the 1960s and became a common form again in the 2000s for various reasons. The boundaries with performance arts is vague today but, as Patricia Miller points out, we should not forget that there is an element of teaching in lecture performances. So there is always an element of power, somebody is delivering something to the listeners. And of course, as Miller notes, since teaching as instructing implies institutional power relations, lecture performance works often include self-reflexive critique or coercive structuring dynamics of teaching structuring as well.
At TCT’18, Black & White - Panda by Hsu Chia Wei of Taiwan and Friends, let’s have a break by Julien Fournet from France clearly involved a subtle yet clear critique of the form of lecture performance itself. Black & White was the first lecture performance (LP) by Chia Wei, the first one. He has never done it before. He is a taiwanese contemporary visual artist. It was a rather straightforward historical lecture of China’s “panda diplomacy”. The events and circumstances surrounding the panda sometimes even tragic [33:55] comic, are visually presented as an ordinary lecture session accompanied by the materials that appears to have been carefully researched and collected.
The reason why the lecture did not become one directional was that Manzai of comedians, the japanese form of stand-up comedy, were a comical performance of stuffed pandas inserted ever so often. I cannot deny that the impact of a laugh is not so great because the comedians were not too good in terms of making people laugh but at least I could - they were very newcomers and I think it was Soma’s real attempt to find a comedian, she’s a very high-up person, she doesn’t know anybody in the scene, but she was able to find very interesting young, who actually do some theatre on the side as well, but they were not really good - but at least I could understand the concept of dislocating this artistic patronising by Malzacher all in all [34:52] teaching moment, imposing the sense of tutelage so curiously and methodologically evaded and deconstructed.
Fournet’s three day long lecture performance takes place in a relaxed mood. We have lots of intermissions and we are drinking some tea, soup, stuff like that and although it is a light setting, the content was the history of art and beauty in the West and its metaphysics. There is art that influences people's senses and changes their empathic consciousness itself and deeply related political consciousness that is the art [35:35], as the transformative form of the word. It is politely told, with the criticism of global capitalism and an undertone of the entire narrative and easy to understand metaphors with varying emphasis.
However, Hirano Akihito, the guy on the right who is doing a lively performance as a simultaneous translator and interpreter to the audience, played an important role. He is physically there in the space and does the support of simultaneous translation from French to Japanese. However, he has the script. He stresses to Fournet, for instance, he doesn’t translate all that he says. Sometimes [36:14] taking advantage of the opponent’s lack of understanding of Japanese. In other times, simply reads around [36:20] the prescribed text of the Japanese translation. This relationship [36:25] in Japanese Manzai style, its a comic form, which infringed [36:34] the teaching moment of the conventional LP is simply dislocated rather than internally criticised.
Compared to the previous two artists who were supposed to be quite popular in the first place, in an attempt to relocate [36:47] it by inserting something else in each restrictive way, Morimura Yasumasa’s LP Nippon Cha Cha Cha! was paradoxical and interesting. Outstanding because it was an autobiographical performance that demonstrates [37:03] his own history as an artist. In the first half of the performance, using a lot of visual images, he explains why he needed to perform General MacArthur and Emperor Showa or Marilyn Monroe and Mishima Yukio within the unique political and cultural sphere of post-war Japan. The content and the article is like [37:25] a college class, to the degree of being enlightening: “Wow, we didn’t know that. So that’s what happened in the 1950s.”
In the latter half, Morimura impersonates Marilyn Monroe in front of the mayor on the stage and then he transforms himself into Mishima Yukio. The question inevitably comes to the surface as to how we can respond to Morimura’s performance in this dramatic here and now, and historical here and now. However, as you can see from the description above, in TCT’18, this was the most “usual” theatre production and somewhat paradoxically, we were convinced to be okay. To stay as a passive theatre audience sitting uncomfortably and just listening and observing.
The last work I would like to take up, this is not LP, this is theatre mix with LP from Malaysia. This is Version 2020 - The Complete Futures of Malaysia Chapter 3 by Mark Teh and Five Arts Centre. Who has seen this? It was designated as theatre but it was indeed a creative hybrid of LP and theatre performance. It was an LP as in some parts we were being lectured, and in some other part it was a theatre performance. Although the performers seem to be acting as themselves, not enacting prescribed characters.
