ISBN: 978-4-9909155-0-6

Performance Studies international Fluid States 2015 Tohoku, Japan
Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality, and Pilgrimage in Northern Japan
Select conference proceedings

Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality, and Pilgrimage in Northern Japan
28 August 2015 (Pre-event, trip to Mt Osore),
29 August -1 September, 2015, Aomori, Japan.

Host organizations:
Keio University Art Centre
Aomori Museum of Art

1

Editor: Peter Eckersall
Editorial Board: Hayato Kosuge/ Takashi Morishita / Yu Homma /Katherine Mezur / Peter Eckersall / Kim Kyueun/ Rina Otani

Copyright © 2016 by the Keio University Art Center(KUAC).
Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice andthe full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned byothers than KUAC must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

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Published on 25 July 2016
ISBN 978-4-9909155-0-62

Preface
PSi Fluid States 2015 Tohoku, Japan was held in Aomori from 28 August to 1 September
2015. The title of the conference was: ’Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality,
and Pilgrimage in Northern Japan’.

Excerpts from the Call for Papers (following)elaborate on the conferendce themes.

The conference was curated by Hayato Kosuge (Director), Katherine Mezur, Takashi
Morishita, Peter Eckersall, and Yu Homma with help from Rina Otani and organisaitonal
support from the Keio University Art Centre and the Aomori Museum of Art, where theconference took place. Keynote addresses where delivered by Professor Marilyn Ivy(Columbia University), Takashi Morishita (Keio University Art Centre) and Takahiro
Okuwaki (Aomori Museum of Art).

The conference featured a mix of papels with 20-minute paper presenations, working
groups and performances (see http://psi21.portfolio-butoh.jp). Four working groups
were convened on the themes of: Corporeality (convenor Katherine Mezur), Performance(convenor Peter Eckersall), Pilgrimage (convenor Stephen Barber) and Place (convenor
Yasushi Nagata). Included here is a selection of papers from the conference gathered as aselect conference proceedings. They address the conference themes in a diversity ofways. They have all been reviewed by peers and are published here without further
editing. Reports from working groups and documentation of the conference will also be
available on the conference website.

We are grateful for support from the Keio University Art Centre and the Aomori Museumof Art. We thank our keynote presenters and all the participants for their contributions.
We also owe a depth of gratitude to the officials and citizens of Aomori who were sowelcoming. We deeply thank the many helpers, local artists, businesses and city officials.

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Table of contents
Preface .............................................................................................................. 3
Welcome address:
Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality and Pilgrimage in Northern Japan. (English)
Hayato Kosuge ......................................................................................................................................... 7
けがれを超えて：パーフォーマンスと東北（⾝体・霊性・巡礼）」(⽇本語）
⼩菅隼⼈ ................................................................................................................................................... 10

Call for Papers:
Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality, and Pilgrimage in Northern Japan .......................... 12
Conference dramaturgy
Katherine Mezur ....................................................................................................................................... 14
Working Groups:• Corporeality .................................................................................................................................. 16• Performance ................................................................................................................................. 17• Pilgrimage ..................................................................................................................................... 19• Place.............................................................................................................................................. 20
Corporeality Working Group Reflections
Katherine Mezur ....................................................................................................................................... 22
Papers:Re-Vision: Waste and Memory in Post-War Japanese Visual Art
Gunhild Borggreen.................................................................................................................................... 34
Fluid Corporealities: Hijikata Tatsumi’s Bodies Trembling between States of Crisis
Katja Centonze .......................................................................................................................................... 43
Hyperrealism and Everyday Performance: How is the text constituted in Everyday Theatre?

Raimondo Cortese .................................................................................................................................... 55
The gap between the <insider view> and <outsider view> on Fukushima as seen in the change ofFestival/Tokyo’s lineup
Ken Hagiwara ............................................................................................................................................ 66
The Hunter in Soto-no-Hama of the Noh ‘Utō’ and Performers
Rurihiko Hara ............................................................................................................................................ 774

Môn Tohoku Môn Triad: ‘We are water carriers: committing our bodies to transformation inplaces of sacredness and contamination.’

Ariana Jordão ........................................................................................................................................... 95
Performing Recovery: Music Making and Disaster Relief in Post-Tsunami Japan

Nana Kaneko ............................................................................................................................................. 100
VORAZ [Ravenous]: Reflections on Butoh Fu Notation from Mexican imagery in times of crisisand violence
Laboratorio Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual......................................................................................... 113
Save your own skin: Performative Text

Tanja London ........................................................................................................................................... 117
Body as a place of poetry: memory and imagination in Antonin Artaud
Samantha Marenzi .................................................................................................................................... 142
Transmission of Gestures in Dance: the Spectrum of Corporeality of Kazuo Ohno in « Ô sensei »by Catherine Diverrès
Mariko Miyagawa .................................................................................................................................... 151
Butō Workshop
Lori Ohtani ................................................................................................................................................ 160
A Fly in the Light - The Corporeal Presence of the Organic and Inorganic Other
Krisztina Rosner ........................................................................................................................................ 163
We’re Here Now: Site-specific theatre beyond place in Canadian Jewish Diaspora
Jenny Salisbury.......................................................................................................................................... 179
Trauma and Survival in the Art of Yoshiko Shimada and Soni Kum
Eliza Tan .................................................................................................................................................... 193
Hijikata Tatsumi—Artaud’s True Heir? Corporeality and Spirituality in Hijikata and Artaud

Tsu-Chung Su ........................................................................................................................................... 210
The Singer of Tales as Itinerant Performer: the Michiyuki Trope

Alison Tokita.............................................................................................................................................. 224
5

World Factory: Staging Migrant Labour on a Migrant StageWEI Zheyu ................................................................................................................................................. 243

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Welcome address:
Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality and Pilgrimage inNorthern Japan

Hayato Kosuge
Director, PSi #21 Fluid States 2015 Tohoku Organizing Committee

Minamoto no Toru, a main character of Japanese Noh drama, was known for having built
in Kyoto (an old capital in Japan) a gorgeous mansion with a large garden in which thescenery of Shiogama, a scenic spot in Tohoku, was recreated. In fact, he had nevervisited Shiogama; for Toru and almost all aristocrats, it was a celebrated place only
mentioned in traditional Japanese poems, waka. In the first scene of Toru, one of theNoh plays created by Zeami, a Buddhist priest wandering from Eastern Area to Kyoto
found himself at the place where Toru’s mansion used to be, and then met an old man
drawing saltwater from there. The old man praises the autumn scenery of Toru’s gardenin old times that has now gone to utter ruin. This poor-looking old man is actually Toru’s
ghost, and in the second scene, appears again as a noble figure to remember his
forgotten past by looking back to the splendor of the garden with nostalgia.
expresses his emotion as a wistful affection for the past and disappears.

He

It is anoteworthy point in terms of theatrical structure that Toru’s spirit in disguise as a shabby
old man tells of the past splendid appearance of something in a far remote place; as withmany Noh dramas, figure, time and place have a double appearance and double meaning.

Likely, Japanese people have been forced to be aware of a similar sense of doubling intheir daily life since 11 March 2011 when the devastating earthquake and tsunami, and,especially, the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster occurred. First of all, this disasterreminded not only people from Tohoku, but also those living in Tokyo, how their “normal”
and “domesticated” ordinary life was, in fact, very unstable. Millions of people in Tokyo
were stranded on that day when public transport systems were completely paralyzed and7rolling blackouts began on 14 March due to power shortages caused by the earthquake.
Our everyday life could be ruined in an instant, either from natural disaster, or manmade calamity, or both. Secondly, Japanese people have experienced both the visible
destruction by earthquake and tsunami and the invisible danger of radiation caused by
the nuclear accident. The earthquake and tsunami taught us the fear of total destruction
in a single moment; on the other hand, the Fukushima nuclear accident taught us thefear of an invisibly polluting environment.

Finally, such destruction and pollution

reminded us of the ruinous images of Tokyo just after World War II and the atom bombs
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Past nightmares make their reappearance now. The fear ofradiation has come to be actualized again as a national trauma for Japanese people tothe extent that a sense of national identity conditioned by this is one of the mostcontroversial issues for Japanese people today.

Duality and connection cause us to rethink the properties of matter as a form of upheaval.
Rendering impure, or corrupting, defiling, tainting by contact or mixture, visible lives andinvisible radiation, present feeling and past memory, remote country and capital city are“contaminating” each other and confounding simple dichotomies. As Marilyn Ivy, our
keynote speaker insightfully said: “The subject of late-twentieth-century Japan confounds
the simplicities of the world order, whether new or old” (Ivy, 1995: 1). Our present
reality and corporeality are being haunted by past experiences and influenced byseemingly unrelated places. Thus, the concept of “Contamination” in our title is pivotal
to many aspects of this conference at this Tohoku site. Our themes of corporeality,spirituality, pilgrimage and place interact in many ways with traditional andcontemporary ideas of contamination, which are particular to this region, Aomori, where
Mt. Osore (or in Japanese Osorezan; literally “Mount Fear”) is located. According topopular mythology, Osorezan is the entrance to the Buddhist Hell. Many people makethe pilgrimage to Osorezan to communicate with the souls of their dead loved ones.

8This conference is part of PSi fluid states - performances of unknowing, * a year longseries of events by members of Performance Studies international. Aomori is a "fluid"site because it is the gateway for the main island of Japan lying in the middle of two
peninsulas jutting out between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean and because it isalso a site of passage between life and death. We hope this first PSi meeting in Japan will
be an opportunity for everyone involved to discuss and reconsider our “normal” and“domesticated” ordinary life and body, and re-examining the power of performance in anage of crisis, both spiritual and physical.

Reference
Marilyn Ivy. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity Phantasm Japan. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1995.
* Fluid States: Performances of UnKnowing is a yearlong, globally dispersed andcross-cultural event which resists the prerogatives, politics, and hierarchies of centralised
and corporatized conferences, festivals and organizations in culture and arts, humanities
and social sciences. (http://www.fluidstates.org)

9けがれを超えて：パーフォーマンスと東北（⾝体・霊性・巡礼)

⼩菅隼⼈

能『融』の主⼈公である源融は，平安初期に⽣きた嵯峨天皇の皇⼦です．京都六条河原の邸
宅に，陸奥の塩竈の⾵景をそっくり再現し，難波の海から潮⽔を汲んで来て池を満たしたとされています．融が塩竈を実際に訪れたことはありませんが，かの地は歌枕によって絶景の地として⼈⼝に膾炙していました．世阿弥作とされる『融』では，東国より都へと上ってきた旅の僧が，ある夜，六条河原院の邸宅跡で潮汲みの⽼⼈と出会います．海辺でもないのに
なぜ潮汲みをといぶかる僧に⽼⼈は，かつてあった庭園の⾒事さを語り，その邸宅も今は荒れ果ててしまったと嘆きます．⽼⼈の正体は融の霊でした．やがて，⽣前の姿の融が現われ，往時を偲びつつ，舞に興じ，夜明けが近づくころ，融はまるで「⽉の都」に向かうように，⽉光の中に消えてゆきます．実在と⾒えた貧しい⽼⼈は，本当は貴⼈の霊であり，今は荒れ果てた過去の栄耀栄華を語ったのです．それは遠く離れた都に再現された東北地⽅の絶景でした．ここでは，他の多くの能楽作品と同じく，⼈物，時，場所は，⼆重の姿を持ち，⼆重の意味を担っています．
2011 年 3 ⽉ 11 ⽇ 14 時 46 分，その後の⽇常⽣活において現実レベルで⼆重性を強く意識させる出来事が私たちに起きました．東⽇本に巨⼤地震が発⽣したのです．それから約 40 分
後，巨⼤な津波が東北地⽅太平洋沿岸を襲いました．さらに，この地震と津波による福島第⼀原⼦⼒発電所の全電源消失によって，深刻な放射能汚染が起こりました．第⼀に，この⼤災害は，東北地⽅だけではなく，⾸都圏に住む⼈々にも，「飼い慣らされた」⽇常⽣活が，実際は，いかに不安定なものかという事実を知らしめることになりました．同夜，⾸都圏では全ての公共交通機関が⽌まり，500 万⼈以上の帰宅困難者が，地獄の亡者のように，⾃宅へと歩き続けることになりました．さらに，3 ⽉ 14 ⽇からは計画停電も実施されました．
私たちの⽇常⽣活は，天災によるものにしても，⼈災によるものにしても，あるいはその両⽅にしても，⼀瞬にして失われるということを誰もが実感したのです．第⼆に，私たちは，このことによって，地震と津波という⽬に⾒える⼤災害と，放射能汚染という⽬に⾒えない脅威を同時に体験することになりました．地震と津波は⼀瞬のうちに起こる破壊の恐怖を，
放射能汚染は⻑く続く環境汚染による恐怖を，同時に私たちに経験させることになったのです．第三に，この災害によって⽣み出された⽡礫の⼭は，第⼆次⼤戦後の廃墟となった東京

10

の姿を我々に思い起こさせ，広島，⻑崎の恐怖を蘇らせました．⽇本⼈にとって，空襲による破壊と放射能被害は負のナショナル・アイデンティティでもあります．多くの⼈が命を奪われ，住居を破壊され，避難を余儀なくされただけではなく，この恐怖が私たちに再び呼び起こされ，⽇本⼈の精神⾵⼟も再汚染されたのです．
⼆重性と複合性によって，私たちは⽇常の本質を異常な出来事として再検討することができます．連鎖と同時発⽣による汚染と破壊によって，⽬に⾒える⽣活と⽬に⾒えない放射能，
現在の恐怖と過去の記憶，地⽅と⾸都は，それぞれを汚染しあい，単純な⼆項対⽴を拒絶します．基調講演者であるマリリン・アイヴィーは慧眼にも，「20 世紀の⽇本は，新しさと古さという単純な⼆項対⽴を混乱させた」と述べました．私たちの現実と⾝体は，過去の経験によって脅かされ，⼀⾒関係のない他の場所に影響されるのです．この意味で，私たちのテーマである「けがれ」は，この東北の地で⾏われる様々な話題にとって重要な⼿がかりになります．⾝体，精神性，巡礼，場所は，「けがれ」の伝統的な意味でも今⽇的な意味でも多くの点で相互作⽤を起こすでしょう．特にこの⻘森は恐⼭の地でもあります．⺠間信仰によれば恐⼭は地獄の⼊り⼝とされ，死者と交信する為に巡礼をする地でもあるのです．
この会議は，⼀年間続く，国際パーフォーマンス・スタディーズ学会（PSi）の連続シリーズである「PSi，流れる国：未知のためのパーフォーマンス」の⼀つです． ⻘森は，本州への出⼊り⼝であり，⽇本海と太平洋に突き出た⼆つの半島の中央に位置し，⽣命と死への狭間にあるという意味で，「流れる国」と⾔えましょう．私たちはこの⽇本最初の PSi の会合が，私たちの⽣命と⾝体を，「普通の」⽇常と「飼い慣らされた」⽇常という点から再検討
し，危機の時代にあってパーフォーマンスの⼒を，精神と⾁体の両⽅から検討する機会としたいと思います．

11Call for papers: Beyond Contamination: Corporeality, Spirituality, andPilgrimage in Northern Japan

Tohoku is a "fluid" site. It is the northern region of Japan, which lies between the Sea ofJapan and the Pacific Ocean. It is also a site of pilgrimages to Mt. Osore, which is locatedon a far North Eastern peninsula and known as a place of passage between life and death.
Our event focuses on this "between states" of crisis and passage. Among the questions
we wish to address are: What is the relationship of specific geographies to the identity ofa nation? How do certain regions become marked by strange or otherworldly qualities?
How do these myths of place contribute to the expansive history of a nation and the local
history of the inhabitants? What happens to the cultural ecology of a place when it isirreparably devastated and indefinitely quarantined? When disasters strike, whether
slowly or suddenly, human induced or nature driven, what are the ways we deal with theimmediate and long-term repair and change? What role have the arts played in this andother fluid states of crisis and recovery?

Following the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear melt down, Tohoku
experienced increased economic hardships, which added to its spiritual burden of being aplace of aversion. At the same time, the commitment of the local population to recovery
has gained increasing momentum. The concept “Beyond Contamination” in our title ispivotal to many aspects of our gathering. Our themes of corporeality, spirituality, andpilgrimage interact in many ways with traditional and contemporary ideas ofcontamination, its memorialization and the enduring spirit of the region.

While our location near the city of Aomori is not directly linked to the Fukushima nuclear
disaster, we are aware of its proximity to the triple disaster, not to mention Aomori’s own
nuclear plants, and its own eccentric reputation. It is a perfect site for our conference
event for many reasons. Among our related topics, we are interested in investigating
place-based crisis cultures, locally and globally. In what ways does local geography and its
12memorialized histories become part of national consciousness? In what ways does
disaster, human-made or otherwise, shift values and needs in the moment and overtime? How do these shifts change our ways of being in that place and in the world? How
do artists respond to large-scale disaster and its aftermath? What can art making do in
the continuing crisis of disaster? How do national enterprises use or abuse the arts intimes of devastation?

On an individual level, how does memory act on the devastating event? What are theworkings of memory and event? How can we create art that questions, moving us deeper
into the event and also allowing us perspective and critical distance? Memory, place,ancestors, actions all form a woven fabric of the event: How are these things sometimes
contaminated and in need of renewal? What can be "beyond" disaster, difficulty, and/or
the weight of time and place?

Tohoku is also the birthplace of butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi and avant-garde
playwright and director, Terayama Shuji. Both artists dealt directly with states of crisisand critical re-imagination of Japan. Our host institution, Keio University Art Center is therepository for the Hijikata Archive and our conference host site, Aomori Art Museum,holds a collection of Terayama's art works as well as artifacts of the ancient Jomon
culture of Japan.

We encourage researchers and performers to engage in discussions and interventions
around the key working group themes of: corporeality, performance, pilgrimage, andplace. This conference will afford us the opportunity to sound out and struggle with theborderlines between the extraordinary and the everyday, and how the arts in times ofcritical upheavals deal with political and spiritual crises.

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Conference dramaturgy
Katherine Mezur

One of our goals for PSi Tohoku was to have every participant engaged in the entire
conference and a variety of activities. In order to achieve this goal and facilitate individualand collective participation, our Fluid States cluster used a “working group seminar"model in addition to the keynotes and panel presentations. We had four WGs:
Corporeality, Performance, Place, and Pilgrimage. Each WG had a particular focus but all
related to our larger conference theme of "Beyond Contamination." Other sub-themes
developed as the WGs participants and curators worked together before and during theconference. The WGs framed the entire conference because their topics dealt with the
major issues of the cluster as a whole. In the CFP anyone could submit their paper or
performative event to the WGs of their choice. Once the participants were chosen, eachcurator set the dates for short paper/presentations to be submitted to the entire group
before the conference in order to set up the organization of the presentations. It was
important for everyone in each the WG to be familiar with each member's individual
topic before the conference. The curator of each WG facilitated the pre-conference
exchange by dividing presentations into small clusters or partners. The curator provided
an outline of working group structure and sequence of discussions and topics before theconference. These pre-conference preparations meant that WG members were familiar
with the presentations and their working group partners. Depending on the curator, eachparticipant had some time to present but the emphasis was on small clusters/partners
sharing their insights, then larger group discussions on r topics. We had three WG
sessions over three days of the conference and on the last day, each WG was invited topresent a summary or highlights of their activities. These working groups were like
concentrated seminars that included performance and video presentations. The WGs
became the heart of the conference and energized every moment between
presentations because WG members were meeting informally for their next gathering.

14

The WGs also contributed to making the conference more egalitarian and diverse, withequal emphasis on WGs, panels, performances and paper presentations.

15

Working Groups: Calls for Participation

Corporeality

Leader: Katherine Mezur

Inscribed on her skin as an initial sign of violent exteriority, the mark of radiation
eventually vanishes into Yasuko's body. … She has become an environment inside
out, radiating darkness. (Mizuta Lippit 110)

How do bodies perform during and after a catastrophe? What happens to our corporeal
memories of extreme physical duress as time passes? How do cultural practices shape,
censor, limit, and expand our physical capabilities in times of disaster or extreme
demands? How is disaster different from times of extreme pleasure or even 'near death'experiences? What connections are there between corporeality and sensuality/eroticism,or corporeality and spirituality, materiality and the vanishing, and other states of mind
and body connections and interactions? This conference's focal theme, "Beyond
Contamination," and its focal place, Tohoku, present an opportunity to consider thisworking group's theme, Corporeality, from perspectives that are rarely considered
because of the discomfort, distaste, and social, cultural, and political prohibitions related
to certain states of bodies in life, death, injury, illness, and recovery.

As part of this corporeal theme, our working group will consider how artists have dealt
with the catastrophic, where material conditions completely change lives and theenvironment they live in. We can see that artists' responses to the 2011 catastrophic
earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster of Japan have been hesitant, fitful, and then,overwhelmingly angry and contentious. The material places of Tiananmen Square, the9/11 Twin Towers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki all bring up questions concerning bodies,materiality, memory, and the lingering presence and absence of the catastrophic. Do
16these experiences, over time, change our corporeality? Catastrophes often reveal what
has been hidden and terrifying even before they occur: What conditions produce thisterror from within?