This is from the website: “The departure point of this work was “Wawasan 2020” strategic plan introduced by the Mahathir administration in 1991. The premise was to evolve Malaysia into an advanced nation - in terms of its economy, education, welfare and every other sector – by the year 2020.”
They are talking about the future that was prescribed a long time ago, this was before Mahathir came back to power. This LP theatre concerns Malaysia, which is gradually moving towards 2020 and it was or rather was then, in 2018, strengthening its control and means of dictatorship as they say, huge administorial detail [39:35], research base public statement of Mahathir and showed performances that include much older performers personal auto-biography.
Especially note-worthy was Fahmi Reza, who is right there on the bottom right, who was responsible for the visual projection of the work, who stays behind the stage as a DJ light trigger in the background. He is the only one who speaks mainly in Malay and talks about his study in the United States. He had participated in the massive protest against the government of Najib at that time and showed the video footage of his arrest at the time of Dataran Pudra, Dataran Square or Independence Square where many national events are held and the new democratic movement called “Occupy Dataran” was happening.
In this LP theatre, through the video footage of Occupy Dataran, as a real Butler like assembly, and through the voice and body of performer Reza, who actually participated and talks to us in the theatrical here and now. The alternative public space that actually emerged, as it were, was implicitly emphasised. In the general election held in Malaysia in July of 2018, as you all know, contrary to the previous expectations, the first regime change in the history of Malaysia took place, am I correct? Okay. Sorry if I am wrong, it was a very big change, from what I hear. And it was the [41:00] former prime minister Mahathir who came to power. In this way, this LP theatre was to be remembered ala Malzacher [41:05] so called pre-enacted. Well it’s not actually rehearsal [41:10], after the election in the theatre as assembly.
These are some of the examples and actually I was going to talk about TCT’19. I’m not really ready for this but in TCT’19, there are some more theatre, lecture performances and in between like Sankar Venkateswaran, I cannot pronounce his name, Criminal Tribes Act. There was Ogutu Muraya’s Because I Always Feel Like Running, he was from Kenya but he works now in the Netherlands. The Birth of Tragedy, a solo performance which begins with the full sort of tragic figure and ends up with the three shirts [41:58] and this is not, well, it’s again, lecture performance, theatre performance, in between.
There are a lot of different types of screening. This is the Koki, Tanaka Koki’s video, it’s not a video, it’s a movie, the film was shown but an actual assembly was expected so the audience members entered the theatre before the screening. Afterwards, everybody was welcome, not, no- they didn’t force us to stay, but there was lots of discussions after the screening.
This is a lecture performance about the music, This is no Country Music and this is Robin Muore Ode to Joy but actually, it was presented in the first occasion as a theatre piece but it was made- Soma asked him to do it in the lecture performance format.
A new one is a reading performance series and it was read by three directors. What was new about this is that the audience members participated, actually reading the different kinds of text. Three text, one was the artist Shima Takashi. He chose Pablo Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail. Nakamura Yuko chose Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed - these are not actors, they are the participants - and Hagiwara Yuta chose Ota Shogo’s Sarachi (Vacant Lot). This is a kind of new testing of the different ways that the audience can participate in the process of a performance, although they did not have to prepare anything beforehand.
The TCT’19 was a logical expansion of what Soma started in TCT’17 and TCT’18. That development of various LPs, as well as performances, plays and video art works in their unique form have developed further in TCT’19. The diversity of the things they dealt with, as well as the forms, ways and channels of audience participation, keenly reflects Soma’s philosophy as a dramaturgical festival director who is responsible for the sum total of the experiences they generate. The sum total was where formal experiments materialised, Soma’s statement that quote: “In order to see the complex world as it is, isn’t it necessary to put a small gesture that everybody can put on and take off into their bodies and those [44:50].”
I put, finally, this quotation of Erika Fischer- Lichte. I think this notion or image of interweaving performance cultures seems to be, I mean you know, it’s probably again euro-centric. There is all this sort of self-critiquing notion of ‘these things may not do any good to our ways of thinking’ but I think this is a very good image of what is happening, what should be happening in performance and theatre making. This is from the extension of the notions of interculturalism, which was heavily bombarded for the last 20 years.