Our presentations focused on corporeality under duress. Contributions were encouraged
from all parts of the planet and comparative studies were welcome. We supported shortscenes or example performance works related to these topics. Corporeality is not limited
to humans or sentient beings. Filmic, robotic, animated, painted, sketched and literary
corporealities were included and sought to query our assumptions of materiality and ouracts of compliance, resistance, fluidity, and transformation in the face of the catastrophic.

Reference
Mizuta Lippit, Akira. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: UP, 2005.

Performance

Leader: Peter Eckersall

The Tōhoku region has long been a locus of performance, a place where the performing
arts mingle with otherworldly atmospheres and expressive landscapes. Hijikata Tatsumi’s‘Tōhoku Kabuki’ butoh performances expressed a longing for his Tōhoku home (furusato)even while they displayed a sense of estrangement and the impossibility of returning to
the past. In his collaboration with photographer Hosoe Eikoh, in ‘Kamaitachi’, the imagesof his performance are echoed by a second performative depiction of rural life in Akita.
Terayama Shūji was also from the North of Japan and drew on its sense of mystery in his
remarkable oeuvre of plays, poems and films. Tsugaru-jamisen is a percussive and boldly
rhythmic local style of playing shamisen. The annual Aomori Nebuta Matsui, with origins
as a purification rite, features large lanterns decorated with human faces and supposedly
accompanied by ecstatic dancing. Mt Osore is famed for blind itako who perform rituals
17

to communicate with the souls of dead people. All of these examples are performative
expressions of Tōhoku, perhaps something akin to what Derrida calls hauntology. This is
an idea of paradox, something ‘neither living nor dead, present nor absent’, andemphasizing the experience of liminality (Derrida 1994: 51). In light of this, the working
group might consider how ghosts, embodied states, community celebrations, andprotests arising in and inspired by Tōhoku have liminal qualities that continue to haunt us.

Combining expressive signs of phantasm, nostalgia and remoteness, Miyram Sas has
called Tōhoku ‘a discursive space of eternal repetition, a mise en abime of its own
continual reproduction and self-representation’ (Sas, 2011: 192).

Here Tōhoku isimagined not as a geographical place, but as a discursive space of performance thatrecirculates the potent presence of something not quite knowable. This is an effect thatis both evident in how the atmosphere of Tōhoku is experienced in performance andsomething sensed in the accumulation of the images and performances from the region.
Hence, Tōhoku grows in the mind as a place of transformation in the works of Hijikata,
Terayama and others. As Hijikata famously said, ‘Tōhoku is everywhere’ (Hijikata 2000:
41), perhaps sensing how Tōhoku exists in the imagination as a performative expressionof darkness.

In this working group, we explore how these ideas of performance enliven our cluster
theme. We welcome contributions on aspects of the live dramaturgical event (theatre,
performance, dance and butoh) as well as performance rituals, cultural historicalcontexts and what is broadly recognized as performance in everyday life.

Reference Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. New York: Routledge 1994.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. ‘Inner Material/Material’, The Drama Review, 44:1, 2000, 36-42.
Sas, Miyram. Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan. Harvard: Harvard East Asia Monograph
Series, 2011.

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Pilgrimage

Leader: Stephen Barber

Tohoku and notably Mount Osore have been destinations of pilgrimage for many
centuries - as evoked in Terayama Shuji's 1974 film Den-en ni shisu (Pastoral Hide andSeek); pilgrimage encompasses both the ongoing corporeal rigours of its journey and thedestination-site as re-envisioned at that journey's end. In performance terms, pilgrimage
often entails an engulfing transmutation of the body. Pilgrimage need not possess any
religious dimension, especially in the work of performers and performance theorists: we
can think of Antonin Artaud's apocalyptic pilgrimage to Inishmore island in 1937, Jean
Genet's pilgrimage to witness the residue of the Shatila massacre in Beirut in 1982, andHijikata Tatsumi's sequence of performative pilgrimages of 1965-68 to his home region of
Akita with the photographer Hosoe Eikoh for their Kamaitachi collaboration - all of thempilgrimages multiply documented in texts or images, as well as through performances.
Pilgrimage's journeys may be performed on foot or via other media, and may even form
anatomical transits into the body's interior zones; pilgrimage can be an autonomous andwillful act, or a forcibly imposed one, as in the abrupt expulsion, from the theatre space
into the street outside, of the audience for Romeo Castellucci's 2013 production

Hyperion. Japanese performance-artists and filmmakers contributing to the 2014 artexhibition Fukushima in Berlin directly conceived of their Fukushima journeys as
exploratory pilgrimages into contaminated space. In performance's domain, pilgrimages
can entail corporeal disintegration and fragmentation as well as ecstatic transfiguration
and revelation; they may lapse into malfunction and aberration while simultaneously
constituting durational, sacred trajectories. This working group will interrogate
performance's vitally distinctive rapport with pilgrimage in its widest, most open sense.

19PlaceLeader: Yasushi Nagata

How do the performances relate to the histories and people’s memories of those places?
And how do the performances reveal those histories and memories and pass them onto
the future generations? These topics merit a more detailed examination, given the many
types of traditional and contemporary or “site-specific” performances taking placearound the world. And also recent performance research has focused on the relationshipbetween performances and the places where they are performed.

The meeting of working group “Place” will be held in Tohoku, one of the areas in Japanthat have been considered as “Peripheral.” Today this region has very uniqueconnotations. On one hand, the historic, antiquated characteristics of the ancient Japan,
including the traditional customs and values that the Japanese people embraced before
the country became modernized. Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior) by
Matsuo Basho, celebrated Japanese Haiku poet, or Tōno Monogatari (Tales of Tōno) by
Yanagita Kunio, founder of Japanese folkloristic, described these indigenous manners,
mode of life, and ideas of past Japan. Though these customs and values are no longer
seen in most modern Japanese cities, many Japanese popular cultures, such as popular
Enka songs, Tsugaru Kaikyo Fuyugesiki (Tsugaru Strait - Winter Scene) or Hakodateno Hito
(A Woman in Hakodate), and TV drama series Mayuko Hitori (Lonely Mayuko) or

Amachan (Amachan) or so many have still depicted Tohoku area as an “Asylum” fromcollapse, fatigue, aging, depopulation and disaster of past. On the other hand, Tohoku
has had to face difficult current problems. The mega-earthquake of 11th March 2011, thesubsequent tsunamis, and especially the nuclear power plant accidents caused suchserious global consequences.

20

These unique aspects of Tohoku, encompassing both historical and current themes,
undoubtedly serve as a source of creative inspiration for Japanese dramatists or
performers from the region, such as Miyazawa Kenji, Dazai Osamu, Terayama Shuji,
Akihama Satoshi, Hijikata Tatsumi and many other contemporary performers.

It’s really meaningful that “Place” working group will hold a meeting here in this multilayered place of memory and past.

21

Corporeality Working Group Reflections
Katherine Mezur

There were twenty-five members in the Corporeality Working Group. When we entered
our workshop room on the 30th and 31st, the energy of the groups and pairs working out
their format, cutting and pasting and speculating, vibrated and echoed: Will this work?
Shall we perform then read? Will anyone understand what we are performing/doing,
imagining, sweating and theorizing?

We managed together because of our numbers to push ourselves into the lesscomfortable zone of summarizing and choosing what is at the heart of our material. Of
course that means there was dissatisfaction and the loss of the usual respect for scholarly
precision and details and the exacting movement techniques had to be politely ignored
for the more spectacular, fragmented, and strangely oriented presentations. That said,
we found new knowledge floated up from the "wrecks" of careful papers and the "cuts"
and mashing of movement sequences: we made our selves a very attentive andprovocative, public and collaborative ensemble of performance studies labor.

We focused on our corporeality themes of violence, contamination, extremes, new waysof critiquing empathy, alternative bodies, corporeality as marker of and marked bypolitics, ethics, memory, and imagination. Scarred by imagination? What's that? We also
pursued the big questions of art labor: what can artists do when working within acatastrophic zone? An important topic scattered among the papers had to do with whenartists can respond to disaster, violence: at the moment of catastrophe: Some said there
is a calming and focus on what is at hand, and others related that we can wait too long toact because we are too careful. What is the distancing of art making in the time ofdisaster about? How can art making create an immediate and intimate contact with the"contamination" of victims and destruction that does not shut down the viewers'
consciousness? In "beyond" disaster, how can artists keep making art but deal with not22

only the physical conditions of disaster, but also the more subtle persistence ofsurveillance and repression tactics? We also looked at specific artists and "corporealities"
whether in the midst of disasters or not, and suggested more radical ways for
performance and sensory knowing and unknowing, chaos and communication to unfold
and gain momentum in the "beyond" time and space. There were also some wonderfulrevisions of hegemonic performance tropes and histories, which we delightfully put on
trial with our collective group encounters.

Our Working Group was divided into dialogue groups, who then formulated theircollaborative method of presentation. The following is are collective remembered
responses by the Corporeality WG:

Fragments, Stones, Silences, Waves, Flashes, Tears
Shizuka Yamate

Quiet Room: existence of temporary body and verbs of earthquakes
Christopher Gregory

Slow Violence and Distant Bodies: Mediated Immediacy in Waiting for Godot at
Fukushima
Tanja London

Save your own skin: Is terror a kind of contamination?

Shizuka Yamate doused the lights and in that darkness we perhaps emptied our
preconceptions of what this WG was supposed to be. Aiming her flashlight at her own
face, we were forced to gaze at her, watch her every move, and listen to her narrative.
She unbuttoned her shirt, she unzipped pants, but no clothes came off. Where was she

23

taking us? Just as suddenly as the light switching on, she throws up the light. In "Quiet
Room" the deep chaos of earth and bodies screams.

Christopher Gregory takes advantage of the Quiet Room and walks us through aperformance of waiting and waiting in Godot's empty Fukushima road-scape. What doesit mean to perform Beckett's forever stagnant waiting? If Fukushima is an abandoned
town of invisible dis-ease, then the Beckett play can possibly be a world of beyond
contamination because as Christopher suggests, not much happens? Slow violence hides
its progress.

Tanja London stands before us asking us questions of terror. In art making we are forever
haunted by the "what if"? She reminds of the poisoning of terror, the contamination offear fictions in how we think and act. Does our caution become a habit of selfsurveillance? She describes our biology as a scaffold and somehow the outside-inside ofthis scaffolding can also be like a spider skin: we are hardware, software, wetware, andvulnerable and already always programmed.

Nadya Moretto D' Almeida

A portrait of the Japanese choreographer “Kaoru Ishii” around her recent activity Guerilla Dance

Megan Nicely

Critical Corporeality: Akira Kasai’s Butoh Practice as Social Action

Megan Nicely and Nadya D'Almeido are dancing theorists and historiographers. Theysuggest through their research on two dancers, which undo the stereotypes of "modern
dance" and "butoh" through their singular performance mutations and theories. They are
two rogue performers. D'Almeido's Kaoru Ishii, in her 80s, breaks from "modern dance"and creates site works against the norm. She is anti-easy pretty-ness. Ishii makes her own
24guerilla dances. We want to know more about this woman's physical crusade. Nicely
twists and turns with our favorite dualities and physical contradictions and turns these
into training methods and composition tools. She teases out the not not humanphilosophical knots with the butoh dancer/philosopher Akira Kasai's use of "excusial" life
forces that are not object forces, but vibrant matter. Perhaps. There is something about
how Kasai's mineral time relates to slow glacial durations. Megan brings in "voice power"
and the non-human voices in the 'body" and she reminds us of the stones in the film
presentation by Aomori Museum of Art Director and Curator, Okuwaki Takahiro: The
voice seemed to emanate from the mini-stone-henge?

Natalia DuongViệt and Đức: A Separation Embodying Transnational Unification

Bruce Baird

Pika-Don (Flash Bang) : Butô, Catastrophe, and the Power of Image

Natalia Duong sets off our empathy debate setting up a transnational territory between
Viet Nam and Japans across the bodies of Viet and Duc. Here corporealities are wreckedby Agent Orange's vampire drugs. What does "beyond contamination" mean anyway inthese doubled bodied circumstances? We are not sure of Susan Foster's cool Western
theories of kinaesthetic empathies here when there is a collaboration between Japanese
doctors and Vietnamese children. Then Japanese children are inspired by their images
and there is a song that is taught to Japanese children. Two Japanese scholars in our WGknow the song and hum the melody: Who can "cheer up" the weaker Viet, who dies in avegetable-like state when separated from his brother Duc? Are there ecologies of pity?
Ecologies of empathy? Is there an incommensurability to culture-based kinaesthetic
empathy? We need to be careful with the specificity of each and every corporeal
experience.

25

Bruce Baird re-awakened the most often used explanation by Western performance
history scholars and practitioners: how butoh came out the catastrophe of the US atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is: Whitened bodies equals ashen flesh,grotesque distorted faces are from victim or self-taught horror stories etc. Of course
most butoh scholars think this is a simplistic explanation and usually indicate theparticular circumstances of Hijikata Tatsumi's life and "times," his education, city life,
Ausdruckstanz, his family's dire state of starvation and his passion for dark European
literature alongside pop bar culture, which really negate the Hiroshima=butoh equation.
BUT Baird says: "wait a minute": a description or labeling of Hiroshima is Pika-Don orFlash Bang, to most Japanese. It seems that the A-bomb was a "…powerful audio-visualexperience, making the bomb a new media." So is butoh, after all, a white ash postmemory of the A-bomb? Or is it time to re-assess the butoh/bomb association? Baird
brought up one of the subthemes of the conference: the relationship of visual media toperformance and in particular the photograph to performance to the evaluation of
performance.

Voraz: Aura, Eugenia, and Teresa with Tanya and Sara on the green grass of Aomori.

Aura Arreola, Eugenia Vargas, Teresa Carlos"Voraz" [Ravenous] (Performance/presentation excerpt)

Tanya Calamoneri

Letting the Flesh Sing: Immediacy and Vibration in the Works of Hijikata Tatsumi and
Yoko Ono

Sara Jansen(Un)Timely Gestures: On the Themes of Return and Repetition in the Oeuvre of Hijikata
Tatsumi and its Reception
26

The violence of everyday hit us all hard when the Mexican dancers, Aura Arreola, Eugenia
Vargas, and Teresa Carlos fiercely bounded onto the open grass, with Tanya Calamoneri
and Sara Jansen sharing pages of their papers. The chaos that Nicely had spoken of
entered the carefully managed Working Group. We heard only fragments of Sarah's
careful dissection of time and return and the provocation of an old worn out"contemporary." Jansen's quiet revolutionary paper may be what unsettles the Hijikata
archive, and in turn, any history that is left after these 20 years of too-fast social media.
But Calamoneri reminds us of the physicality of performance, even if we do get confused,trying hard to respect everyone's "beyond" contamination concept. Calamoneri mixes
Yoko Ono and Hijikata writing and performing into the vibration of material art labor. We
know it is based in training patterns and we see the Vargas, Carlos, and Arreola roll theireyes upwards, climbing into their own totem stack of bodies. But there is something
about how gesture speaks the text loudly and clearly, with multiple scales of meanings.

Ya-ping Chen Exorcism through Corporeal Resonance: Disease, Torture, Trance

Fran Lloyd Being in the World: Corporeality and Strategies of Intervention in the

Performative works of Chikako Yamashiro

Ya-ping Chen and Fran Lloyd divide their papers so we are driven by doubled forces ofrecall and two artists who encounter martial, postcolonial, terror, and mental andphysical torture, which they turn on themselves to do what Chen calls a reconfigurationof perception with mind/physical acts. For both presentations their artists take us into
disturbing sensorial conditions, which the scholars frame and carefully detail, but physical,
the kinaesthetic empathy overwhelms and our debate ensues… can art do this? Do wehave to see the wounding and trancing from pain? Do we have to feel like we aredrowning or even swallowing the voice of an elderly male soldier? We are disturbed andno longer safe. This is activism in small intense acts. The brilliance of artists who press
27

into the moment at the moment of encounter, body to body, must be heard, seen, andendured. Do we have to look? Do we have to ingest? What cannot be re-enacted? What
does their media do to the live and now dead performance acts?

Michael Larson

Of God and Water

Samantha Marenzi

Body as place of poetry: memory and imagination in Antonin Artaud

Siriol Joyner & Ariana Jordão

We are water carriers: Committing our bodies to transformation in places of sacredness
and contamination

Larson takes us into his personal and public writing on the first few months of recovery
processes in NE coastal Tôhôku. While it seems distant, on his arrival to clean up wholetowns of bodies and debris, we are brought close-in by his grandfather's death backhome. We move into macro and micro mourning and views: We still want to hear thepolitics of his work crew, the survivors, the re-call of disaster, without the big wave
video…and with time, a close reading of close and distant grief.

Samantha Marenzi marches us outside and into the labyrinth of the museum's sunken
dark brown dike-like walls. Humans become small and we are pressed into one nearly
enclosed section: we are incarcerated with Artaud. We are sucked into a kind of vortex oftime past, another post-memory, when Marenzi reminds us that Artaud no longer moves.
We are told that it is in these last days of immobility that Artaud comes back to life
through his other body of imagination. We have that wrong, she means memory,
Artaud's body is imagination. Marenzi has us in a thrall among walls: She says that breath28becomes life. This puts speech into Artaud 's body. His theatre is a body showing. Do
angels fall up?

Siriol Joyner and Ariana Jordão remind us that we have a mother tongue and that manyof us talk in body tongues. We are on the grass again, on another plateau, looking out toforests, distant buildings. They place clothe on the ground with ritual objects. Each object
gets used and is named in several languages. They remind us that we are in "constantconversation with the environment." They gesture in directions with the small objects
and tell us about a beautiful island off the coast of Wales that is a sacred island, like theOsoresan area we have visited. The Welsh island, Mon, is a pilgrimage site, and like
Aomori it has a nuclear power plant site. We are aware of the beauty and its
contamination. Not unlike shaman and itako, they seem to speak to us through anotherworld: Joyner and Jordão teach us that we can decontaminate irradiated soil and air withwoodchips and planting and growing mushrooms. This small group around the small
clothe of ritual objects remind us of how we can turn the exclusion zone of nuclear
disaster into a recovery zone of art labor.

Lushan Liu

Borderland Journey

Saiko T. Kase

Life-time Project

Lushan Liu and Saiko T. Kase bring us back to Osoresan and the different ways that one
can measure our lives and our deaths. Lushan Liu takes us through her Borderland
Journey: back and forth, to and from China and Japan. Does she have two mothertongues? We see that one presentation may bleed into the next. We have very little time
to absorb in this working group but both of these women give us time to just wait
there/here witnessing. They leave open gaps of silence and just watching. Liu's
29photography presentation reminds us of processes of making prints when we look at her
family picture under water, water of the straits or water of memory or water of journeys
or water of nourishment? Or water of drowning? Migration is a deep topic and present
every moment in our time here. We are all so driven by journeys. Liu is involved in a postmemory project with survivors of the tsunami and Fukushima disaster.

Saiko Kase's parents and a friend have come especially to perform witnessing in her
yearly signing ritual. Kase's ritual is at the end of a long day. Everyone is a bit numb withnew ideas and questions. We are restless but immobile, waiting and witnessing theinscriptions of these parents, friend, and child. In Japan they do not "sign with signatures"
but with a tiny chop or stamp that has your family name in kanji or characters. It may be
distinctive or not. Unlike a signature, it is the same every time depending on the ink andthe surface of the paper, but not your hand's tension. Kase has asked us to witness thesigning of her yearly life/death cycle, but she could not talk to us about her ritual. We
leave sadly and silently and exhausted. Disaster is close to home. Liu and Kase remind usof the contracts with make with life and death.

Ashton Lazarus

Folk Performance After 3/11: Agriculture, Ideology, and Locality

Mariko Okada

Dance for Consolation

Wei Zhang

Nationwide Public Square Dancing in Post-Socialist China
Mariko Okada dares to re-mark history with Japanese dancing that is done for rituals,
efficacy, and marking time on the planet. Her key words like "consolation" are presented
to provoke. It is Okada's mission to undo the acceptable. Her research undermines the"folk" ideas of consolation. She suggests these dances just may not be doing30

"consolation" at all, but perhaps a kind of revolt. She reconsiders "memorial" andmemorial performances as activist sites of encounter. Her suggestion that the surviving
folk performances today in Tôhôku may have a great deal to do with dis-consolation,even by hiding sorrow, great loss dances death best in public.

Ashton makes us consider the agricultural mythology of Tôhôku and other imaginary nonurban lands. He explores agrarian fundamentalism, but with more time, we needed hisrich histories. We keep thinking of learning about the subversive dengaku (field dances)that led to more and more infractions because of their "wildness and abandon." We
wanted to match this up with Okada's subversive consolation dances. Still our point of
the general population's idea of Tôhôko after the triple disaster needs to be addressed
here and again. Even as we gather here, we are aware of Fukushima and the tsunami
towns and how the black wave swept in and in and in forever. Is the tsunami a kind of
dengaku dance? Is this a massive dance of nature overwhelming the planet? But this useof the folk material, especially the collective dancing, requires careful consideration andreworking into our ethnographies and theories of making art and research.

Wei Zhang brought us to China's public squares where collective dancing and exercising ispart of daily life, except that the government uses surveillance and suppression to control
these practices when they become too popular, too moving. We questioned how thepresent post-socialist government is managing this increasingly charged and active
collectivity of dancers. These group dances appear to be for the public good: public
fitness, collective activity, aesthetic pleasure in a social space, but these are gradually
being regulated. Can the collective public go underground with its dancing?

Holger HartungIn the light of catastrophe

Jennifer Clarke
31Invisible Matters: Art and Anthropology in Tohoku

Holger Hartung and Jennifer Clarke alternated reading and visual presentations: we getpushed between art practices, cultures, and post-destruction contexts. Hartung blasted
us with the atomic light of shadows and memory in Japan. We move from the 1960s
quickly to the present: what does that say about what is contemporary trauma and what
is memory? He has us rip a piece of paper and remember how that divided material wassomehow ruined and ruins and the interval or space between. We are all implicated inthis tear. Hartung introduces Naoko Tanaka, a contemporary performance artist, whoreminds us of how darkness is the interval between states of light or is it the other way
round? We meet Clark's young Japanese artists who are bordering on art andremembering trauma. I see her blue prints made with long exposures (photography reenters) with living plants. She makes a garden of slow blue memories. Hartung brings usback to the flashlight, the flash of light, and he asks us to re-vision vision. Clarke makes us
start making visions. How far and for how long can we perceive traces of a body? We
have to hold onto thoughts between Hartung and Clarke, or let them float and see if theideas need an author or not. Hartung reminds us that we are in Japan and we can rethink"light" just as we rethink "temporality" across time zones, taking our bodies back into thevisual field. How do we mix this with Clarke's slow blue ecology and how much invisible
matters?

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PAPERS33

Re-Vision: Waste and Memory in Post-War Japanese Visual Art

Gunhild Borggreen

The title word of my paper, Re-Vision, is an attempt to include two perspectives in one
concept: one perspective is the notion of evaluation, adjustment, and change associatedwith the word revision. The other perspective refers to vision as an act of visual
perception and imagination, for which the prefix ‘re-’ suggests alternative, new, orrevised ways of seeing and imagining. Speaking of vision and visuality, we also need toaddress phenomena in everyday life that are made invisible, all the things that go unseen.
My emphasis on vision is also a reference to Victor Turner, who in his book The

Anthropology of Performance (1986) speaks of a performative reflexivity as a condition inwhich a sociocultural group turn, bend or reflect back upon themselves, and upon thesociocultural components which make up their public ‘selves’. They become active
agencies in the social and cultural processes of transformation, and represent what
Turner calls ‘the eye by which culture sees itself’ (Turner 1986, 24).

The crossover between anthropology and art has been formulated as ‘the ethnographic
turn’ in contemporary art by a number of art critics. According to Hal Foster in his book

The Return of the Real (1996), the emergence of the ethnographic turn in contemporary
art evolves around the issue of authenticity and reflexivity. In the 1980s, anthropologists
developed what Foster calls an ‘artist envy’ because the artist was seen as a ‘self-aware
reader of culture understood as text’ (Foster 1996, 180). Foster identifies a similar‘ethnographer envy’ among artists, who aspire to use fieldwork as a meeting place fortheory and practice. According to art critic Miwon Kwon, ethnography became amethodological approach for artists working with ‘politics of representation’ because theparticipant observation methods in traditional ethnography promises a dialectical
position of both experience and interpretation (Kwon 2000, 75).
34

In their recent article on art and ethnography, Larissa Hjort and Kristen Sharp describe
contemporary art practices that focus upon socially engaged interventions as an echo of
the counter-artefact and political philosophies of many art movements from the 1960s.
While socially collective art activities aim to engage local communities and non-artist
participation, Hjort and Sharp argue that such public engagements are less focused on a
specific political outcome, and rather ‘allow for aesthetic as well as socioculturalreflection about the changing environment’ (Hjort and Sharp 2014, 133).

In the following presentation I focus on how Japanese artists as members of a society
function as this ‘eye by which culture sees itself’. By observing, digesting and visualising
the sociocultural performance of everyday life, artists propose means of evaluating andrevising the way society handles on-going issues related to time, space, and memory. The
artworks I use as examples today are works that address issues of crisis andcontamination, most of them related to the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power
plant in March 2011, but also other recent events that reveal the precariousness andvulnerability of the human body. This approach might allow for discussions afterwards ofsome of the topics suggested by the organisers of this conference: how do people deal
with disaster, large or small? How does changes in the environment affect the cultural
ecology of place? And what is the role of the arts in the fluid states of crisis and recovery?

Photography and film lends itself easily to the crossover field of art and ethnography
because of the documentary style that many ethnographers and anthropologists use in
their field work. The works by media and performance artist Keiko Courdy that we havejust seen is an example of an artist working exactly in this ‘eye’ of culture. Using
documentary style and the interview format for her films, Keiko Courdy has talked withpeople who live their everyday life in disaster areas after the earthquake and tsunami inNorth-eastern Japan in March 2011. While the people in her films speak about theirthoughts and experience with their own language, Keiko Courdy uses the language of film
35

aesthetics to frame and interpret their statements and provides a space for viewers toreflect and digest the ethnographic accounts and their social and political consequences.

I was especially moved by the young high school student Yamada Risa who appears in
one of Keiko’s videos. The young woman lives with her family in Minami-Soma, 20 km
from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant. She seems to be aware that theradioactive contamination from the power plant is dangerous for her and her family’s
health, but as she says, ‘when you live here, you don’t think so much about radiation’.
The contamination itself is invisible and odourless, and has no immediate sensuous effecton the body.

So if the core of the sociocultural concern that the artist wants to address is in factinvisible, how, then, can the phenomenon be visualized and, in extension, contribute to
the critical and reflexive act of ‘seeing’? I propose that such artworks are tied to ‘place’ incertain ways because the geophysical site provides an anchorage for the corporeal
embodiment of experience and memory. More importantly, such artworks are tied tocontamination as a ‘materiality’ which is invisible and ephemeral, and which therefore
renders embodiment as index rather than as representation. I will elaborate on thisnotion of index as performance by focusing on the protection suit or the hazmat suit as acase example, so let me first give you some examples of hazmat suit artworks fromvarious contemporary Japanese artist:

In 1964, the artist group Hi Red Center performed the happening Be Clean! in the streetsof Ginza in downtown Tokyo. The work is a humorous comment on the city government’s
call for everyone in Tokyo to clean up the city in advance of the Olympic Games to beheld in Tokyo that same year. The photo documentation of the happening shows thegroup members as they meticulously clean parts of the public sidewalk, and the lab coats,masks and gloves they wear function as a protection suit of sorts associated with a36science lab. By their intervention, Hi Red Center challenges the city authorities by
exaggerating what constitutes a ‘clean city’ versus a ‘dirty city’.

Mikami Seiko created the installation Suitcases in 1993. The work includes a conveyer
belt like the ones you find in airports, and on top the artist has placed a number ofsuitcases with see-through covers, revealing various sorts of dangerous materials insidesuch as hazardous biochemical material or needles used for handling contagious virus.
Mikami makes visible some of the consequences of globalization in the risk society due toincreasing international air travels and the way in which diseases are spread or
biochemical and radioactive materials are traded and transported across the globe. In an
exhibition entitled Information Weapons: Super Clean Room from 1990, the artist is
dressed for protection, with her body and most of her face concealed in a hazmat suit ina dramatic setting of blue and yellow light. The exhibition took place at a research facility
with a specially built clean room, and audiences had to wear white protective clothing
when they visited the exhibition.

Another hazmat suit image was produced by the artist Fukuda Miran in her artwork
entitled Metro Cards in 1995. We see personnel of the Self Defence Agency dressed inprotection suits and gasmasks cleaning the platforms of Kasumigaseki metro station inTokyo. In this work, the artist produced a number of pre-paid metro cards affixed withimages pulled from the media around the time of the sarin gas attack by the fanatic
religious group Aum shinrikyô on several metro lines and stations in Tokyo in March 1995.
While the contamination released by the perpetrators was not without instant deadly
effect on human bodies in this case, it was the insignificant and almost invisible
appearance of the poisonous liquid that caused so many people to be harmed before
actions where taken by the authorities. It is the invisibility of the action that creates theterror, and the hazmat suits of the Self Defence Agency personnel become complicit by
way of the index because they remind us of the precariousness of everyday life.

37

Another artist dealing with the invisibility of hazardous material is Yanobe Kenji. One of
his first so-called wearable sculptures is this one, Yellow suit, from 1991. The work consistof a protection suit again radiation for Yanobe himself and his dog, made of lead, and too
heavy for the human body to actually carry. The work was made in direct response to an
accident at the Mihama nuclear power plant in 1991. Yanobe further develops theprotection suit, and with the more mobile and less uncomfortable version from 1997,
Yanobe embarks on a journey to the city of Pripyat in the former Soviet Union, the citywhich was abandoned overnight in 1986 because of the accident at the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant. Arriving 11 years after the disaster, Yanobe travels through theghost town and poses in the midst of rusty amusement parks, scattered remains ofchildren’s playrooms, and other heaps of unintended junk.

Yanobe meets people living in Pripyat: the chock of bodily exposure, and his own identity
crisis as an artist. In an interview, he confesses the profound doubt he had when
encountering the 3 year old boy living his everyday life in the reality of a highly
contaminated environment. What should Yanobe do: take off the protection suit in orderto ‘meet’ and confront the ‘reality’ of the child on equal level, or to keep wearing theprotection suit and maintain the role of the artist, committed to the art project? He
decided on the latter, but apparently, this specific situation evolving around theembodiment of the hazmat suit - to wear it or not to wear it - was a defining moment in
the artist’s self-understanding.

Other artists have made personal travels to a site of danger and put their body at risk inthe physical encounter with the invisible materiality of radiation. The artist group
Chim↑Pom has made numerous artworks and projects related to the post Fukushima
conditions, among these a video piece entitled REAL TIME. The video is a documentary
recording of two Chim↑Pom members dressed in hazmat suits trespassing high-security
areas around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and walking along a road clearlydamaged by the earthquake while they approach a scenic lookout point near the power
38

plant. The video was recorded on April 11, 2011, exactly one month after the disasteroccurred, and there are no other human beings to be seen on the site. The two persons
arrive at the lookout point where the smoke from the power plant can be seen in the
background, and they take out a white flag on which they spray-paint with red first alarge dot, symbolizing the Japanese national flag, and then adding three triangles aroundso the symbol transforms into the hazard symbol of ionizing radiation. Chim↑Pom also
made another work, in which one of the group members (Mizuno Toshinori) worked
undercover as a day labourer in a clean-up team. Standing in front of the damaged
reactor building dressed in hazmat suit, he holds up the red card as to indicate ‘gameover’.

In 2011, an individual called ‘the Finger pointing man’ was employed by TEPCO in theclean up team, and one day this person appeared in front of one of the surveillancecameras put up around the power plant, and for 15 minutes just stood there, pointing his
finger directly at the camera. The camera was feeding directly into live streaming on theinternet. According to analyses by art critic Sawaragi Noi, this intervention could havebeen performed by the artist Takeuchi Kōta, as it matches other earlier finger-pointing
performances by him, but Takeuchi has apparently never openly acknowledged that hewas the finger pointing man (Sawaragi 2014). With a conceptual and visual reference toVito Acconci’s video work Centers (1971) the activist gesture is also a re-enactment of apiece of performance art. Where Acconci used the video camera as a mirror at which hepoints his finger at himself, Takeuchi, (or whoever it is) would use his mobile phone tomonitor the live feed from the TEPCO surveillance camera on the internet and thereby
also be monitoring or pointing at himself. But in effect, of course, what the viewers see
and experience is the finger pointing out towards the spectator.

So let me return to the index. I am highly inspired by an article by media scholar Kris
Paulsen entitled ‘The Index and the Interface’ (2013) in which Paulsen discusses the
ontological status of digital photography. Paulsen draws upon the semiotics of Charles S.
39

Peirce, in which three basic types of signs can be outlined like this: a sign is an icon when
the relation to the object to which the sign refers is through resemblance. A sign is asymbol when it relates to its object through agreed upon conventions. The third type ofsigns, the one relevant for my argument, is the sign as index. According to Peirce, theindex is ‘a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object by virtue of being connected with
it as a matter of fact’ (Paulsen 2013, 85). The usual way of exemplifying index is to saythat smoke rising on the horizon is an index of a distant fire. Perhaps we can use thisimage to visualize the smoke as index. Or we can say that debris is an index of a tsunami.
A pointing finger indexes something to be seen. My argument is that we can also
understand the hazmat suit as an indexical sign of the invisible and ephemeral materialityof contamination such as hazardous biochemical matter, sarin gas, or nuclear radiation.
The hazmat suit is ‘a real thing’ which is connected to its object, the contamination, ‘as a
matter of fact.’

Paulsen points out that the most significant trait of indices is their temporal element
because an index is always created simultaneously with the action or event it refers to,even if the index may first be encountered after the fact. Hereby, Paulsen argues, indicesare ‘indicators of the present, not the past’ (Paulsen 2013, 92). Indices need to bepresent in a contextual situation in order to be perceived as signs in the first place. So
even if the hazmat suit we see is a sign of events happened in the past, it relates to us
because we are interpreting the sign now, today. Furthermore, Paulsen points out aconcurrence between Peirce’s concept of indices and Roland Barthes’ concept ofpunctum by emphasizing the ‘urgent, forceful and sensuous’ way in which both summon
the attention of the viewer. Both Peirce and Barthes understand this connection as anaffective and almost physical relationship between the referent and the receiver by using
the double meaning of the word ‘touch’: where Barthes talks about being ‘touched’ byphotography, he refers to the notion of punctum (as something that ‘pricks’ or ‘bruises’
the receiver) (Paulsen 2013, 93). For Peirce, it is the way in which the sign touches its
interpreter that makes a sign an index. He writes that the sign ‘forcefully intrudes upon40

the mind’. The index is both a sign but also an event which transfers an existential
relationship from the referent to the receiver. As Paulsen sums up: ‘the index is a signthat calls all three terms - sign, referent, and receiver - into a contextual, present-tense
situation.’(Paulsen 2013, 95).

The hazmat suit is a powerful image because of the way in which it forces a connection
between the object and the mind of the receiver by virtue of its indexical property. It calls
upon the viewer to relate to its object, the contamination, across space and time,
demanding the viewer to pay attention. When artists like those I have talked about today
use the hazmat suit in their work, it is not only to protect their own bodies at the site of adisaster, but also as a means to activate the power of the indexical quality of the hazmat
suit as a sign. By doing so, they establish an affective relationship to the viewer that spans
across temporal distance and intrudes itself forcefully upon the mind of the viewer. At
the same time, the hazmat suit as an index also points to its own ambiguity andvulnerable status, because, as Paulsen also argues, the indexical sign is an ‘ephemeral,
doubtful and distant sign’ that is merely a symptom. A symptom indexes something, butwhat that something is can be unclear or have multiple explanations. Indices need to be
decoded. Indices are signs in need of contextual or supplementary information. Whatkind of fire causes the smoke? What is the finger actually pointing at? Whatcontaminations causes these bodies to wear protection suits and gasmasks? The viewer
need to decode the sign, to figure out what this signs indicates, and hereby becomeaware of the vulnerability of the sign itself as well as the event or phenomenon to which
it refers.

The artworks by the contemporary artists I have presented in this talk are examples of
how artists provide the opportunity to experience and interpret topics related toconcerns of everyday life such as contamination. They do so not by representation, but
by applying the embodiment of the protective clothing and hazmat suit as an index. The
role of the artist is to become an active agency in the social and cultural processes during
41

times of crisis and recovery, and represent what Turner calls ‘the eye by which culture
sees itself.’

References

Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.
Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Hjorth, Larissa, and Krisen Sharp. 2014. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or
ethics of participation?” Visual Studies 29(2): 128-135.
Kwon, Miwon. 2000. “Experience vs. Interpretation: Traces of Ethnography in the Works
Ethnographicof Lan Tuazon and Nikki S. Lee.” In Site-Specificity: The
Turn, edited by Alex Coles. London: Black Dog.
Paulsen, Kris. 2013. “The Index and the Interface.” Representations 122: 83-109.
Sawaragi Noi. 2014. “Notes on Art and Current Events 39”. Accessed 5 August 2015.
http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_contri9/Sd0YV1axJMNszmy9IGCW/
Turner, Victor. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ

Publications.

Gunhild Borggreen is Associate Professor in Visual Culture at University of
Copenhagen. Focusing on nationhood and performance in contemporary Japanese art
and visual culture, Gunhild has published in journals such as Performance Review and

Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, and is co-editor of Performing Archives / Archivesof Performance (2013).

42

Fluid Corporealities: Hijikata Tatsumi’s Bodies Trembling between States of Crisis

Katja CentonzeThis paper concerns the contiguous spaces between the writing practice and the dancing
practice of Hijikata Tatsumi.
In 2009 the 15th Performance Studies International Conference (Zagreb, June 24-28)
faced the complex problem of ‘MISperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading’. Whatcame to the fore, were emerging agendas that radically discussed the error within theory
in relation to a ‘mis-performativity of transmission of knowledge and of its lecturemachine, of the very academic format of the conference’ (Čale Feldman 2010, 2). One ofthese was the urgency for a new vocabulary, while the existing one was challenged by a‘provocative terminology coinage’ that attempted to re-position the status of rhetoricand the notion of subjectivity itself (ibid.). The nature of illegibility which affects the bodyand corporeality was inevitably under examination. This challenge denounces a shareduneasiness about approaches to performance studies nowadays, and shows the strong
necessity for exploring new tools that might reduce the distance between theory andpractice, the body and discourse.1
Performance studies and dance studies are young research fields, and the most recent is
the latter. Dance research, as defined by Janet Lansdale, ‘is very much a newcomer as adiscipline’ (Lansdale 2010, 158) and it has given rise to continuously new challenges inanalytic approaches to movement and choreography from the 1980s and, more
pronouncedly since the 1990s. Many debates are still open and it is a difficult task tosolve theoretical and methodological problems that arise from the encounter between
scholarship and choreutic arts, the area which visibly manifests a very high degree ofcomplexity in its survey.

1

Problems concerning the discourse on the body are felt strongly by a large group of theorists working inmany areas.

43

The specific cluster of problems we encounter, when dealing with Hijikata’s art, is oftranslating dance, translating corporeality, translating Japanese, translating Hijikata’s
hermetic texts.2
Stemming from Japanese studies, since the ’90s I have been trying to demonstrate, thatthe investigation of Hijikata’s praxis and writings may open up new perspectives on theencounter between dance and discourse, the body and words, and that the explosion ofissues relating to corporeality, and the questions they embrace, have been investigatedby Hijikata. In my works I also discuss how the fibre and fabric of movement in butō
praxis, if viewed from a certain perspective (Centonze 1998; 2013), pertains to a different
order from that of contemporary dance and many other types of experimental
performance, i.e., butō may belong to a register that necessarily requires not only a new
language of criticism, but a specific thermometer of corporeal sensitivity. In my opinion

butō, in particular, requires a new formulation of its survey, due to its paradoxicalcharacter.

Especially during the ’60s Hijikata’s butō unfolds as a 'terroristic act', and the corporeal
matter, he works on, appears as a minefield and site of critique against the socio-politicalsystem and the pervasive commodification of existence. Hijikata condenses the critical
corporeality and the crisis of the post-war body in a revolutionary project enacting a
resistance to post-war politics.
The complex operation of dance aesthetics undertaken by Hijikata is considered here inlight of his radical exploration and diversification of corporeality as it was dissected into
multi-layered nuances, which manifest subtle and changeable spectra in a polysemousinterplay.
Within this landscape emerges the nikutai (the carnal body), i.e., the anarchic
corporeality or the starting point of the adventure of butō’s history. Besides the nikutai
Hijikata fleshes out the suijakutai (the weakened body, the altered body, or, as I define it2

My politics of translation is trying to avoid as much as possible a contamination of the original source,even if this means sacrificing the final textual aesthetics.

44

here, the contaminated body),3 the shitai (the dead body), jintai (the human body), mi(body), karada (body), etc.4 As, for example, Hijikata writes:'The nikutai’s voice, inside which are buried an infinite number of chasms [sakeme],
is something as if you would wrap in a handkerchief anew the scream from thematerial. This happens often in the civilisation inside the body [karada]. Who is thecreator of the overconfidence in transforming into flesh and blood? The pure spirit
and the dim soul gazed at by the nikutai, which is divinity of flesh [niku no kami] andraw dream, cry with a faltering voice, hand in hand under the collapse while still
pending up in the air as ever…' (Hijikata 1969, 35; my translation. Cfr. alsotranslation in Centonze 2010, 116)

Hijikata’s radicalism and deep concern for the body manifested in his performative
practice penetrates into verbal landscape enforcing the revolutionary act of his art,
where bodies are taken in extreme situations, and threat and risk are displayed on thechoreographic level by, for example, unbalance, instability and entropic forces (Centonze2013).
Hijikata’s obscure literature goes beyond rhetoric. We see confirmed in it, the way thebodies, as conceived by the dancer, condense states of crisis turning into critical
corporealities. The body itself is questioned. While dealing with bodies/corporealities in
his texts, he applies distinguished terminologies in differing contexts, connoting case bycase the specific materiality and matter of the body. For this purpose Hijikata treatswords as bodies and opens up the same word to continually new meaning. His 'bodily
writing' (Foster 2010) confers corporeality to words and creates synaesthetic texts which
are multidimensional and involve all senses.