“Many strands are plied into thread; many such threads are then woven into a piece of cloth, which has thus consists of diverse strands and threads… without necessarily remaining recognisable individually, they are dyed, plied and interwoven, forming particular patterns without allowing the viewer”, while she uses the word ‘the viewer’ because she is at the [46:13], she says she thinks she is the audience and that status is very fixed but I can say without allowing anybody, those artist, the dramaturgs or the spectator, whoever they are “to trace each strand back to its origin.
On the other hand, a process of interweaving does not necessarily result in the production of a whole. In it, mistakes, errors, failures, and even small disasters might occur when unintended knots appear in the cloth, when threads unravel or flow apart, when the proportion of the dyes is off, or the cloth woven becomes stained. The process of weaving is not necessarily smooth or straightforward.”
Thanks for listening. These are references. [47:10]
CR: Thank you very much Tadashi. That’s a lot to think through. But it’s weave, is one that I hope we can begin to engage with gradually. We don’t have that much time but I think we can take 10 minutes into the break so that we can have at least 20 minutes to respond and raise questions. If not for comments, in a range of ways.
I’ll start the ball rolling by saying that one of the impressions for me is how this suggests that the festival is pushing for new literacies in attending festivals because you talked about how the audiences is expected to attend everything, but not necessarily, but there’s a kind of expectation when the festival is put together in order for it to be generative. It’s almost like the programme is a curriculum and as an educator that strikes me as one of the things we need to take on board because then certain kinds of literacies are obviously being emphasised and when you then led to the idea of the lecture performance, it’s very overtly pedagogical in its attempt to enact this curriculum as a pre-enactment where the pedagogy is suppose to lead us.
If you could say a bit more about how you think this idea of assembly, which is a form of, you know, schools have assembly in the morning in this part of the world where everybody stands in front of the flag and sings the national anthem, that kind of thing, and they become inter-related in a useful as well as a troubling way because schools can be very problematic.
TU: I don’t really have any proper answer for that. I’m just observing that this is happening at the moment as Soma chose this way to go forward. She is always conscious of what’s happening in [49:50]. Even on festival Tokyo days, she decided not to only invite the finish work but co-creation, and now she is again always talking with the artist on how to actually present the work. Even if the work is already there, she is discussing with her other colleagues, she is not a dictator, there are lots of other members as well, and they discuss how to present the work. I don’t think she has anything, she is not manipulating the audience to be somebody and she is not interested in the kind of classroom, she is not interested in actually leading them to somewhere so then those assemblies are very far-fetched but of course, the assembly in theatre.
But worthy in the sense that each individual, each sort of individuated body may appear together when something critical happens in the case of emergency. Not necessarily connecting to the revolutionary moments like before but something is going to be said about what is happening there. It might or might not change the world. And so she’s trying to let the audience think on their own, which is very much forgotten in Japan, where popular entertainment, immersivity is everything. You go to the theatre because you want to forget what is happening.
CR: Yes, thank you. Other responses, questions from the floor? How Ngean than Janet.
Au1: To build on Charlene’s question and the response. I also can’t help but feel that there is a very strong pedagogical leaning because as Professor Tadashi pointed out that there’s a very big element of the lecture performance at play even though there is this urgency of assembling of the people coming together, people of ‘we the people’ right. But it also feels as if the element of wanting to not just communicate aesthetics, issues, messages, politics, There is this, I don’t know, the format of this lecture performance does have very strong pedagogical implications. There seems to be wanting, the classroom environment does come into play in the mind when looking at just as a snapshot of what has been presented today.
I guess the question for me is then the agency of the spectator to take what they want to. It probably feels now that the artistic director has a very, what’s the word I am looking for, strong mission to want to really drive it through that this is a learning experience. I would like to hear your comment about that.
Au2: Can I just continue from him? I’m kind of curious because the first set that you showed, theatre as assembly as in taking up activism kind of topics, mirroring the kind of assembly, which is kind of formal political assembly. I find it interesting that a certain kind of activist, activism that then picks up the kind of framework of the political assembly and replicates it, as assembly and then there’s this lecture system, I mean lecture performance, which is picking up another kind of format, to say something but through the performative. And then there’s Fahmi Reza’s assembly at Merdeka picking up the Occupy format and these are all assemblies, actually.