3

The suijakutai may be also viewed in in contrast to Harald Kreutzberg’s vigorous physicality (Centonze
2015, 104-108).
4
For the construction of disparate corporealities see Centonze 2010.

45

The critical body or body of crisis (Centonze forthcoming) is revealed in Mishima Yukio’s
text ‘Kiki to buyō’, written in 1960, when the definition butō was not yet in use.
Mishima’s literature on the avant-garde dance is without any doubt one of the mostintuitive group of texts written about Hijikata’s dance preannouncing the main traits of its
development.5'He said that, an example that seizes this posture of crisis—and it is a very
singular example—is ‘a man who urinates in a standing position seenfrom behind’.' (Mishima translated in Centonze 2012, 224)

We may say that the novelist was confronted with an artistic reality characterised by thepotential to display concretely what its intentions and desires are, and by the actual andcarnal manifestation of a discourse that goes beyond words. In fact, he often puts
emphasis on the actuality (akuchuarite) of the performative act in Hijikata’s creations(Centonze 2012, 224).

The de-figured body seen from behind becomes a topos in Hijikata’s anti-dance, where
the main territory is occupied by the rear which replaces face, head and hands whichare/were the usual vehicles of expression. This implies that together with the erasure of
the face and hands, expression is also erased (see Centonze 2013; forthcoming).
As he declares in his programme notes for Kinjiki nibusaku (1959):'The execution of the action will be done all at once without bending thedomesticated articulations. The expression of this body writhing in agony under thestrict restriction of the bar [bōjō], will be reoriented from the face to the back. The
promotion of the prioritised back to carry out a very important role, in consequenceof this drama in which all the evil comes from the rear, the chest, which circles, thechest which moves slowly, and the chest which flies high around and must land, are5

For Mishima’s writings on avant-garde dance see Centonze 2012; forthcoming.

46

equivalently used.' (Hijikata 1959; my translation. Cfr. translation in Centonze
forthcoming)

Hijikata divests not only the body in his art, but he undresses also words (naked words,
naked body) often through a mix of cruelty or apparent sarcasm and his dry realism.
Hijikata goes further: he eradicates and opposes one’s/his own physicality which isconditioned, shaped, formed, informed, domesticated by the system or by dance
formulas.

A further important aspect in Hijikata’s revolution, enucleated by Mishima ante litteram,is the relation between the body and the object, which is exemplified by the dancer as apatient affected by poliomyelitis, who tries to catch an object. Mishima envisages in thisrelation a process of estrangement and detects the thing (mono) as a dreadful thing-initself (monojitai).
I think that, what is described by Mishima, can be connected and extended to thatspecific corporeality of the hagurete iru nikutai, often mentioned by Hijikata. Hagurete

iru nikutai is the carnal body which has become lost, errant/wandering/roaming,
disoriented, the body of which we lose control, which has lost control, alienated from
itself, detached from the bonds which govern society and the individual, divorced fromsubjectivity and from the person herself/himself. Such a body cannot be subjected either
to choreutic methodology, or to “readable” kinetic configurations or dynamics oriented
towards a goal with an aprioristic and distinguishable point of departure and arrival. It
belongs to the non-oriented and non-directed gesture and to the de-figuration of thesystemic organisation of choreography (Centonze forthcoming). It has also a strong
connection to what Hijikata defines as the mumokutekina nikutai, the nikutai without anaim, aimless nikutai or, as I call it, the atelic nikutai, which operates against the society of
productivity. This mumokutekina nikutai is at the centre of his dance, as he declared in'Keimusho e' (1961, 46; Centonze 2010, 118-119), and may be linked to immobility(Centonze forthcoming).
47

Mishima isolates a crucial characteristic, which I consider as the Copernican Revolution
actuated by Hijikata, i.e. the non-dialectic between the body and the object and themanipulation of the nikutai in respect to the object. Hijikata obliterates the hierarchy
among human being, animal and object, dismissing an anthropocentric vision of dance interms of human expression.
Ichikawa Miyabi focuses on this nikutai/object relation and discerns in Hijikata’s dance anoperation, which he defines as the nikutaika sareta mono, or the nikutaised thing(Centonze 2014, 96-100; forthcoming).

Hijikata reserves a peculiar attention also to natural crisis underlining the difference
between his region, Tōhoku, and the city. He relates natural calamity and disasters tospecific corporealities, in particular to the bodies of children. Without rhetorical gloss,
Hijikata focuses on the situation of natural catastrophe and the infant body surpassing
the possibility of moral judgment. As far as I have observed, the infant body is denoted by
Hijikata throughout his texts with the term karada or shintai and never with the term

nikutai:'Natural disasters and children are connected. There are many children considered
to be the appendix to natural disasters. It is a natural disaster when they are swept
away by illness, as well when a mochi gets stuck in their throat. Children are
standing next to natural calamity. They scream, not because they have found their
hat or one of their shoes has fallen, but rather because they cannot find their body[karada].
I have made the experience, one after the other, of being nearly thrown into theiron pot, but I was not able to have such a natural disaster in the city. Speaking
about natural disasters reminds me of the flood. Together with the flood come thecorpses of drowned children [kodomo no suishitai], and when the children’s white48

swollen belly comes drifting, it gives a cool sensation.' (Hijikata 1969, 33; mytranslation)

This excerpt is taken from 'Nikutai ni nagamerareta nikutaigaku' (The study on the nikutai
scrutinised by the nikutai, 1969). This essay enacts a concrete movement from text
towards the carnal body.
As the title highlights, Hijikata operates an inversion of the rapport between the nikutaiand the discourse on the nikutai: it is not the study of the body that observes the body,but here the body observes the cognitive practice and research. Present dance studies
punctuate this very aspect: the body of the observer or scholar is epistemologically
included in the analysis (see for example, Rothfield 2010; Foster 2010). In contemporary
terms we may say that Hijikata accomplishes what dance studies and performancestudies recently claim: to bring back corporeality to its corporeal sense.
'Nikutai ni nagamerareta nikutaigaku' embraces stratified observations, perceptions andcognizance concerning bodies, and is an important key to access Hijikata’s conception ofdiverse corporealities, as well as their intriguing rapport with language, with the verbal
and rational universe. It may be considered an investigation ante litteram of several
issues posed by recent dance theory. Moreover, this text came out in the special number

Nikutai to gengo (Nikutai and language) of Gendaishi techō (October 1969), preceded by
the September number (1969) including Kasai Akira’s critique and other essays on
language and nikutai. In my opinion, both issues epitomise the articulate debate about
the nikutai in the ’60s (Centonze 2010, 113).
I dare to say that for Hijikata the text is a bodily text, which melts orality and writing,performance and literacy, bodies and words, and I see this clearly displayed in this essay.

A fundamental aspect of Hijikata’s dance politics, corporeality, and artistic strategy
introduced explicitly in this essay, is the shattered visual rapport, the debunking of the
optocentrism (Centonze 1998), i.e. the monopoly of the sight in perceiving performance,
as a criteria in producing performance and in philosophical phenomenology. This aspect49

is crystalised in the reign of ankoku, in the subtraction of light, in confusing theaudience’s visual perception and empowering the other senses. Also the performing
body is deferred from the production of visual forms through disorienting the spectator’sand the performer’s gaze. Recently dance and performance studies have concentrated
on reorienting the optomonopolism and turned to the analysis of performances involving
our organs beyond our eyes (see for example, Banes and Lepecki 2007).
As Gunji Masakatsu highlights:'On top of that, Hijikata Tatsumi peeps constantly into the nikutai’s inside/inner part
as if he would go beyond the inside of a cavern, and as if he would look at
something which is his own nikutai, but is not his own nikutai. There the relation of
showing and seeing seemed not to have been established. While the spectator sees
Hijikata’s dancing nikutai, and also Hijikata is seeing that nikutai, it seems as hewould render this nikutai and its condition different from the usual scenic arts in theworld.' (Gunji 1991, 253; my translation)

The extraordinary condition created in Hijikata’s performances, according to Gunji, canbe paralleled only by the folk tradition based on the sympathetic magic, jujutsu, as
happens in the Hanamatsuri and Yukimatsuri, performed in Winter in the area between
the mountains of the upper course of Tenryūgawa. In these rituals the relation between
seeing and show/ing, between who dances and who is watching is erased. Spectators(kenbutsu) are excluded, because a fundamental condition of partaking in the event is ofblood relations (Gunji 1991, 254; Centonze 2008).

It should be noted that the definitions nikutaigaku (study on the carnal body, or study on
the nikutai) and nikutaishi (history of the body, or history of the nikutai), Hijikata deals
with in 'Nikutai ni nagamerareta nikutaigaku', are not common designations for bothdisciplines and I suppose, that we should cut out also here a specific address to a
discourse concerning distinctive nuances of corporeality, which in this case is the nikutai.
50

A sort of neologism is emphasised in respect to the shintai, the corporeality prevailingly
considered in a philosophical context, and a sort of normativised body inserted into asocial context (Centonze 1998).
The layering of words attached to the nikutai, which is probably ineffable, created by thehistorical discourse of the carnal body (nikutaishi) and by the study on the carnal body(nikutaigaku), shared by a large number of people, is seen by the dancer as a mythology
constructed around the carnal body, and is compared to bacteria, or microorganisms,
which can be viewed as pathogenic cells causing infectious disease. In contrast and as aparadox, Hijikata adds that these discourses are for maintaining the hygiene of the body(karada). He manifests a sort of critique against the imposed social body designated here
as karada. 6 According to the dancer, this condition of the discursified nikutai istransitional, then, he adds, anything is hushed up when “real extinction” makes it
entrance. The dead body, shitai, does not take part in the ‘real extinction’, and therefore
it is affected by the mythological bacteria.
The nature of the nikutai is to be shattered, disintegrated even in the very moment ofbirth; it is not intact or integral and untouched. This is reflected also in Hijikata’s
choreographies since the beginning, and will be fixed as a method in his dance practicedefined as that of butōfu. The nikutai concerns a condition of corporeal fragmentation, a
split corporeality, a straying and alienating/alienated (hagurete iru) corporeality,
characterised by chasms, splits, tears, cracks, rips (sakeme), not graspable in a unity.
Therefore, the hand chases the hand, seen as independent entities, alienated from thesubject. Subjective identity is obliterated and the nikutai melts, congeals, coagulates likea sugar candy (bekkoame) in a physiochemical process reproduced in dance. The body’s
structure is radically disturbed in its normal and normative organisation, its parts andsenses are once dissociated from their original physiological position and function,
dismembered, mixed up and then dislocated, as for example a seeing foot (eyes under6

Confront here the importance of hygiene introduced during the immediate post-war period analysed by
Edward Seidensticker, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Igarashi Yoshikuni and reflected in art by High Red Center.

51

the foot) or a seeing rear (eyes on the rear). 7 The dancer’s hand does not belong to thedancer. The nikutai is an object independent from the dancer, and is aligned with theexternal objects. This deferred and distantiated body, the distance between the dancer
and him or herself, is the peculiar Verfremdung achieved in butō dance, where theattention is shifted from the centre to the periphery, and the focus is distributed
everywhere. The decentering process can be very similar to postmodern readings andpoint at the anti-modern aspect of Hijikata’s dance strategy. But, as I often havediscussed elsewhere, the condition of Verfremdung is not a prerogative of butō, although
it has been accentuated and made explicit, and recurs historically and technically inJapanese performing arts dating back to premodern theatricality (I discussed the‘diachronic polymorphism of wazaogi’ in Centonze 2004; 2008).
Hijikata’s words reveal that the nikutai is approachable cognitively through bodily
knowledge—and not through nikutaigaku or nikutaishi—and is bound to loneliness.
We may say, that the discursive disciplines embracing nikutai are fallible and misfiring,
because the nikutai is not circumscribable, confinable, containable.
Hijikata’s words convey that we can dominate history as a cultural construction, but wecannot dominate the nikutai. I suppose that herein lies the anarchic nature of the nikutai.
Nevertheless there are also contrasting and paradoxical aspects of the nikutai or different
nuances or states of the nikutai. Therefore, it is a fluid entity. It is fluid, because these
corporealities maintain paradoxes and contradictions inside (such as the standing deadbody).
In Hijikata’s text we are not confronted with the idea of the body, but the body in itself.
Through this perspective, the word does not entrap (corpo)reality in a fixed category, butflows together with it.

7This was put into practice, for example, during Kobayashi Saga’s workshop (POHRC event, Tokyo, May
13, 2014), where the topics were: eyes under the feet, on the rear, or corporeal situations linked to Francis
Bacon’s art, or Hans Bellmeer and articulations with spherical junctions.

52

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Gen’yō no michi 3, Masakatsu Gunji, 253-58. Tokyo: Hakusuisha.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 1959. “Kinjiki”. Kugatsu itsuka rokuji no kai. 6nin no abangyarudo.
Programme notes, 650 EXPERIENCE no kai, Daiichi Seimei Hall, Tokyo, September 5.
——. 1961. “Keimusho e”. Mita bungaku 1: 45-49.
——.1969. “ Nikutai ni nagamerareta nikutaigaku.” Gendaishi techō 12 (10): 30-5.
Lansdale, Janet. 2010. “A tapestry of intertexts: dance analysis for the twenty-first
century.” In The Routledge Dancer Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter and JanetO’Shea, 158-167. London ; NewYork: Routledge.
Rothfield, Philipa. 2010. “Differentiating phenomenology and dance.” In The Routledge

Dancer Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 303-18. London;
NewYork: Routledge.

54Hyperrealism and Everyday Performance: How is the text constituted inEveryday Theatre?

Raimondo Cortese

As a professional writer since the early nineties, I have written, dramaturged anddeveloped over forty texts for theatre or performance. In 1994, I founded Ranters
Theatre along with other graduates of the VCA School of Drama; it is this company thathas produced the majority of my texts, and with whom I have shared an ongoing
exploration of the practice of everyday and hyperreal aesthetics and processes in relation
to writing and theatrical production. My work with hyperrealism and everyday theatrebegan in the early nineties alongside companies such as Oriza Hirata’s Seinendan, Richard
Maxwell’s New York City Players, Philippe Quesne’s Vivarium Studios, Pan Pan, Back to
Back Theatre Company, Tamara Saulwick, Rimini Protokol among many others.

The practice of everyday theatre has also seen a corresponding rise in theoretical analysis
of its methodology and practice, the most notable being by writers such as Peter Crawley,
Sarah Gorman, Noelia Ruiz, Sodja Lotker, Peter Eckersall and Eddie Patterson.

Everyday theatre aims to reject prevailing theatre aesthetics; a dominant manifestationof theatre that is beset with a reverential attitude to stage conventions, which, in myview, undermine theatre’s potential for immediacy and ‘liveness’. In everyday theatre,
traditional performance codes, such as character development, plot, conflict,representation (temporal/spatial/persona), mise-en-scene, dramatic trajectory andtheatrical language (i.e. metaphor, theme, narrative, history) among others, areminimised or rejected. The languages of everyday existence, while lacking a narrative
epicentre, possess a rawness and vitality that transforms into theatrical content via theirenactment as an experiential engagement, one that emphasises the audience’s ability to55

contaminate the experience. The banal, the ordinary, the vital, the fantastic all bound up
to create a complex but fragmented textual entity.

While everydayness might now be considered de rigueur in the contemporary theatrical
festival environment, it hasn’t come about overnight. My own practice has also been
influenced by various Situationist exponents, such as Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem andConstant, who have theorised on the everyday as a field of performance. Constant’s
research into dynamic space, which ‘leads to constantly changing behavioural patterns’(1998, 275) has been an inspiration for the design of the non-representational setting formany of my plays. My methodology for sourcing material has been informed by Debord’s
notion of the derive, where the spectator, rather like a Baudelairean flaneur, engages inwandering about the everyday environment as a ‘mapping of the psychogeographicalareas and ambience of the streets’ (Read 1993, 117). Recent theorists, such as Alan Read,
Sarah Gorman and Noelia Ruiz, provide a critical focus on everydayness in theatre, which
expound on the ways the text of the everyday offers fragments, multiple trajectories, and‘seemingly random configurations making the viewer responsible for the production’s
dramaturgy’ (Crawley 2010, 23). For Read theatre is a process of ‘giving everything, of
not keeping anything for oneself’ (1993, 95). The everyday offers immeasurable minutiae
of verbal and physical acts that infects and contaminates the way theatre is constituted;
traditional performative codes and structures can be dissolved and re-bound together ina multifarious, inter-relational matrix. This new everyday theatre ‘resides in the microgestures of society, not in its flamboyant theatrical expressions concretised as thediscourse of theatre’ (Read 1993, 95).

In my experience, much of what occurs on the stage is a process of conventional wisdomthat has been passed down via the skills base of generations of writers, directors, actors
and theatre workers in response to practical questions that arise when working within
particular performance contexts, such as a stage. As Lefebvre states, ‘Every space is56already in place before the appearance in it of actors… space conditions the subject’spresence, action and discourse’ (1991, 57).

Rather than place the focus on external indicators of change, such as narrative, story, or
physical action in the text, everyday hyperrealism places the focus on the minutiae of
moment-to-moment expressivity. The dialogic content is made up of independent yet
relatable fragmentary sequences. As Sodjka Lotker puts it in relation to postdramatictheatre: ‘The traditional coherent plot of a ‘well made’ theatre play was atomised into ascript with fragments as the main dramaturgical building blocks.’ (2011, 198). My plays
reject conventional unity and symmetry in favour of a ‘rhizomic’ structure in which‘unsurveyable branching and heterogeneous connections prevent synthesis’ (Deleuzeand Guattari cited in Lehmann 2006, 90). The theatrical ciphers are recalibrated andturned away from fictive content towards the dynamic, contaminated space between
audience and performer. The pay-off for the audience is direct contact, a continualtransference and intersharing. The audience is placed at the heart of narrative and story
construction; narrative fissures are created, in which the audience weave their life
experiences and thus contaminate the fabric of the performance. According to Jacob
Wren, artistic director of PME-Art, ‘the most consequent contemporary theatre is thatwhich deals with the immediate, concrete situation (2011, 64). Performing as ourselves,
we create actions, conditions and speech executed with a singular intimacy andfamiliarity. This intimacy reduces the separation between performer and spectator,
opening up a space for thinking, tension, reflection and confusion. Within this space we
present meticulously prepared material in a manner that is open and loose, sliding thesituation towards the unexpected, towards a sense of connection with whatever theaudience brings.’

The plays I write are designed to create a continual rupture in the dramatic pattern; thefocus is on revealing an underlying ontology which expresses itself through an everyday
physical/linguistic dichotomy. In this respect the plays are aligned with Grotowski’s
57

objective to see theatre as a means to crack open the conscious rituals and games people
play to reveal something essential about their humanity. The theatrical event should
enable us to ‘experience what is real and… in a state of complete defencelessness unveil,
give, discover ourselves’ (1975, 212-13). This implies a form of performative consciousness
within actual everyday discourse that inhibits the way we behave. Our performativeawareness, rather than liberate us, forces us to contrive our behaviour, usually in order toappease an agenda or further a cause.

The text in my plays such as St Kilda Tales, Holiday and Intimacy, is constructed to follow an
objective end point, which is then resisted and obstructed by the dialogue, through ‘anelaborate labyrinth of sidesteps and manoeuvres’ (Cortese 2005, ix). Each of these plays, aswith all Ranters productions, unfolds in real-time. They might use everyday language as amodel but they are not verbatim texts. The dialogue in these plays emulates the nuance,
rhythms, ellipses, non-sequiturs, repetitions, and speech effects of everyday language but
are structured in order to achieve an aesthetic objective. These plays utilise textual shifts inthe dialogue to open up cracks in narrative authority and to ultimately disintegrate it. The
action and dialogue are out of alignment and progress down an uncertain and difficult path.
The personas are rubbed in the wrong direction; they are contaminated by unconscious
impulses from each other and the audience, which bring into being unexpectedconsequences. The social register, meter and rhythm of the dialogue are continuously
altered to disrupt the reception of literal narrative. Sentence structure is often
fragmentary, or interrupted, causing a break in the linear trajectory of an argument. These
conscious manipulations of the text are not designed simply to create a mirroring of theeveryday, but also to refocus the emphasis on the relationship of the text to physicalresponses. The text disrupts and contaminates the relationship between theactor/character and the audience, between the material presence of the actor and thecoming into being of the enactment. The audience are invited to contaminate these
uncertain spaces with their own narratives that emerge from the enactment of the text.
The texts at once create a realness, a fragile space that suggests the existence of multiple
58domains. Everyday language, once manipulated and enacted in this way, ‘leads beyond
presentness, towards an elsewhere’ (Lefebvre 1991, 135). The audience now occupy thesame concrete reality as the performers, ‘sharing an as yet only partly defined space’(Wren 2011, 64). This theatre beyond representation enters a crucial phase where theboundary between the everyday theatre and the audience becomes interchangeable andblurred, and serves a process of continuous contamination.

In theatre, and in real life, it helps to understand the context and parameters of theperformance; we are more likely to accept what we are already familiar with. In a process
defined by Goffman as ‘anticipatory socialisation’, we are already ‘schooled in the realitythat is just coming to be real for us’ (1963, 79).

Much of what transpires in the relationship between performer and audience is dependent
upon the expectation of the latter. In the work of Ranters or other contemporary theatremakers, like Richard Maxwell or Oriza Hirata, which seek to emulate the feel of everyday
discourse, the audience consists of literate festival goers who are primarily familiar withthe theatrical codes they are about to witness. In Hirata’s case, the attempt to reconstructa delicate, quiet theatrical space on stage, with its denial of the dramatic, allows for theaudience to impose their own mental framing of the action, or to drop out into isolation.
The meditative space created requires a degree of discipline to appreciate it, an ability to
let go, focus and watch. The audience contaminate the theatrical frame with their own
imaginings. In Jerome Bel’s The Show Must Go On the dancers simulate everyday posturesand gestures in a way that is consciously contrived as performance. The intention is toconfront the audience’s desire to be entertained at all costs while rejecting classical dance
aesthetics. But the audience that attend these festival shows are mostly familiar with theaesthetic domains being presented; rather than being confronted, the danger is theaudiences will enjoy the fact that their knowledge and aesthetic awareness of new forms isbeing validated. It has the potential to ingrain a new form of cultural snobbery.

59

A recent work by Not Yet It’s Difficult called The Olympic Training Squad, required
performers to run a dedicated circuit through a city, and incorporated audience responseto the event. This movement of theatre from organised theatrical constructs into everyday
life is being progressively advanced through the use of digital technology in contemporary
art practice and with the tendency of theatre makers to cross-over into other artistic
disciplines, such as Live Art, where audience interactivity is at the heart of the work.

My own hyperrealist texts are constructed to allow a moment-to-moment reconfiguring of
the dramaturgy. The instability of the narrative patterns, the creation of diegetic fissures,
breakages in dialogic response, the lack of history or character information in the content,
is a way of dissembling the audience to experience mutual contamination with theperformers, the performed is turned into a question. By creating a realm of ontologicaluncertainty, the text requires the actor and audient to follow pathways that correlate with
their own emotional and psychological perspective. The role of silence, pauses, disruptionsof physical dynamics, the use of repetition, and the sustained durational presence of theperformers are a way of enabling the audience to activate an invented response to what
they experience. According to Lehmann, a performance ‘with a low density of signs aims to
provoke the spectator’s imagination’ (2006, 90).

Richard Maxwell’s plays demonstrate a similar objective to dissemble narrative and story
construction. Maxwell’s work also embraces everyday language, closely following therhythms, ruptures, repetitions, and circularity of natural conversation. As with the work ofRanters, Maxwell tends to smooth out dramatic tension, or dramatic patterning in the text.
Unlike Ranters, Maxwell’s productions thus far, maintain a degree of characterisation andrepresentation. The texts are usually set somewhere, incorporating fictional content, often
as a way of addressing a socio-political question, such as presented in Good Samaritans
and Neutral Hero.

60

In his play House, the causal relationship between scenes is scrambled; conversations are
begun around a topic then soon abandoned; at the extreme end, characters are murdered
without obvious repercussions. Maxwell’s plays share similar characteristics to a plot in
Commedia; events/scenes move from one point to the next, ‘but not as a series ofpsychological consequences… the action continues as if nothing has happened’ (Rudlin
1994, 35-57). The absence of causal plot in Maxwell’s plays forces the audience to supply
their own rationale, provide an internal logic of their own. This is further aided by thewriter’s refusal ‘to permit the actor to prioritise the fictional scenario over the reality ofthe performance’ (Gorman 2011, 182). The structure of Maxwell’s plays (absence of causal
and narrative coherence) together with his use of the dialogue (inclusion of pauses,
ellipses, grammatical errors, illogical argument et al) creates an uncertain contaminatedspace between the fictional character and the material presence of the actor.

These plays require a different style of performance that engages with the changes
brought about in human behaviour from a generation of people who have grown up
contaminated by digital media. What has the camera and digital media in general, taught
the audience to ‘read’ in a glance, a gesture, a miniscule expression in the face, amanifesting of the physical in relationship to the spoken? Nicola Ruiz suggests that
postdramatic work places the focus on audience experience, while ‘highlighting the
liveness of performance: the unique and unrepeatable encounter between audience andperformers’ (2011, 126). The audience engage the material presence of the actors in aspace; the experience is one of mutual contamination, which is unambiguously real andspontaneous. The performances, in their relationship to audience, are specifically designed
to draw out phenomenological responses to the liveness of the enactment. The viewer isaffected by and gives impetus to external circumstances that prompt a phenomenologicalform of contamination in order to convert a particular space into a passage, or transform a
nameless occurrence into a significant event. The everyday audient provides spaces andevents with form and meaning by a ‘poetic geography’ that contaminates the geography ofthe literal’ (de Certeau 1988, 105).
61

The Canadian company PME –Art, like many contemporary theatre makers working withpost dramatic forms, have adopted a similar approach to character. The impulse toconstruct character via technical preparation and the exploration of psychologicalmotivations can be used to hide qualities that are perhaps more vital to theatre. According
to Jacob Wren, it can be argued that this impulse distances the actor ‘from what is mostimmediate, to defuse the intimacy and potential for conflict and in doing so undermine
what really is at stake’ (2011, 65). The artistic director of Pan Pan, Gavin Quin, similarly
requires his actors to shed characterisation, and employ tasks to access the core of an
encounter. The aim of the task, in association with a segment of text, is designed to createa ‘spontaneity that seeks the quality of improvisation or unpredictability to achieve
realness as opposed to rehearsed repetition’ (Ruiz 2011, 129).

The work of Ranters Theatre employs what Eckersall and Patterson refer to as a ‘dwindlingof the dramatic impulse’ (Eckersall & Patterson 2011, 7). The dialogic sequences have atheme-based juxtapositional organisation. There are no naturalistic segues between
sequences. The conversations in Holiday, Affection or Intimacy begin around a particulartheme, but then abruptly end or wind down. Conversation flows laterally from one subject
to the next without any logical coherence; topics include; taking pets to the vet, Chinese
medicine, the nature of performance in the everyday, poetry, architecture, roller-coasterrides, travelling and so on, but devoid of narrative unity. These plays also utilise
intertextuality, such as occurs in Holiday, where there are quotes from Hafiz and Ernst
Jandle, alongside references to pop culture, Hinduism and Mexican filmmaking. The use ofsongs further breaks narrative hegemony, while revealing hidden content in the concrete
relationship between the performers.

There is no attempt to represent a reality beyond the material presence of the space theperformers occupy. This is reflected in the dialogue, which at no point refers to a fictive
space in proximity to the space being performed in. The fictive spaces mentioned are not
62

localised to this degree; they are stripped of specific details so that they can be positioned
in a city anywhere in the world. In other words, the audience have no way of knowing
whether these spaces or locations are real or not. There is also no information about thecharacters that can be construed as fictional. Past events are described, but are devoid of
information pertaining to the lives of the personas/characters. There is a ‘collapse ofboundaries’ that distinguishes post-modern theatre, but in the case of the later plays/texts,
the removal of the desire to perform and fictionalise creates a space that is contaminatedby the audience’s expectation of the dramatic. The creation of a meditative, relaxedambience creates an open invitation to the audience to reflect, fantasise and invent theirown narrative that infects the original text with their own meanings and significance. The
texts are structured so that at any moment they could stop; creating what Eckersall andPatterson describe as ‘dramaturgical collapse’ (2011, 7).

In my play Holiday, a metonymic space is created with a gentle, fluid ambience, theperformers then demolish the ‘real’ by suggesting that one of the performers is in fact‘dreaming’. It posits the question, which is underpinned throughout the play: is the ‘real’
just as illusory as fiction? Is the suggestion here that the material reality of the space andthe performers is in fact no less illusory than a fictive space or persona? The play’s
phenomenological method creates an underlying tension between the audience’s desire tocontaminate the space with the expectation of the dramatic and the disintegration of theaction that beckons during the silence. This tension is compounded by the ontologicalambiguity that presents itself as the play progresses. The development of a material spaceand persona presence is blurred within a real-unreal dichotomy.

In this new variant of everyday theatre, what Eckersall and Patterson describe as a ‘newalternative-dramatic paradigm’, the removal of the action/dramatic imperative offers theaudience the temporal space to reflect on their own internal stories (2011, 7). The text is
designed to slow down time, to create fragile, ephemeral and contaminated spaces
between performers and audience. These momentary spaces are filled by the audience’s
63

awareness of their own tenuous performances within the entire field of humaninteraction. This new everyday theatre takes the audience beyond the boundaries of selfimposed exile and into the streets and buildings we inhabit and contaminate daily with
our own desires, and beyond that into our own imaginary lives.

References1.

Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, (, 1998) 275.

2.

Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, (London: Routledge, 1993) 117.

3.

Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More Drama, (Dublin: Project Press, 2010) 23.

4.

Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, (London: Routledge, 1993) 95.

5.

Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, (London: Routledge, 1993) 95.

6.

Henri Lefebvre, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell Pub,
1991) 57.

7.

Sodja Zupanc Lotker, Dramaturgy' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More Drama, (Dublin:
Project Press, 2010) 198.

8.

Deleuze and Guattari cited in Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, (London: Routledge,
2006) 90.

9.

Jacob Wren, 'Theatre reminds me of Politics' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More

Drama, (Dublin: Project Press, 2010) 64.
10. Aristotle, Malcolm Heath trans, Poetics, (London: Penguin, 1996) 15.
11. Sodja Zupanc Lotker, Dramaturgy' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More Drama, (Dublin:
Project Press, 2010) 205
12. Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba ed, Towards a Poor Theatre, (London, Methuen, 1975) 212-13.
13. Raimondo Cortese, Roulette: 12 Dialogues, (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005) ix.
14. Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, (London: Routledge, 1993) 133.
15. Henri Lefebvre, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell Pub,
1991) 135.
16. Jacob Wren, 'Theatre reminds me of Politics' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More

Drama, (Dublin: Project Press, 2010) 64.
17. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press,
1969) 78.
18. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, (London: Routledge, 2006) 90.

64

19. John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte, (London: Routledge, 1994) 35.
20. Sarah Gorman, 'Without Guile:Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players', in Peter Crawley
and Willie White ed, No More Drama, (Dublin: Project Press, 2010) 182.
21. Nicola Ruiz, Dramaturgy' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More Drama, (Dublin: Project
Press, 2010) 126
22. Michel de Certeau, Steven Rendall trans, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkely: University ofCalifornia, 1988) 105.
23. Jacob Wren, 'Theatre reminds me of Politics' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More

Drama, (Dublin: Project Press, 2010) 65.
24. Gavin Quinn cited Nicola Ruiz, Dramaturgy' in Peter Crawley and Willie White ed, No More Drama,(Dublin: Project Press, 2010) 129
25. Hans-Thies Lehmann cited in Peter Eckersall & Eddie Patterson, Slow Dramaturgy and theEveryday, Australasian Drama Studies issue 58, University of Queensland, Dep. English, Brisbane(2011) 7.
26. Peter Eckersall & Eddie Patterson, Slow Dramaturgy and the Everyday, Australasian Drama Studies
issue 58, University of Queensland, Dep. English, Brisbane (2011) 7
27. Peter Eckersall & Eddie Patterson, Slow Dramaturgy and the Everyday, Australasian Drama Studies
issue 58, University of Queensland, Dep. English, Brisbane (2011) 7

Raimondo Cortese graduated from the VCA School of Drama in 1993 and is a founding
member of Ranters Theatre. Raimondo was the Artistic Director of Ranters from 1994 to
2000. He has written over forty plays, as well as fiction, film, and radio and lectures in
Masters for Performance Writing at VCA, Melbourne University.

65

The gap between the <insider view> and <outsider view> on Fukushima as
seen in the change of Festival/Tokyo’s lineup

Ken Hagiwara

Festival/Tokyo (F/T), the performing arts festival in which the presenter himself has beenworking continuously as translator and subtitle operator, has been held seven times by
now, and the next F/T will be opened in the coming November. In the following, thedevelopment of its concepts and lineups is summarized and analyzed, so that it will beshown that the F/T reflects problems of places in two ways – inside and outside Japan,
and inside and outside Tokyo.

1. About the F/T
The F/T, one of the largest international performing arts festivals in Japan, started in2009 and it has been introducing many Japanese and international cutting edge artists.
Often, their works didn’t belong to established genres such as theatre, fine art and music.
These kinds of artistic experiments formed the core of the F/T.

This concept of the F/T had been actually already proclaimed one year before its starting.
In the closing symposium of its predecessor, Tokyo International Festival (TIF), theprogram director of the following F/T, Soma Chiaki, had made a statement which shesummarized later as follows:[T]wo fundamental principles as aspirations for a new festival: a festival that
continues and creates, and a festival that is open and collaborative. The former
was about engendering new values from Tokyo to the world through continuing tocreate works of art that respond to society and the zeitgeist. The latter was an
aspiration to implement an open platform whereby people and works of art based66

on diverse sets of values gather together, and recognize each other’s difference
through dialogue and partnership.1‘[E]ngendering new values from Tokyo to the world through continuing to create works
of art’ had to be the mission of the F/T, too, because it was a part of Tokyo Culture

Transmission Project that had been established for the movement to host the Olympics
in Tokyo 2020. And the ‘open platform whereby people and works of art based ondiverse sets of values gather together, and recognize each other’s difference throughdialogue and partnership’ seems to have been realized by the mostly latest andexperimental works or collaborations by Japanese and non-Japanese famous artists
including Rimini Protokoll and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. The experimental character of
the F/T is recognized also by the slogans saying ‘Toward a new <real>’ in the spring 2009,‘<Real> evolves’ in the autumn 2009, and ‘disrobing theatre’ in the autumn 2010.

And then, the fourth F/T was prepared for the autumn 2011.

2. The F/T after the earthquake
After the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 which caused the tsunami and theaccident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the F/T changed its concept. It
tried to be more engaged in current social developments in Japan. The slogan was ‘What
can we say?’, expressing the honest anxiety, and Tokyo as the place of safe daily life wasquestioned. The first statement of the documents says as follows:

The ground continues to shake; radiation continues to leak out. We cannot see adestination for the rubble. Great numbers of people are bereft of words; silence is
imposed upon them. And now or ‘here and now’ also continues to shake alongwith the earth. On the one hand we seem numb with unease, and yet our daily

1

Festival/Tokyo Executive Committee Office, F/T12 Documents (2013), 3.

67

Tokyo lives persist with detachment.2

Until the F/T in 2010, the basic axis had seemed to be <Tokyo – abroad>, and Tokyo had
represented Japan. Now, Tohoku, particularly Fukushima, interested people all over theworld, so that Tohoku and Fukushima represented Japan. Of course the people living inTokyo were also strongly interested in this region and most of them were surely for the
first time realized that their daily life had been supported by Tohoku, especially by theelectricity produced by the nuclear power station in Fukushima operated by TEPCO(Tokyo Electric Power Company). The F/T had to be conscious on this fact. Its statement
continues as follows:[T]his city of ‘Tokyo’ where we base ourselves, amidst a feeling of distance from
Fukushima, from Tohoku, and a dramatically transforming world map and historicalaxis, somehow the city critically relativizes its own existence: What kind of selfportrait can be re-drawn? Through the visions and theatre work urgently presented
by the artists, we have raised this inquiry and attempted to grasp anew thecomplex present reality.3

Now the F/T could not avoid including the theme Tohoku and Fukushima in its concept
and lineup. The statement above asks then: ‘In the midst of commands that are
swallowing up differences […] can the arts now go beyond the role of merely healing orproviding good cheer? And what kind of site for thought can they open up?’4 That is, theF/T tried to be a platform of artists and audiences who will seriously think about how thenext possible living circumstances could and should be. Besides the works which had
been produced before the earthquake, some works were created strongly inspired by thedisaster.
2
3

4

Festival/Tokyo Executive Committee Office. F/T11 Documents (2012), 5.
Ibid.
Ibid.

68

The next F/T in 2012 presented only the works created after the earthquake, especially

Kein Licht., which Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek wrote inspired by the nuclear
accident. Soma says: ‘I started to plan the lineup of the F/T12, inspired by Kein Licht.
which had been published soon after the Great East Japan earthquake.’5 (Kein Licht.
became then repeatedly the source of productions by different artists in the F/T) The
slogan was ‘Beyond words’. After asking ‘What can we say?’ in the last year, the F/Tseemed to be still in search of words which should form the self-portrait of the city Tokyo.
The opening statement of its documents tells followings.

[F/T 2012] engages again with the task of confirming our present location throughsome of the ‘words’ that emanated our after the Tohoku disaster in 2011. In ourcomplex present reality, wherever we go we are simultaneously involved withcertain events, but also unable to identify fully with the involved. Or rather,simultaneously we are the victims of certain events, yet also the perpetrators.6

The people in Tokyo can be both ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ regarding Fukushima,
because their daily life was and is supported by resources in rural areas around Tokyo,
particularly by the electricity produced in Fukushima. Now a lot of residents in Fukushima
have to be evacuated from the nuclear power station that had produced electricity
mainly for Tokyo capital area.

This fact was critically pointed out especially in the work created by the group Port B
presented in the F/T 2012. In their <tour performance> Kein Licht II – Epilog?, theaudience walked around a building in Shimbashi district, near Ginza in Tokyo, listening
Jelinek’s text in Japanese translation that were read out loud by the high school students
in Fukushima. About how the location Shimbashi was selected, the director Takayama
5

6

F/T12 Documents, 33. [translated by the author]
F/T12 Documents, 3.

69

Akira tells as follows:

There is the Headquarter of TEPCO. And in 1955, at the Hibiya Park near fromthere, The Exhibition on Peaceful Using Atomic Power was held by Shōriki
Matsutarō’s Yomiuri newspaper and the US-Embassy. The ministry of economy andindustry is also near from there. It is the place where peaceful using of nuclear
power station was heavily promoted. That is why I thought the project should be
realized there. But rather than such historical backgrounds, the New Shimbashi
Building in front of the Shimbashi station, the starting point of the tour, had
attracted me (laugh). Then, after starting to talk with the people there, an idea
came up to me: ‘Perhaps it could have been built in the time Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power station was built.’ It was true. Both were built in 1971 and opened in
two months. My idea was correct. Shimbashi must have been fevered in the timeof the High Economic Growth, and to support the fever, the electricity wasnecessary. Probably in such background, the nuclear power station in Fukushima
was built.7

In this way, through the works by Port B and other Japanese and non-Japanese artists,
the audiences in the F/T had chances to know the backgrounds of the disaster, thecurrent situations in Fukushima or observations by non-Japanese people.

And these audiences included non-Japanese producers, so that some of the works wereinvited to various international festivals. Port B’s recreation Fukushima-Epilog? (Kein Licht

II) was realized at Wiener Festwochen in May 2013, and Chelfitch’s Current Location wasstaged in the special week ‘Japan Syndrome’ held at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin in May
2014.

3. The F/T after the change of the organization
7

F/T12 Documents, 37. [translated by the author]

70But such development of the F/T had a side effect. The more the F/T became
internationally well-known and was colored by a ‘festival-aesthetics’ (Fischer-Lichte)8, themore it alienated the local, conventional Japanese theatergoers. The critical approachesof the works which made Fukushima their main theme and followed an <outsider view>
were difficult to understand for them.

The F/T in 2013 was the last festival led by Soma. In 2014, the F/T tried to close the gap
to its local audiences. Fukushima was still the main theme of many productions, butmainly for and from the view of Japanese people, meaning they followed an <insider
view>. The opening event led by ‘Project Fukushima’ offered a concert by a Japanesecomposer who had composed music numbers for a nationwide successful TV series Ama-chan which made the region of the earthquake its theme. In the same event, theaudiences had a chance to dance a folk group dance, Bon-odori, that is familiar for
everyone living in Japan. On the other hand, there were often contexts that few nonJapanese could understand, like in the productions by an Aomori-based theatre company,
Watanabe-Genshirō-Shōten. They referred repeatedly popular music numbers and TV
series that were and are popular all over Japan.

As a result, many Japanese audiences were attracted. However, these same productions
didn’t seem to be suitable for an INTERNATIONAL festival with non-Japanese audiences.
It was also remarkable that no performances were guided by English subtitles (somedance performances were without any problem to be enjoyed also by non-Japaneseaudiences, though).