It’s interesting that festivals, particularly in Japan, they are dramaturge in such a way, not just this city festival. I consider the Tokyo festival a very city festival. So the kind of things that appear in this assembly in the Tokyo festival are a certain collective of formats. Whereas if you look at the Satawachi [55:15] Festival or one of the visual arts festivals in the rural areas, the assembly is quite different. It’s a different kind of assembly that fits that environment. It’s not an urban environment. I never thought about this, it’s just a comment that it’s really interesting how theatre people are sort of looking beyond their works or rather the dramaturgs, the bigger dramaturgs, again better to not use the word ‘meta’, but they are looking at ways of pulling themselves and having a bigger voice.
TU: I think that the Theatre Commons Tokyo is not even a city festival. It’s a very small ward festival, Minato Ward. So the target is very obvious. Although, I was saying because she has been the artistic director of the big festival Tokyo, theatre forward [56:05] and I put the word politicise use in the, the english words is not coming, it’s what I was going to speak in the programme, but its particular ways of gathering different particular target audience. The politicise, middle-class, very well informed intellectual probably university students, who know what she is trying to do. That is a kind of assembly but it’s not, I said politicise, at least conceptually. In their mind they are politicised, but they are not mobilised at that moment, from my point of view. To give them a kind of political mobility, and the mobilisation of this middle class is very, I don’t know, Soma is not, I’m not really sure she’s such a politicise person or not, but she seems like she’s saying, moving, geared towards mobilising middle class from the ratting them out of the self, of the closure and self-complacency of ‘we are okay. Japan is fine.’ which is not true.
Au3: My question is regarding your point about how theatre as an assembly presents possibilities for rehearsal for certain types of political future or political action. Not having attended any of these kinds of performances that you have mentioned. I am curious, from your perspective, to what extent is assembly actually just used as an image or a spectacle type of gesture for people like us who do not actually participate to see and say ‘oh, that’s interesting’, they are enacting this kind of rehearsal, they are enacting this kind of mode of participation. To what extent do the people who turn up, actually have the option of answering back, actually have the option of pushing back, of rehearsing political agency, in this case, to answer back to this person who is enacting this theatre and who is creating this environment for them.
TU: I haven’t really seen all of the examples that Malzacher was taking up but in the cases that have happened, there is no distinction between the performer and non-performer. They are all participants. In the examples, the assemblies of climate change and all those things, they are really strong. In the Rimini Protokoll’s case, it’s a rehearsal but it’s also about the COP21, so there’s alternative ways of that thing which already happened in the past, and so the learning process for the participant also trying to figure out, to think through to the future, the next COP- I don’t know what it’s going to be called.
In Europe, that is possible. Because theatre as an institution is operating at least to some classes of society. I’m not using the word ‘middle class’, I don’t know but it’s just that. But in the case of intervention, The Congo Tribunal, has anyone seen the video? The Congo Tribunal? Milo Rau actually went into Congo and researched and actually met those people who had something to do with the massacre of the village. They actually did a fictional tribunal but actually everybody is real. And the real result was that the minister who was responsible for the massacre, who actually oversaw that the police were overlooking, they were there but didn’t intervene and there were a lot of witnesses about that. I'm not really sure why it wasn’t intervened or stopped by the authorities. It just went on and the minister was actually fired after the tribunal. So he had the real effect although I don’t know if it’s really- it’s quite tricky that all these was already [1:00:50] the Ministry of Internal Affairs be on the stand, be criticised by all these people while all these are fictional. So a kind of possibility is being thought out in those kind, European kinds of theatre as assembly. It’s not really possible in Japan.
Activism and our practices are not really in a very good relationship, at least for my generation. Activism and protest are usually being looked at, at the best, a dubious thing. Keng Sen was trying to do this comfort women issue in Japan and it was successful in Victoria Theatre, it was successful at first in 2000. But when he was trying to do it back in Japan, he was heavily criticised by the activist, ‘why a Singaporean [1:01:45] guy was taking us up as the scene and what does that have anything to do with us?’ And so he had to change everything into a completely different format.
Au4: I’ll say a similar comment. I’m a critic and artist influenced by Chiaki Soma. I’m really inspired by her works, her curated works. Her enlightenment tactics were successful. Yes, enlightenment. I’m really enlightened. But we, the same generation or younger generation of artists, have already started another tactic. So they enter into community or social etc. I really love her works, really like them but we should always think about assembly for what, assembly for whom? It’s always the same people coming to the theatre. That is why I already left the theatre.
TU: I have to introduce him, he’s Chikara Fujiwara and he was saying, he’s a critic slash, I don’t think he’s a dramaturg. Critic in an artist? What he is doing is very interesting. He goes into different places to do research and he does art projects. It’s called Theatre Quest where you are given this game book and you are on your own to find out and answer questions in a TV game format. You won’t really know what’s going to happen. It’s a bit different depending on what time of the day you go there, these places. It’s heavily researched. He does not really make it as a visible production but he puts it in the game book format which, of course it’s a game book, it’s questions. So that’s why it’s called Engeki Quest.
He’s quite right that there are lots of different things that are happening. I don’t really know about the theatre artists, he’s the only one and there are lots of art projects like [1:04:34 Tate wutchi?]. The visual artists are trying to do different things. Visual art has a very different status in Japan’s cultural sphere because it’s institutionalised from the beginning. As I always say, there’s Japan trying to westernise itself in the late nineteenth century. There was a national school for music, a national school for visual arts, but there was no national school for theatre. So visual arts and music are nationalised from the beginning. Visual art, a section of the national school for the arts, was opened by Tenshin Okakura. He first decided not to do anything western as a gesture against cultural colonisation. There began Tokyo University of Fine Arts.
But there are lots of institutions and it’s all there, so that’s why there are different projects and there is a lot of money and they are finding ways to go into the local city to do different projects. But is there anybody - I don’t really know who is working in - I mean there are lots of people actually doing community theatre because theatre is a collective manifestation of whatever they stand for. There are lots of community theatres all around the world, all around Japan, doing its own thing and I think they are trying to network. One is local community Theatreworks but it’s all theatre, theatre, Theatreworks.
CR: We have time for one final question, or thought, or comment.
Au5: I just kind of feel that, i’m not a dramaturg or an artist or a director, I work more in production as a producer and behind the scenes, and I think that this kind of movement towards theatre as assembly or assembly as a political movement or performative gesture can sometimes be very dangerous or troubling, especially because when there isn’t sufficient thought or time given to who is actually in the assembly or how this assembling is being done.
I have had to rush through too many open calls desperately seeking participants who are free at the directors will to show up and participate in this theatre as assembly thing and what actually manifest for the audience, as a result, or for the actual theatre, when it happens, is just this reinforcement of an echo chamber that is so lacking in this reflexivity or lacking in awareness of the lack of diversity within the room that it- part of me actually thinks that it becomes part of a much bigger problem? It’s no different from any kind of like, you know, right-wing assembly or a huge congregation of people fueling hate, for example.
So I think that considering that issue in the creation and production of theatre as assemblies is really critical and that’s why I feel that having it manifest as part of a festival that potentially has, like you mentioned, maybe middle-class audiences or quite homogenous demographics, maybe that’s not a very productive way? And it serves the artists CV a lot more than it actually does society a political progress.
TU: I think that’s a very good thought, but what I think I was quoting from Soma is that we are fighting a retreat, we are retreating and the homogeneity of the middle class is not really feasible, it’s not manifested, they don’t really know their homogeneity even. So it’s very difficult to be inclusive. Outreaching, we are trying to outreach, you know outreaching, inclusive has been an issue and we’ve failed. And we are retreating into the, it’s not retreating to where- the battle of the retreatment is not to consolidate the homogeneity of the middle class or the privileges of the middle class. But it’s just to give them some kind of collectivity to think over, to think about themselves.
CR: And there is more to think about and think over. We have a 15 minutes break before the next session which is another interesting session of dramaturgies of technology with our panellists talking about their experience and their approaches in relation to this.
Just before I finish, I strongly recommend for those who want to continue thinking about this, the Florian Malzacher article which is available online. It is a part of a larger publication called Performance Public and Politics and it’s examining a European condition but nonetheless, there might be examples there and critiques there that respond to some of your thoughts and questions.
Please join me in thanking Tadashi Uchino. Thank you.