The lineup of the F/T in 2015 (from the November for one month) is similar to that of thelast year: Among around fifteen main performances, as far as the titles and short
descriptions tell, the performances which would make Tohoku and Fukushima their
theme will be just the opening event entitled ‘Festival FUKUSHIMA!@Ikebukuro West8

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theaterwissenschaft. Eine Einfürung in die Grundlagen des Faches (Tübngen; Basel:Franke, 2010), 193.

71

Gate Park’ and Blue Tarp by Ameya Norimizu.

The change of the approach to Tohoku and Fukushima by the recent F/Ts is remarkable interms of the slogan, too. That of the F/T 2014 was ‘Border play’, and its pamphlet says:‘The program presents many pluralistic works that will flexibly overcome different
limitations such as countries, societies, milieus, styles and standpoints’9. The ‘border’ isactually understandable as the border between metropolitan (Tokyo) and rural areas(Tohoku and Fukushima), too, but no performances made this topic their themes clearlyand critically except Watanabe-Genshirō-Shōten. The tendency remains the same today.
The F/T in 2015 mentions repeatedly the keyword ‘border’ and has chosen the slogan‘Border Fusion’. But the F/T’s message to the audience by choosing these slogans is
unclear. Also, Fukushima as a theme seems to be fading into the background.

Such outline of the recent F/Ts recalls the insight by Hayashi Tatsuki, the translator of
Jelinek’s Kein Licht.. In 2013, he talked with Soma and Takayama at the same table andsaid the following:

I am sure that among the audience, also among the people who have something to
do with theatre, some people would have the opinion that a festival should besomething glamorous and delightful. They would say that a difficult and serious
work making nuclear power stations its theme like that of Jelinek does not have to
be in the lineup, but the works that are more enjoyable and understandable foreveryone should be the core.10

The recent F/Ts seem to face the audience that Hayashi mentioned above. In other words,
the recent F/Ts reflect the audiences in Tokyo who now would not care so seriously
about Tohoku and Fukushima and the view from outside Japan.
9[Festival/Tokyo 2014 Pamphlet] (2014), 2. [translated by the author]

10

F/T12 Documents, 33. [translated by the author]72

4. Conclusion: The F/T as an INTRAnational festival?
In Japan, nowadays, perhaps it could be hardly possible to realize an international festival
mentioning the earthquake, the tsunami and Fukushima that captures all audiences. The
reason for this is the different way of watching a performance on Tohoku and Fukushima
by Japanese and non-Japanese audiences with <insider> and <outsider> views. Moreover,the change of the lineups of the F/T implies that there are different Japanese audiencesin terms of Tohoku and Fukushima. Roughly speaking, there are the audience who careabout Tohoku and Fukushima and the audience who not, although their daily life had
been supported by the resources from such rural areas. The one should be an <insider>and the other an <outsider>, and vice versa.

In this context, the opinion by Kainuma Hiroshi, sociologist, is to be referred. According tohim, in Japan during the period of the <colonization to inside> (1945-95), ‘[a]fter the
failure of outbound colonization, <inbound colonization> was accelerated so that therural areas took over the function of the past colonies’, and in the period of the<automatized and spontaneous colonization> (1995 and after), ‘[a]fter the colonization iscompleted by the end of the economic growth and the development of neo-liberalism
and globalization, political power is activated supposing automatic and spontaneous
obedience’11. Let us remember that the F/T is a part of Tokyo Culture Promotion Projectthat was originally established for the movement to host the Olympics in Tokyo 2020.
And Tokyo Metropolitan Arts Theatre which is operated by Tokyo Metropolitan
Government is one of the main locations of F/T. On the other hand, the F/T soon after
the earthquake had been repeatedly presenting the performances which made thedisaster their theme and often criticized TEPCO which is supported by the Tokyo
Metropolitan Government as one of the important stakeholders. There should have been
so-called ‘inconvenient truth’ which is not to be mentioned in the F/T.
11

KAINUMA, Hiroshi, Fukushima ron. Genshiryoku mura ha naze umareta no ka. (Fukushima discourse.
Why the nuclear-power-village emerged) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2011), 375. [translated by the author]73

In fact, while the F/T has been working on the theme Tohoku and Fukushimacontinuously despite of the downsizing since 2014, it has been providing few voices ofthe people living in these Northeastern Japan. As a result, the audiences in Tokyo had few
chances to be confronted closely with the voices of the ‘subaltern’ (Spivak), that is, thevoices of the <colonized> people in rural areas in worse living conditions who do notknow how to tell their voices under certain political pressure.

After finishing the F/T 2012, the executive committee re-questioned ‘what kind of festival
does Tokyo need or, just to whom does a festival belong’12. The answer for this question
seems to not have been found yet. However, regarding Tohoku and Fukushima, the F/Tshould perhaps not be an international festival, but an INTRAnational festival.13

In 2008, Soma aimed to form the F/T to an ‘open platform whereby people and works ofart based on diverse sets of values gather together, and recognize each other’s difference
through dialogue and partnership’. Why not to realize more performances createdthroughcollaborations

betweenartists

and/oraudiences

from

Tokyo

and

Tohoku/Fukushima? Or in 2012, Soma questioned: ‘In the midst of commands that are
swallowing up differences […] can the arts now go beyond the role of merely healing orproviding good cheer? And what kind of site for thought can they open up?’ Isn’t thevision to be realized by collaborations by artists and/or audiences from Tokyo andTohoku/Fukushima?

Actually, independently of the F/T, Soma has already made her first step. Exactly thisAugust 2015, in a workshop Michinoku Aato Junrei Kyampu (Art Pilgrims Camp in

Northeastern Japan) held in Kitakata city in Fukushima, she is now working with
12

F/T12 Documents, 3.

13

Cf. OOTA, Shōgo, “Nashonaru na mono he no utagai (Suspition about <national>),” Butai Geijutsu(Performing Arts) 7 (2004): 1-8; OOTORI, Hidenaga, “Intoranashonaru to ha nani ka (What is<intranational>),” Butai Geijutsu (Performing Arts) 7 (2004): 9-12.

74

Takayama and other artists and scholars to improve young artists who are required todevelop projects on site in Tohoku which perhaps would be presented in Tokyo. Probably
this workshop will rather realize the vision of the F/T which was mentioned after the F/T
2012. The opening statement of the document had written as follows:[T]he collection of works each addressed the harsh reality that faces us, signifying
one again that the arts is more than just temporal consumption or entertainment,or simply encouragement or healing, and rather something to confront the
distance between <here> and <there>, the disparity between <I> and <you>.14

References

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2010. Theaterwissenschaft. Eine Einfürung in die Grundlagendes Faches. Tübngen; Basel: Franke.
Festival/Tokyo Executive Committee Office. 2012. F/T11 Documents.
Festival/Tokyo Executive Committee Office. 2013. F/T12 Documents.
[Festival/Tokyo 2014 Pamphlet] 2014.
Kainuma, Hiroshi. 2011. Fukushima ron. Genshiryoku mura ha naze umareta no ka.
(Fukushima discourse. Why the nuclear-power-village emerged) Tokyo: Seidosha.
Oota, Shōgo. 2004. “Nashonaru na mono he no utagai (Suspition about <national>).”Butai Geijutsu (Performing Arts) 7: 1-8.
Ootori, Hidenaga. 2004. “Intoranashonaru to ha nani ka (What is <intranational>).”Butai Geijutsu (Performing Arts) 7: 9-12.

14

F/T12 Documents, 3. [translated by the author]

75

HAGIWARA, Ken: Associate Professor of the School of Global Japanese Studies, Meiji
University (Tokyo). Conducts research on Japanese and German theater since the early
20th century and gives undergraduate/graduate courses on Japanese theatre history inJapanese and English. Works often as a subtitle translator and operator for German
speaking theatre productions staged in Japan (Ken Hagiwara-Wallentowitz).

76

The Hunter in Soto- no- Hama of the Noh ‘Utō’ and Performers

Rurihiko Hara

Introduction
Soto-no-Hama (外の浜, literally outer coast) used to refer to the eastern coast of the
Tsugaru peninsula in Aomori-prefecture. In the Medieval period, Soto-no-Hama wasthought to be the eastern edge of Japan, and it was also an utamakura. The noh piece‘Utō (善知⿃),’ set in Soto-no-Hama, is still performed today. Its title, ‘Utō,’ is the nameof a bird. In Shinsen utamakura nayose, thought to be edited in the 14th century, thefollowing tale concerning Soto-no-Hama appears:

It is said as follows: The birds named utōyasukata live in Soto-no-Hama. They hide
their baby birds in the sand of Soto-no-Hama. If the mother bird sings ‘utō, utō,’
the baby birds crawl out singing ‘yasukata, yasukata.’ The hunter imitates themother birds’ song and hunts the deceived baby birds. Then, the mother birds
come, follow the hunter here and there, and cry. The color of their tears, which fall
like rain, is the deep red of blood. A waka relates:

ko o omou/ namida no ame no/ chi ni fureba/ hakanaki mono wa/ utō yasukata(In mourning the children, if one touches the rain of tears like blood, the transient
being is the bird utōyasukata)
It is said that the hunter wears minogasa (a straw raincoat and hat) for protection,
because he is damaged if he touches the blood. A waka reads:

ko o omou/ namida no ame no/ mino no ue ni/ kakaru mo kanashi/ yasukata no
tori(Mourning children, a rain of tears falls on the coat. The yasukata bird is sorrowful)1

1(Kuroda 1988, 119-20)

77

The noh piece ‘Utō’ is based on this peculiar tale. The plot of the piece is as follows: A
priest (waki, supporting actor) is on his way to Soto-no-Hama, which he has never seen
before. Before arriving there, at Tateyama in Etchū on the Japan Sea, an old man (mae-shite, former protagonist) speaks to the priest. Because the priest plans to go to Soto-noHama, the man asks him, to visit a home in which the father, a hunter, died the previous
autumn. The priest should tell the widow and child to hold a memorial service for thedeceased with an offering of minogasa. The old man tears a piece off one of his sleevesand gives it to the priest as a ‘sign.’ The priest goes to Soto-no-Hama and arrives at thehouse with a local man’s guidance (ai, interlude). The priest shows the sleeve to thewidow (tsure, attendant), she identifies it as her husband’s and starts to hold a memorialservice. During the service, the ghost of the hunter (nochi-shite, latter protagonist)
appears. He tries to touch his dear child (kokata, child’s part), but cannot see the child’s
figure as punishment for his deeds in life. He demonstrates how he did nothing but hunt.
While alive, he was absorbed in hunting utō and never stopped to think of the sin in his
actions. As punishment in hell, he suffers extreme pain: the transformed utō attack him,
grasping his eyes and tearing his flesh, or turning into hawks that hunt the hunter, whoturns into a pheasant. He begs the priest for help, but in vain. The hunter’s ghost
disappears.

Although the author of this piece is unknown, the oldest record concerning it documentsa performance in 1465. 2 The poignancy of ‘Utō’ lies in how it ingeniously takes up
fundamentally human themes: the grief of parents for their children, the life
circumstances imposed by birth, and the difficulty of quitting sinful behavior.

‘Utō’ raises many issues, especially the Medieval idea of a border delineating Ainu
territory to the north. Therefore, much research on ‘Utō’ deals not only with the field of
noh studies but also with history. This paper provides an answer to the previously

2(Takeuchi 1967, 219)78

unaddressed questions: Why did performers create a noh piece like ‘Utō?’ Whatsignificance did performances of the piece have?

Place in Soto-no-Hama: The Divergence of Legends about Utō between
Center and Periphery
The first mention of Soto-no-Hama can be seen in a waka by Saigyō from the 12th
century.3 The coast was well known in the field of renga (linked poetry). Waka and renga
used utamakura to allude to famous places all over the country. Among these, Soto-noHama was the easternmost and northernmost place and, as mentioned, was considered
the eastern edge of Japan in the Medieval period.

In Soga monogatari, there is one episode in which Adachi Morinaga dreams an auspicious
dream. In it, Minamoto no Yoritomo, the shogun of the Kamakura shogunate, stands withhis left foot on Soto-no-Hama and with his right foot on Kikai-ga-Shima.4 The scene iswritten so that the dream symbolizes Yoritomo conquering Japan ‘from end to end’
thereafter. In this representation, Soto-no-Hama is the eastern edge of Japan and Kikaiga-Shima is the western. According to Naomasa Ōishi, the notion that Soto-no-Hama isthe eastern edge of Japan was gradually formed in the 12th century and completed
around the end of the century.5

In the Medieval period, borders were not linear and strictly defined as they are today.
The actual area of Soto-no-Hama is vague and cannot be defined as only the eastern
coast of Tsugaru peninsula. The island, located to the north of Soto-no-Hama across thesea, was Ezo-ga-Shima, that is known today as Hokkaido. At that time, it was a completely
foreign country and a place of exile. Therefore, Soto-no-Hama was an intermediate zone

3

‘Michinoku no/ okuyukashiku zo/ omooyuru/ Tubo no ishibumi/ Soto-no-Hama kaze’ (Gotō 1982, 280)

4

(Kajihara, Ōtsu and Nonaka 2002, 120)5(Ōishi 1980, 594)

79

between the main island of Japan and Ezo-ga-Shima. As Ōishi says, in the Medieval period,
it was a place where strange things appeared and were exiled.6 For example, Azuma

kagami includes a record of a horse with nine legs found in Awaji that was exiled to Sotono-Hama in 1193.7

There are various versions of the utō legends other than the noh and Shinsen utamakura

nayose. Kōji Sasaki classifies his collection of narratives into four types as follows:

Wandering legend type (court noble type)
Basic Plot: An exiled man, Utō Yasukata, takes up residence in Soto-no-Hama, helps
the local men, and is finally worshipped as a god.
Wandering legend type (samurai type)
Basic Plot: A man, Utō Yasukata, lives hidden in Soto-no-Hama and protects andnurtures a child left by his father, Yasukata’s lord.
Revengeful spirit damaging fields legend type
Basic Plot: A spirit becomes a monster bird, utō, damages fields, and is killed by ahunter. Or, the spirit of killed birds damages the fields.
Hunting utō legend type
Basic Plot: The mother utō sings ‘utō’ and the baby birds respond ‘yasukata.’ Ahunter in Soto-no-Hama imitates the mother’s singing and hunts the baby birds.
The mother bird sheds tears of blood, and the hunter wears minogasa forprotection.8

The noh belongs to the hunting utō legend type. However, according to Sasaki, thelegends of this type were actually not known in Soto-no-Hama itself. Sasaki points to two
events in support of this conclusion. In 1718, Tokugawa Yoshimune, the 8th shogun of6(Ōishi 1980, 575)

7

(Kuroita and Kokushi taikei henshūkai 1964, 494)
(Sasaki 1990, 166-70)

880

the Edo shogunate, wished to see real utō, which he knew through contact with the noh
piece. Tsugaru Nobuhisa, the forth federal lord of Tsugaru, tried to fulfill the wish, but the
Aomori magistrate reported that there was a marsh called Utō and a place called

Yasukata, but no one ever saw the bird named utō. Furthermore, when Furukawa
Koshoken visited the Utō shrine in 1788, which remains to this day, the shinto priests said
they had never heard about the bird utō.9

However, a counterexample can be found in Soto-ga-Hama tsutai, travel writing by Sugae
Masumi in 1788. It shows that the wandering legend type (court noble type) andrevengeful spirit damaging fields legend type are indeed handed down in Sotono-Hama.10

As Sasaki shows, the hunting utō legend type appear predominantly in books edited
in the center (Kyoto), like Shotetsu-shū, Aro kassen monogatari and Moshiogusa, besides
the noh ‘Utō’ and Shinsen utamakura nayose.11 Thus, it is possible to say that there is adivergence between utō legends in the center and the periphery.

Therefore, it cannot be said that the noh ‘Utō’ is faithful to a local Soto-no-Hama legend.
It originates from Soto-no-Hama as periphery but is mainly formed in the center, a place
independent of the local site.

The Noh ‘Utō’ and Ainu

Concerning ‘Utō,’ there is another asymmetric relationship between the center and the
periphery. It has to do with the Ainu people, who are called Emishi, Ebisu or Ezo (蝦夷).

9(Sasaki 1990, 170-71)

10(Sugae 1971, 459)

11

(Sasaki 1990, 166-70)

81

Soto-no-Hama was where Ainu resided and traded with Japanese.12 They were not anagricultural people but hunters. The hunter in the noh ‘Utō’ can be considered an Ainu
hunter.13

Some details in the noh ‘Utō’ relate to Ainu. As to the origin of the peculiar word utō, on
the one hand in Soto-ga-Hama tsutai, it is written that the word comes from a word utōthat means ‘hollow’ in the Soto-no-Hama dialect and refers to the birds’ digging holes inthe beach sand to live there.14 On the other hand, a different etymology says that itderives from the Ainu word ‘etu (etō)’ meaning ‘bill’ or ‘nose.’15

In the noh piece, when the priest asks the local man of Soto-no-Hama where the hunter’shouse is, he answers that it is inside the ‘high stockade made of crisscrossed bamboo(takamogari, ⾼ も が り ).’ 16 Kōichirō Shinoda interestingly suggests that this ‘highstockade’ also means ‘temporary mortuary (mogari, 喪家)’ and actually is a high stand for
Ainu mummification.17

The hunter (nochi-shite) in ‘Utō’ sometimes appears in a feather skirt called hamino. As
Shinpei Matsuoka says, the feathers are related to Ainu in some ways.18 And, in the scene
in which the widow looks at her husband’s sleeve, the word ‘thin, crude stuff, for summer

12(Hanawa and Ōta 1988, 511)

13

(Itō 1985, 168)

14

(Sugae 1971, 460)

15(Chiri 1975, 316)

16

(Weatherby and Rogers 2008, 275)

17

(Shinoda 1978, 182)

18

(Matsuoka 2013, 126)82

clothes (夏⽴つ狭布の薄⾐)’ can be seen.19 This is a thin cloth woven with the feathersof cranes.

The blood is also closely connected with Ainu. In ‘Utō,’ the image of the tear of bloodleaves a strong impression. In the scene the hunter shows how he hunts utō, the jiutai(the noh chorus) sings the following:

From the sky the parent bird is weeping tears of blood.
From the sky fall the tears of blood. And I, covering myself with the sedge-hat, withthe cloak of straw, try to escape the falling tears, dodging now this way, now that.
But alas! these are not the enchanted cloak and hat which make invisible theirwearer.
Faster and faster fall the tears of blood, until my body cannot escape their mortal
touch, until the world turns crimson before my eyes—crimson as the fabled Bridgeof Maple Leaves, formed of magpie wings across the sky and at the dawn stained
red by the tears of two parting lover-stars.20（親は空にて、⾎の涙を、親は空にて、⾎の涙を、降らせば濡れじと、菅蓑や、笠をかたぶけ、ここかしこの、便りを求めて、隠れ笠、隠れ蓑にも、あらざれば、なほ降りかかる、⾎の涙に、⽬も紅に、染みわたるは、紅葉の橋の、鵲か。21）

19(Weatherby and Rogers 2008, 277), (Koyama and Satō 1998, 210)20

(Weatherby and Rogers 2008, 283-84)

21(Koyama and Satō 1998, 216-17)

83

‘The tears of blood’ can be seen in Shinsen utamakura nayose version of the narrative as
referred before. For example, in the paragraph ‘the blood shed from Ebisu’s body’ in

Shuchu-shō in the late 12th century, the following is written:

Michinoku ni/ Ebisu no mi yori/ idasu chi no/ kotouji nareya/ awanu koi kana(The blood shed from Ebisu’s body in Michinoku is from different family. The love isincompatible!)
Kenshō said as follows: when Ebisu in Michinoku examines whether a child is his or
another’s, he mixes his blood with the child’s. If it is his child, the two blood
samples match, but if it is another’s, they do not match.22

Here, the theme of parents and children suggests a relationship to the noh ‘Utō.’ The
blood is the extremity of kegare (contamination). This closely concerns a point to be
discussed later in this section.

Thus, several points related to Ainu can be seen in the noh ‘Utō.’ From ancient times,
people at the Japanese center detested Ainu and discriminated against them for being
disobedient. In the following passage from Suwa daimyojin ekotoba in 1356, it can beseen how in the Medieval period the center thought about Ainu in Soto-no-Hama:

The two species are Hinomoto and Karako. Their lands are connected to foreigncountries. Their figures are like demons and extremely monstrous. They eat men,birds, animals, fish, and meat. They do not know the materials for the agricultureof five grains. Even with many interpreters, it is very hard to understand theirspeech.23

22(Kyūsojin 1958, 316)

23

(Hanawa and Ōta 1988, 511)

84

The point is that Ainu are discriminated against because they are hunting people rather
than agricultural. The occupation of hunters is killing (sessho). Therefore, as Yoshirō Itō
observes, the center thinks of them as hinin (⾮⼈, non-human).24

The center considers hinin those people whose occupation is slaughtering or thetreatment of the dead. In shokue (触穢, literally touching kegare) thought, which
gradually took clear shape beginning with Engi-shiki in the middle of the 10th century,

hinin suffer kegare, and are detested and discriminated against. Accordingly, theemperor, as center of the center, must be kept absolutely clean.25

When the noh ‘Utō’ was composed, Ainu belonged to the category of hinin. The

minogasa that the nochi-shite of ‘Utō’ wears even today, was the costume of hinin or
beggars.26 Not only the shite in ‘Utō’ is a hinin. As Itō says, the characters that often
appear in noh, except dream noh (mugen noh), are hunters and wandering people likebeggars, disabled people, madwomen, prostitutes, bandits, burglars, performing priests,
slave dealers, and so on.27 They were all people in kegare and therefore hinin.

However, Itō makes the interesting point that sarugaku-shi ( 猿 楽 師 , sarugaku 28
performers), who performed such noh as ‘Utō,’ were also discriminated against as hinin.
That is, both the hunter and the performer who performs the role belonged to the samesocial category. Originally, in the 12th century, ancestors of sarugaku-shi played an

24(Itō 1985, 169)25(Ōyama 1976, 278-90)

26(Amino 1993, 129)27

(Itō 1985, 174)

28

Sarugaku is the pre-modern designation for noh.

85

indispensable role of exorcising kegare in such nationally relevant and important rituals
as shushō-e and shuni-e.29

Thus, Itō clearly points to a fundamental connection between the performer and theperformed in noh, but he does not question the significance of hinin performers playing

hinin roles. This is an important problem concerning the foundation of noh. The following
sections will give answers to the questions: Why did performers create a noh piece like
‘Utō?’ What significance did performances of the piece have?

Utō and Nue
At present, the word utō is usually written using the Sino-Japanese characters ‘善知⿃
(goodness-knowing-bird)’. However, several books in the first half of the 16th century
show the Konparu school used to use ‘空 ⼋ 形 (hollow-eight-figure),’ 30 ‘ 洞 ⼋ ⼈ 形(hollow-eight-man-figure)’31 and ‘虚⼋姿 (hollow-eight-figure)’32 as Sino-Japanese waysof writing ‘utōyasukata.’ In Unpoiroha-shū, a Japanese dictionary edited in 1548, aninteresting episode as to ‘虚⼋姿’ can be seen as below:

Once upon a time, a hollow boat crammed with eight people drifted away. Theirwandering spirits transformed into birds. That’s why it is written like this [‘holloweight-figure’].33

29(Matsuoka 2015, 92-101)

30(Kitagawa 1973, 483)

31

(Nishio et al. 1961, 149)

32

(Kyoto daigaku bungakubu 1969, 183)

33

(Kyoto daigaku bungakubu 1969, 183)

86

A hollow boat (utsuo-bune, 空⾈) is a boat carved from a single large tree. It is assumed
that not only the formulation ‘虚⼋姿,’ but also ‘空⼋形’ and ‘洞⼋⼈形’ are based on
the legend, although they use difference characters to express ‘hollow.’

It is easy to associate this legend with noh ‘Nue (鵺)’ composed by Zeami. Nue is amonster bird appearing in Heike monogatari. Its head is that of a monkey, its trunk thatof a raccoon dog (tanuki), its tail that of a snake, its limbs that of a tiger, and it sings like ascaly thrush. The episode in Heike monogatari relates that the emperor is awfully
frightened when a succession of nights a black cloud regularly comes from the forest ofeastern Sanjō and hangs over the palace. Minamoto no Yorimasa shoots an arrow into
the cloud and nue falls down. While Yorimasa thus gains reputation at court, nue is sent
off in a hollow boat.34

The noh ‘Nue’ is based on this episode. In the piece, the ghost of nue appears in front ofa priest and shows how Yorimasa killed him, thereby attaining a reputation, and how he
was sent off in a hollow boat. The noh ‘Nue’ is, unlike its resource in Heike monogatari,
not about simply rewarding good and punishing evil, but rather focuses on the loser, nue.
This is concerned with the fact that most characters in noh pieces are people in kegare as
mentioned before. Nue can be thought of as a symbol of kegare that must be exorcizedfrom the emperor. Nue must be killed in order for Yorimasa to attain his reputation andfor the emperor to be cleansed. The disadvantaged status of nue is similar to that ofsarugaku-shi’s ancestors in shushō-e or shuni-e.

The important point is that the episode of nue and a hollow boat closely corresponds to
Zeami’s mythical origin story for sarugaku. In his first text Fūshikaden, Zeami mentions
Hata no Kawakatsu as the founder of sarugaku.

34(Ichiko 1994, 335-40)87

In the age of Shōtoku Taishi (574-622), when conflicts took place, he commanded
Kawakatsu to perform sixty-six pieces of sarugaku and gave him the appropriate masks.
Kawakatsu performed the pieces at the imperial palace, thereby bringing about peace. Aninteresting legend follows this passage as below:

This same Kawakatsu served successive emperors—Kinmei, Bitatsu, Yōmei, andSushun, the empresss Suiko, and Prince Shōtoku Taishi—handing down this art tohis descendants. Then, because wraiths can leave no remains, he set out from
Naniwa Bay in the province of Settsu in a boat carved from a single large tree.
Entrusting himself to the wind, he sailed out over the Western Sea and arrived at
Shakushi Bay in the province of Harima. When the people of this bay pulled theboat to land, his shape had changed from that of a human being. He began topossess and haunt all the people of the area, and to cause strange omens. The
people thereupon began to worship him as a god, and the province prospered.
They named him Daikō Daimyōjin, writing this with the characters meaning ‘greatly
violent.’35

Generally, many gods in Japan are the type of kōjin (violent god). A kōjin has a dual
nature: it is a terrifying existence that causes disasters, but if worshipped, brings
happiness. Hata no Kawakatsu—or ‘Daikō Daimyōjin’ as above—is such a deity.

It is clear that when Zeami composed ‘Nue’ he was thinking of the Hata no Kawakatsu
legend. Therefore, nue in the noh also represents an ancestor of the performers whoplay the role. Shinpei Matsuoka writes about ‘Nue’ when he says that in his sixties Zeami
tried to compose oni noh (demon noh) in order to deal with the origins of his identity as aperformer.36
35(Zeami 2006, 100-101) The quoter changed a few words.

36(Matsuoka 2013, 118)

88

Nue is similar to utō in many ways. As mentioned above, in the Konparu school, utō used
to be written in ways that suggest a similar background, and the episode in Unpoiroha-shū supports this view. The appearance of the alternative Sino-Japanese character
formulations and the Unpoiroha-shū episode might come after the composition of ‘Utō,’
but this seems because the noh ‘Utō’ and ‘Nue’ are based on the same cosmology.

The connection between utō and nue can be seen in other places. As mentioned above,in Sugae’s Soto-ga-Hama tsutai, utō means ‘hollow’ in Soto-no-Hama, although in thatcase the hollow is an utō nest dug in a sandy beach. And, in Hitometamaboko, written by
Ihara Saikaku in 1689, there is a waka about utō.37 However, in Daito gunki from ca. 1466,
the same waka can be seen and the phrase ‘utō tori (the bird utō)’ is written as ‘utsuho

tori (the hollow bird).’38 Moreover, in Shogenjikō setsuyo-shū, a Japanese dictionary from1717, utō is written using a character ‘鵼’ that usually means nue.39

Furthermore, the wandering legend type (court noble type) described in Sasaki’s
classification of utō legends can be associated with the legend of Hata no Kawakatsu in

Fūshikaden, and a monster bird in the revengeful spirit damaging fields legend
type is similar to nue characterizations. Sasaki mentions that in Tsugaru rekiseiroku,
there is a legend about a revengeful spirit, in which a monster bird nue appears and ahunter is sent in order to kill it.40

Conclusion—The Hunter in Kegare kills Utō as Kegare

37(Ihara 2007, 1270)

38(Shiseki shūran kenkyūkai 1968, 203)

39

(Hashimoto et al. 2000, 407)

40

(Sasaki 1990, 169)89

Thus, utō are similar to nue in many ways and can sometimes replace nue. It seems
because utō are—like nue—a symbol of kegare, they are an existence to be killed andexorcised for the good of the nation. In the noh ‘Utō,’ it seems that utō should be pitied
and that the hunter is bad for killing them, but it can be assumed that utō might also be
considered evil and an existence to be detested.

Here, it is necessary to consider torioi (⿃追い, exorcizing birds). Torioi is an event, held
mainly in Eastern Japan, where people remove harmful birds from fields in a beginning ofa year. In the torioi of Hōrai-ji in Aichi-prefecture, the song below is sung:

Gather these and put them into this mountain and the deep mountain. Cross andstop the base of a winter creeper, and cross and grow the end of it. Wind it aroundthem as ‘kaimari, kaimari.’ Chase them to the east, drive them out to Tsugaru,
Gappo, and Soto-no-Hama. Chase them to the south, drive them out to thesouthern sea, Fudaraku, and Soto-no-Hama. Chase them to the west, drive themout to Tsukushi, Chinzei, and Soto-no-Hama. Chase them to the north, drive themout to Echigo, Ecchu, and Soto-no-Hama.
（是等（こりうら）を集めて当⼭へ差（し）⼊れ、奥⼭へ差（し）⼊れ、柾の⽊の葛を本うちかいやすめ、末うちかいはやし、かいまり／＼とかい
まいて、東へさして追はんば、津軽や合浦、外の浜へ追ふべし。南へさして追はんば、南海や普陀洛、外の浜へ追ふべし。⻄へさして追はんば、筑紫や鎮⻄、外の浜へ追ふべし。北へさして追はんば、越後や越中、外の浜へ追ふべし。41）

41(Arai 1970, 175)

90

The torioi song above is for exorcizing harmful birds and other evil things. In this song,the destinations of the exorcized beings are Soto-no-Hama, although in this case thewords are used to signify also the south, west, and north borders of Japan. Torioi, used to
exorcize harmful birds to Soto-no-Hama, the farthest coast, in order to let agriculture
prosper, is based on the same cosmology as that of the noh ‘Nue,’ in which Yorimasa
exorcizes the harmful bird nue from the emperor’s vicinity and sends it away in a hollow
boat. Futhermore, the revengeful spirit damaging fields legend type from
Sasaki’s classification can be associated with torioi. Harmful birds pose a practicalproblem for agricultural people who have fields near the sea, and it is important to drive
them away. In this case, utō is a harmful bird and a threat to agriculture. Therefore, as
mentioned, the bird appears as nue in Tsugaru rekiseiroku.

For that reason, it can be thought that the noh ‘Utō’ employs the same cosmology to thatof the noh ‘Nue’ and of the Hōrai-ji torioi. If utō are harmful birds destructive ofagriculture, hunters are needed to exorcize them. However, in this noh, the hunter is nota hero like Yorimasa, who kills nue. A person who kills birds in kegare cannot avoid
suffering kegare because of his action. This pertains to the point in the legend where thehunter is exposed to the risk of touching utō’s tears of blood—the extremity of kegare.
Then, he wears minogasa, but kegare is unavoidable. However, through this process of
exorcism, agriculture = nation = center is protected from kegare and kept pure. This
characterization of the hunter is, in turn, similar to that of sarugaku-shi’s ancestors.
Therefore, it can be said that the noh ‘Utō’ was also composed in order to deal with theorigin of sarugaku-shi’s identity as a performer, like the noh ‘Nue.’

Cultural anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi observes, ‘The model that forms the symbolic
cosmology of the emperor system is represented in theater.’42 It is possible to describe
the noh ‘Utō’ the same way. It can be concluded as follows: Upon composing ‘Utō,’

sarugaku-shi believed that those in the same situation as them were similarly acting to42(Yamaguchi 2000, 109)91

exorcize the national kegare in the farthest coast, Soto-no-Hama. At first glance, thepiece appears to be a moral drama preaching about the sinfulness of killing animals or a
tragedy about parents and their children. However, it is rather a suggestion thatsarugaku-shi intended to exhibit and proclaim the roll of the hunter in the periphery topeople in the center. When sarugaku-shi got to know the legend of Soto-no-Hama andutō, the fundamental consciousness of kind led them to compose the noh piece.

Reference

Amino, Yoshihiko. 1993. Igyō no ōken. Tokyo: Heibonsha.
Arai, Tsuneyasu. 1970. Chūsei geinō no kenkyū. Tokyo: Shin dokusha.
Chiri, Mashiho. 1975. Bunrui ainugo jiten: Ningen hen. Tokyo: Heibonsha.
Gotō, Shigerō, eds. 1982. Sanka-shū. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.
Hanawa, Hokiichi and Toshirō Ōta, eds. 1988. “Suwa daimyōjin ekotoba.” In Zoku
gunshoruijū dai san shū ge: Jingi bu teisei sanban, 494-539. Tokyo: Zoku
gunshoruijū kanseikai.
Hashimoto, Daishinkan, Akira Kimura and others, eds. 2000. Shogenjikō sechiyō-shū.
Yokosuka: Tōkōzan bunko.
Ichiko, Teiji, eds. 1994. Heike monogatari I. Tokyo: Shōgakukan.
Ihara, Saikaku. 2007. “Hitometamaboko.” In Shinpen saikaku zenshū dai gokan ge,edited by Shinpen saikaku zenshū henshū iinkai, 1266-421. Tokyo: Bensei
shuppan.
Itō, Yoshirō. 1985. “Chūsei koki no zatsugeisha to shuryōmin: ‘Utō’ ni miru saikoku
to tōgoku.” In Tōgoku no shakai to bunka, edited by Nagakazu Ogasawara, 15580. Matsudo: Azusa shuppansha.
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Kajihara, Masaaki, Yuichi Ōtsu and Tesshō Nonaka, eds. 2002. Soga monogatari.
Tokyo: Shōgakukan.
Kitagawa, Tadahiko, eds. “Zenpō zōtan.” In Kodai chūsei geijutsu ron, edited by
Tatsusaburō Hayashiya, 479-510. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Koyama, Hiroshi and Kenichirō Satō, eds. 1998. Yōkyoku-shū I. Tokyo: Shōgakukan.
Kuroda, Akiko, eds. 1988. Shinsen utamakura nayose ge. Tokyo: Kotenbunko.
Kuroita, Katsumi and Kokushi taikei henshūkai, eds. 1964. Azuma kagami zenpen.
Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan.
Kyoto daigaku bungakubu kokugogaku kokubungaku kenkyūshitsu, eds. 1969.
Unpoiroha-shū: Ganki ninen kyōdai bon. Kyoto: Rinsen shoten.
Kyūsojin, Hikii, eds. 1958. “Shūchū-shō.” In separate vol. 2 of Nihon kagaku taikei,
1-340. Tokyo: Kazama shobō.
Matsuoka, Shinpei. 2013. Nō no mikata. Tokyo: Kadokawa gakugei shuppan.
------. 2015. Chūsei geinō kōgi: ‘Kanjin’ ‘tennō’ ‘renga’ ‘zen.’ Tokyo: Kōdansha.
Nishio, Minoru, Makoto Tanaka, Kiyomitsu Kanai and Hiroshi Ikeda, eds. 1961.
den-shō.” In Yōkyoku kyōgen, 144-57. Tokyo: Sanseidō.

“JikaŌishi, Naomasa. 1980. ”Soto-ga-Hama･Ezo-ga-Shima kō.” In Seki Akira sensei

kanreki kinen: Nihon kodaishi kenkyu, edited by Seki Akira kyōju kanreki
kinenkai, 565-98. Tokyo: Yosikawa kōbunkan.
Ōyama, Kyōhei. 1976. “Chūsei no mibunsei to kokka.” In vol. 8 of Iwanami kōzarekishi, 261-313. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Nihon

Sasaki, Kōji. 1990. Denshō bungaku ron to kita ōu no denshō bungaku. Hirosaki:Hoppō shinsha.
Shinoda, Kōichirō. 1978. Chūsei eno tabi: rekishi no shinsō wo tazunete. Tokyo:
shinbunsha.
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Shiseki shūran kenkyūkai, eds. 1968. “Daitōgunki.” In vol. 14 of Kaitei shiseki
192-211. Tokyo: Sumiya shobō.

shūran,Sugae, Masumi. 1971. “Soto-ga-Hama tsutai.” In vol. 1 of Sugae Masumi zenshū, editedby Takeshi Uchida and Tsuneichi Miyamoto, 451-73. Tokyo: Miraisha.
Takeuchi, Rizō, eds. 1967. Kenji sannenki, Einin sannennki, Saitō Mototsune nikki
Saitō Chikamoto nikki, Chikamoto nikki (1). Kyoto: Rinsen shoten.
Weatherby, Meredith and Bruce Rogers, trans. 2008. “Birds of Sorrow.” In Anthologyof Japanese literature: from the earliest Era to the mid-nineteenth century,edited by Donald Keene, 271-85. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.
Yamaguchi, Masao. 2000. Tennōsei no bunkajinruigaku. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
Zeami. 2006. The flowering spirit: classic teachings on the art of Nō. Translated byWilliam Scott Wilson. Tokyo: Kōdansha International.

Rurihiko Hara is a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences, and Research Fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He
majors in Japanese gardens, Noh and Kyogen. He worked as a dramaturge in Ryuichi
Sakamoto+Mansai Nomura+Shiro Takatani’s Nohgaku Collaboration Performance 'LIFEWELL' (2013) in YCAM.

94

Môn Tohoku Môn Triad: ‘We are water carriers: committing our bodies totransformation in places of sacredness and contamination.’

Ariana Jordão

This project is a collaboration between myself, an artist and biologist, and Siriol Joyner, aWelsh dancer choreographer. As a joint practice we are interested in how movement andcultural practices inform and shape our relationship to place. We are working with theinvisible convictions we impose on the land, like rural idyll or contaminated site, thepromise of transformation that may be enacted or not, and the multiple occupancy ofplace, such as when sacred sites are turned into industrial power machines.

In Môn-Tohoku-Môn we are exploring the physicality and physicalisation of history inlocci, particularly seen in ‘Môn, Mam Cymru’, or Anglesey the mother of Wales. Môn is
known as the ‘mother’ of Wales perhaps as she is the place that holds the physical andmythological symbols that point to the origins of Welsh culture: Sacred Celtic sites andstanding stones, holy wells, ancient burial chambers and tombs for Gods and Goddessesof the Mabinogi. We might also think of Môn as Mother in the sense of her voracious
productivity and manifestations of power and ‘energy’, counterpointed to manufactured
and implanted sites of power and energy infrastructure such as the Wylfa nuclear power
plant. This points to a shared territory of reverence and commodification; the correlation
between Tohoku, Japan and Ynys Môn, Wales as peripheral and sacrificial yet sacredregions is so clear that we felt a call to respond within the structure of this PSi conference.
We travelled to Ynys Môn and collected water from a sacred well. 1 A scallop shell too as
pilgrimage is a clear connection between the two sites. Môn is a starting point for el
1

Robert Williams and Phillip Steele, Môn Mam Cymru: the Guide to Anglesey (Llyfrau Magma, 2006) 245

95

Camino de Santiago and scallop shell biscuits, named Aberffraw biscuits, are traditionallymade using the pilgrim’s symbol, the scallop shell, as a mold. In Aomori the scallop shell
was there to greet us in the form of local sea produce branding.

We also visited the Wylfa power station, where the last Magnox reactor in the world isnearing the end of it’s life cycle and getting ready for full decommissioning in December,while the construction of the next generation plant, Wylfa B, has been contracted to
Horizon, a Japanese company. The visitor centre employee, facing imminent redundancy,
seemed keen to off load the remainder stock of souvenirs on us; we walked away withteddy bears, uranium green erasers, DVDs detailing the safety standards of the industry
and a handful of celebratory stickers ‘I have seen nuclear power in action at Wylfa,
Anglesey’. We also met with a volunteer tour guide for the power station, a retired lady,
who shared with us commiserations about Fukushima in the same breath as a true love
and awe of nuclear power, unabated by the ‘unfortunate’ disaster. We couldn’t meetwith the public relations officer for Horizon at that moment but corresponding about our
project he wrote, ‘One of my personal goals is to make the new station as aestheticallypleasing as possible. Finding a way to engage artists and engineers in designing andcreating outcomes would be a subject that would be very interesting.’ (Greg Evans,
Horizon Nuclear Power)

Our goal in coming to Japan was to explore the relationship between these two sites
through attempting to work with materials and aesthetics encountered there: clay, water,shells, mushrooms as materials as well as aesthetic forms such as raku ceramics, the tea
ceremony and calligraphy, and to explore the culture around nuclear energy and it’s
intrinsic myths in both countries; could this technology be seem as value neutral, when it
is so intimately connected with purposeful human action? Is the radical nature of human
responsibility for the social implementation of technology adequately addressed throughthe current political process? Global energy consumption in the 20th century keeps rising
exponentially; one of the defining features of modern life is this unprecedented
96consumption of all forms of energy, fossil fuels in particular. Although only a tiny fractionof that is nuclear the bold mythology enveloping it presents nuclear a magically potent
and unlimited source of power, with guaranteed fuel supply for decades to come, andeven respected environmentalists 2 stand by nuclear power, stating it’s dangers havebeen wildly exaggerated and it provides the key to balancing outputs from renewables
and hence the decarbonisation of the power supply.

We proposed two scores for the conference:
1)
Pick mushrooms from contaminated woods, burn them and cast the ash into a stableform such as glass to create contaminated inert glassware. Invest in the crisis.
The group together drink water that has been carried from Ynys Môn from this glass.
A plurilingual text is shared - Cymraeg, English, Japanese - serving as a container forcollective action.
Paul Stamets, the world-renowned mycologist published a one-page blueprint3 for thelarge-scale bio remediation of Fukushima on the aftermath of 3/11. In one page heproposes what is effectively a landscape wide biological choreographic intervention thatwould imply a synergistic orchestration between government officials, radiation experts,
foresters, mycologists and civil society that remains nothing short of utopic - it never
happened. In Fukushima mushrooms are being used as indicators of falling radiationlevels, and these organisms that hyper accumulate radiation can be harvested andincinerated under HAZMAT protocols and the ash safely set into inert glass or porcelain
clay. We proposed to transform this ash into drinking vessels and pilgrim scallop shells tobe employed in a social choreography. We wanted to work with ceramic artists local to
Aomori to use Ynys Môn shells, Aomori clay and an incinerated mushroom wash to make2

George Monbiot, “Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power” The Guardian March
21, 2011
3

Paul Stamets ‘The Nuclear Forest Recovery Zone – Myco-remediation of the Japanese Landscape AfterRadioactive Fallout’ Coalition for positive change, March 19, 201197

these containers, purposing ceramics as safe envelopes that simultaneously neutralize
and embody a material trace of radiation.

While we were at the conference presenting this creative paper the anti nuclear group in
Wales, PAWB was hosting a delegation from japan in Wales including the ex Prime
Minister of Japan, Naoto Kan, in a public symbolic act of solidarity by twinning Anglesey
and Fukushima. In my own act of twinning, I stopped by in Fukushima on the way backfrom Aomori, to collect some water samples, oyster mushrooms and spread the ‘I haveseen nuclear power in action at Wylfa, Anglesey’ stickers in public places.
2)
A group score and practice entitled ‘Mamiaith’ (Mother tongue).
This is an existing practice and score that Siriol has been developing over the last 3 years
in different countries and contexts. For this practice a group is invited to go for a walk,
this can be a ‘one off’ event or a daily practice over the period of the conference. The
choreographic score is to walk with no destination, and if we speak we do so in what we
feel to be our mother tongue.

Through practicing this score, ‘Mamiaith’ practice has gained a political meaning andweight. A space develops, where one is allowed to speak her/his own language(s) not
because the others can understand, but because this is the language closest to thesource of their own expression: their place. Plurilingualism is a between state, a state ofcontamination in the mouth, and in the case of ‘Mamiaith’ a contamination within thegroup and between many mouths. ‘Mamiaith’ diverts the focus of communication awayfrom being understood by others into being self in direct connection with a wider mesh.

We are a crisis culture, existing within the context of unravelling climate change andrampant imperialist instrumentalization of the building blocks of culture. In thisconception of contemporary time we exist always within conflict, turmoil, uncertainty
and pollution. We are water carriers, committing our bodies, our languages, to hold98

traces, committed to being cultural contagions, bodies passing through places, letting
things stick. Committed to reverence, commodification and manifestation.

In Japan we sourced Japanese materials: handmade paper, ink blocs, calligraphy brushes,
water and clay from Osorezan, and Fukushima, which will be used to produce an editionof choreographic scores in print. We visited the archive of founder of butō dance,
Tatsumi Hijikata at Keio University in Tokyo to study his scores and draw inspiration forour own. The scores are meant as documents and also as material for the next and lastphase of this Triad, as a way of hyper accumulating the various exposures contained in
the project into a shareable form.

Ariana Jordão is a biologist and Artist in Residence program curator at the Centre for
Alternative Technology in Wales. Her artworks explore personal, practical and politicalpaths to sustainability, in collaboration with hello!earth, Craftedspace and Un-earthedcompanies. Môn - Tohoku - Môn had support from Wales Arts International and GreatBritain Sasakawa Foundation.

99

Performing Recovery: Music Making and Disaster Relief in Post-Tsunami
Japan

Nana Kaneko

Introduction
I was in the town of Rikuzentakata in Tohoku, Japan observing their annual Ugoku

Tanabata Festival1 on August 7, 2013, approximately two and a half years after that
fateful day, March 11, 2011, when the town was literally washed away. ‘We lost all but
two dashi (floats) in the tsunami,’ an informant told me. She continued by saying, ‘toobserve the first festival that came around after 3.11, several of the town’s residents
dragged one of the remaining dashi down a hill and around the town. By the end of it, wewere all in tears; that was the moment when the gravity of the situation really hit us.’ Isuddenly realized that matsuri 2 festivals hold newly significant meaning for affected
communities in post-3.11 Japan.

Today, I will present a variety of musical responses to the 3.11 disaster that I haveencountered over the past year of ethnographic fieldwork while based in Sendai, and thecontrasting ways that these activities are serving as models for ‘healing and recovery’ in a
post-disaster context. Although each response is certainly unique in terms of intent andexecution, I’ve decided to arrange them under the following four categories: 1. Localizedmatsuri and folk performing arts, 2. Synthetic, economy-driven matsuri, 3. Musiciansfrom affected areas performing elsewhere, and 4. Outside musicians performing for
affected communities.

1

The Ugoku (moving) Tanabata Festival in Rikuzentakata, Iwate has at least a 700-year history and is held
annually on August 7.
2

Matsuri festivals are seasonal and held on a set date(s) every year. Some are secular, but most aresponsored by a local shrine or temple.

100

To conclude, I will contextualize these activities and responses through issues raised inengaged ethnomusicology and humanitarian anthropology, and offer some thoughts onwhat outsiders can continue to do to support musical revival in disaster-affected areas
during this ‘between state’ of crisis and recovery.

1. Localized matsuri and folk performing arts
The Tohoku region has a longstanding history of local, that is, regionally specific, matsuri
and folk performing art forms that are so deeply rooted in a community’s history andculture that they have organically developed into an integral element of local community
building, especially after 3.11. The aforementioned Ugoku Tanabata Matsuri in
Rikuzentakata is one such example, as is the Minato Matsuri3 in Kesennuma. In bothcases, the majority of participants are local residents who have participated in thesematsuri since childhood as members of neighborhood associations and performancegroups.

Despite the need for basic necessities following 3.11, the revival of many localizedmatsuri and folk performing arts (e.g., kagura4, shi shi mai5, oni kenbai6, and tora mai7) inaffected areas was remarkably fast. A temporary exhibit at the Tohoku History Museumin Tagajō featured a shishi-gashira (lion head) that was constructed using found objects
such as cans, hotel slippers, and zabuton cushions in a hotel in Akita that was being used3

A 2-day port festival in Kesennuma, Miyagi, held annually on August 2 and 3. This year marked its 64
anniversary.

th4

Ritual dances performed since ancient times as offerings to please the patron gods of local shrines.
Kagura means music (and dance) for the gods, and is accompanied by singing, shrill traverse flutes, stickdrums, and other percussive instruments such as small metal idiophones and clappers.
5

Lion dance commonly performed during the New Year accompanied by traverse flutes and drums. The
lacquered head is called a shishi-gashira (lit. lion head).
6

Dances performed while wielding a sword and stamping firmly on the ground7

Tiger dance accompanied by traverse flutes and drums

101

as a temporary housing unit by former residents of Takeura, Onagawa, when somebody
brought a fue (bamboo flute) that was found amongst the debris.

What motivated these communities to prioritize the revival of localized performing artsand matsuri when even basic necessities were not within arms reach? One person from
Rikuzentakata had mentioned that matsuri preparations were simply a feasible activity
that gave them purpose during a period when they didn’t have the resources to rebuild
homes and redevelop their livelihood. At the most basic level, matsuri preparations gave
affected communities a reason to collaborate and an attainable goal to work towards
together.

According to Kaketa Hironori, an ethnologist and chair of The Fukushima Research Groupof the Society of Folkloric Performing Arts8, one of his informants, an elderly woman from
Sōma, stated, ‘on top of losing my home and assets, if matsuri were also to be lost, what
would be left?’ 9 Kaketa argues that matsuri and folk performing arts in post-3.11
Fukushima are not simply for religious purposes, but are in fact the root of regional
rebuilding10 by providing a space and environment to deepen friendships and the spirit ofharmony and helping others in need (Kaketa 2014, 12). The revival of folk performing arts
didn’t come after livelihood, but rather, the folk performing arts remains a necessarycomponent to rebuild livelihood. Although tradition is always mediated, localized matsuri
and folk performing arts are indeed a powerful mechanism for recovery and community
building in disaster affected areas that communities turned to at very early stages in therecovery process.

2. Synthetic, economy-driven matsuri

8

民俗芸能学会福島調査団 Minzoku Geinō Gakkai Fukushima Chōsa Dan

9「家も財産もなくなったうえに、祭りまでなくなったら何が残るの…」Ie mo zaisan mo nakunatta
ue ni, matsuri made nakunattara nani ga nokoru no…
10

地域づくり chiiki zukuri

102

The Tohoku Rokkonsai (Six-Soul Festival), first held in Sendai on July 16 and 17, 2011 (justfour months after 3.11), is a collaboration between six major matsuri representing the six
prefectural capitals of Tohoku where representatives from all six festivals annuallyconverge in one location and put on a massive parade in an attempt to boost morale,
demonstrate ideas about community and kizuna (affective ties), and raise hope for what
they call ‘a new Tohoku.’ The Rokkonsai’s primary objective is to promote tourism, andthus market growth, in Tohoku, putting it under what Donald Getz labels as ‘festival
tourism’ or ‘festivalization,’ which is ‘an over-commodification of festivals exploited by
tourism and place marketers’ (Getz 2010, 5).

However, according to Shiraishi Yu, a member of the Rokkonsai Sendai Tanabata
Preparation Committee, whom I interviewed at the Sendai Chamber of Commerce office,Tohoku was hurting economically after the disaster, and the six Chambers of Commerceof the Tohoku prefectural capitals strove to find a means to boost morale for people inaffected areas, and more importantly, to show the world that people in Tohoku are still
alive and thriving in contrast to news footage, which made it seem that all of Tohoku was
entirely decimated.

The Tohoku Rokkonsai came about when the mayor of Aomori, Shikanai Hiroshi, told themayor of Sendai, Okuyama Emiko, that he would bring the Aomori Nebuta Festival to
Sendai to help boost morale. The Chambers of Commerce had departments forprefectural matsuri, and there was a Tohoku matsuri network prior to 3.11, but following
the mayor of Aomori’s lead, the idea came about to have all six matsuri from eachprefectural capital in Tohoku convene in one location, which would provide an evenstronger basis for a Tohoku network (i.e. boosting market economy and touristic appeal).

Preparations for the first Rokkonsai in Sendai started in May 2011, which means it was
ambitiously planned within just two months. The first Rokkonsai resulted in absolutechaos, however, as way more people came than anticipated that the festivities ended103early on the second day, leaving planners and participants with mixed feelings about theextent to which this event was a success. The massive amount of spectators could be
attributed to a couple of reasons: 1. Kabushiki-gaisha Dentsū, one of the largest
international advertising and public relations companies in Japan, gathered all thesponsors and managed all the PR, and 2. Attendees were probably not only attracted tothe convenience and grandeur of being able to see multiple major matsuri in one location,
but also felt that attending this event would fulfill a sense of moral obligation as a way toshow support for disaster victims, although hardly, if any, of the proceeds are actually
going to disaster-affected communities.

This is not to say that boosting market economy is entirely selfish and shameful, and it’s
undoubtedly necessary, but when considering whether the Rokkonsai is directly helping
people in Tohoku to recover and rebuild a sense of community, I’m not particularly
convinced. Kaketa Hironori mentioned that the Fukushima Waraji is one of the mostworthless and unattractive matsuri in existence 11 , and that it is a disgracefulrepresentation of the array of culturally rich folk performing arts that are thriving inFukushima primarily because participants dance to an audio recording as opposed to live
music and repeat the same basic dance moves at the same tempo throughout.
Furthermore, since the Fukushima Chamber of Commerce organizes it, employees fromlocal companies such as banks are also required to participate, and they approach thedancing not as a means of deepening bonds with others, but rather as a burdensome
obligation. What issues arise then when performers from disaster-affected areas areinvited to give performances outside of their native region?

3. Musicians from affected areas performing elsewhere
Hashimoto Hiroyuki is a folklorist based at Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka, who has
been extremely active in assisting various disaster-affected folk performing groups by
writing grants, providing performance venues, and recruiting volunteers for them. He
11

In his words,もっともくだらない、何の魅力もない。Mottomo kudaranai, nanno miryoku mo nai.

104was teaching in Iwate at the time of the 3.11 disaster. On January 24 of this year,
Hashimoto organized a performance by a Jangara Nembutsu Odori12 group from Iwaki,
Fukushima at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. Before the performance, it
was announced that this particular group was revived just four months after the disasterand has performed in Akita, Miyagi, Ibaraki, and Tokyo since 3.11. The performers who
were all relatively young adults stated that they were inspired to continue their activities
after people found their equipment in the debris and took the effort to return it to them.
Despite receiving criticism from some locals who argued that these young members are
wasting their time with jangara when they should be working towards more productively
contributing to recovery efforts, they stated that these performances are giving them theopportunity to express their gratitude for all the support they have received and also
allows them to educate outsiders about the Jangara Nembutsu tradition as well as thecurrent state of Iwaki.

Hashimoto writes that in order for folk performing groups to recover, they not only need
new tools, instruments, and outfits, but more importantly, they need spaces to practiceand perform, and most importantly, the members of these groups need to be identified
and able to convene in one location to practice regularly since many have dispersed toother areas and prefectures (Hashimoto 2015, 100). Anthropologist Mariella Pandolfi
describes the shortcomings of multilateral institutions through the metaphor of applying
Band-Aids as a temporary fix (Pandolfi 2010, 227). A similar issue is presented here where
folk performing groups are supplemented with new apparatuses as an immediate
response, especially if they are designated as an intangible folk cultural heritage by The
Agency for Cultural Affairs, but they are struggling to receive support for long-term
recovery and revival. Hashimoto states that it is vital to remember that the folk
performing arts have been performed as an indispensable mainstay in the formation of

12

A folk performing art form central to Iwaki, Fukushima where performers sing and dance with taiko(drum) and kane (bronze bell), and circle around to homes to recite prayers for families facing their first
Obon (Buddhist observance for commemorating one’s ancestors held in mid-August) after someone’s
death.

105

regional community, and that we should question the stance of people who are simply
trying to categorize and objectify these folk performing arts into intangible cultural
heritage without fully understanding the extent of their importance for local
communities (ibid., 98).

In an effort to try to provide these groups with more performance opportunities, several
folk performing groups from disaster-affected areas have been invited to give
performances at renowned theaters and venues both domestically and internationally.
Although outside performances are giving visibility to folk performing groups from
affected areas, they are also forcefully changing them into presentational practices.
According to Kodani Ryusuke, a cultural anthropologist based in Miyagi who has been
especially focused on the recovery efforts of Ogatsu Hōin Kagura, folk performing arts
have traditionally been performed in villages for people in that village, in many cases
often serving as background music for matsuri attendees, and were not meant to be
performed presentationally on a stage for an eager and curious audience. Furthermore,these performances were not about demonstrating a high skill level, but were more
about providing a space for attendees to periodically listen, jump in, and participate as
they please. In order for a group to be selected to give an outside performance, however,they must be at a very high skill level, thus only the best groups are given theseopportunities.

Hashimoto also highlights that although outside performances are meant to support
performers from disaster-affected areas, if the performance venue is far away from theirhometown, they need to take off from work, and in many cases, the payment for
performances doesn’t measure up to their salary. So while these performances areattempting to raise the message of ‘Ganbarō Tohoku (Hang in there, Tohoku!)’ they’resimultaneously threatening people’s livelihood in disaster-affected areas. (Hashimoto
2015, 134). Ultimately, it seems most vital to secure performance venues for these106

people in their hometown, and to find ways to support these groups in ways where they
can continue to sustain their activities as close to the way they were prior to the disaster.

4. Outside musicians performing for affected communities
Perhaps the most common musical response to the 3.11 disaster in addition to an arrayof charity concerts has been for amateur and professional musicians to go to disasteraffected areas and temporary housing units to perform for victims. While these
performers undoubtedly mean well, in many cases, these types of performances are
somewhat intrusive since they are not always catered to what the listeners want to hear,
but are instead constricted to the genre of music that the performers specialize in.

Senrai is a professional level neo-folk performing ensemble based in Miyagi featuring

taiko13, chappa14, yokobue15, tsugaru jamisen16, and sometimes bass and keyboard. The
members were in different parts of Miyagi on 3.11, and thus went through theexperience of not having water, electricity, and access to the outside world. According totheir producer, Chiba Shu, within the first week following the disaster, members of Senrai
went to a temporary housing unit with a taiko and offered to give a performance. Prior to
3.11, taiko was nostalgic, especially for older people, and reminded them of attending
matsuri with their families. For children, it was an exciting, invigorating instrument tolisten to. However, this time, Senrai was flat out refused and told that the sound of the
taiko would remind residents of the sounds and rumbling of the earthquake, and that thechildren would be frightened. At that very moment, it became strikingly clear to themthat the very thing they’ve invested themselves into was not only worthless, but alsodenied in a post-disaster context, and they started to question whether they would be
able to continue their career as taiko musicians.
13

A membranophone drum struck with two wooden sticks (bachi)

14

A pair of small cymbals

15

A bamboo traverse flute

16

A type of shamisen (three-stringed plucked lute) originating from the Tsugaru region in Aomori

107Thereafter, members of Senrai went to temporary housing units to help not as musicians,
but as volunteers by cleaning up debris, distributing donations they received from the
taiko community, and chatting with the residents. One day, an older lady at a temporary
housing unit saw an ōdaiko17 that they happened to have in the back of their car, andtold them that she would love to be able to dance bon odori18 to it someday, then asked
if she could write a message on the face of the taiko saying that she wants to hear thesound of this taiko someday. Then, others quickly followed suit and started to write theirthoughts, hopes, and words of appreciation on the taiko. From there, this ōdaiko came tobe known as the ‘kibō no tsuzumi’ (drum of hope), which initially served as a means ofcommunication for people in various housing units, and eventually for people outside ofaffected areas to write messages of support as well.

On May 6, 2011, Senrai performed for the first time since the disaster, and have been
involved in a number of various relief effort projects since then including the Aoi
Koinobori Project (a project to collect and raise blue koinobori19 on children’s day tohonor the children who passed away on 3.11, inspired by an adolescent taiko player who
lost his 5-year old brother, mother, and grandparents on 3.11), the Zero-One Gareki
Saisei Project (constructing musical instruments out of disaster debris to donate toaffected communities and to ensure that 3.11 is not forgotten), and the Ogatsu Chūgakko
Fukkō Wadaiko Project (teaching taiko using tires at Ogatsu Middle School to children
whose taiko were washed away). What is appealing about Senrai’s disaster relief efforts isthat they listen to and involve people from affected areas in their projects and activities
rather than to simply inundate victims with music as a temporary and ultimately selfsatisfying means of relief. I think it is fair to say that the initial rejection of their taiko

17

A large taiko played on stands in a horizontal position

18

Communal dancing at summer festivals to honor the spirit of the ancestors

19

Carp streamers raised on Children’s Day (May 5) to celebrate their happiness and well-being108

playing allowed Senrai to think more carefully and conscientiously about the ways thatthey could be of use to disaster-affected communities.

Closing thoughts
Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino organizes performance into two categories:
participatory performance is ‘a special type of artistic practice in which there are no
artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing
different roles,” and presentational performance “refers to situations where one group ofpeople, the artists, prepare and provide music for another group, the audience, who do
not participate in making the music or dancing’ (Turino 2008, 26). I believe thatparticipatory musical activities as defined by Turino are the ones that are leaving a lasting
impact on disaster-affected communities. Kaketa Hironori mentioned that the folk
performing arts are meant to be performed and not simply listened to, and that it is best
to sing and dance together with (not for) people in affected areas.

In 2007, an applied ethnomusicology study group was established within theInternational Council for Traditional Music, which developed an ‘approach guided byprinciples of social responsibility, which extends the usual academic goal of broadening
and deepening knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems andtoward working both inside and beyond typical academic contexts’ (Harrison, MacKinlay,
Pettan 2010, 1). Many scholars (myself included), however, take issue with the word
‘applied ethnomusicology’ because, as Anthony Seeger puts it, ‘we apply
ethnomusicology all the time – every time we design a syllabus or teach a class we areapplying ethnomusicology’ (Mengel 2013, 22). Thus, I prefer the term engaged
ethnomusicology to describe an ‘ethical dedication to using the knowledge acquired to‘benefit’ individuals, communities and musical traditions’ (Harrison, MacKinlay, Pettan
2010, 7). One of the best ways that outsiders can support musical revival in disasteraffected areas might be linked to the discourse provided by engaged ethnomusicology in109that the most beneficial kind of support is not to reshape and redefine, but tosupplement recovery efforts within affected communities.

As an area, however, engaged ethnomusicology sometimes has a tendency to rely on
predetermined and ethnocentric ideas about what will ‘do good’ for people in a given
community. Thus, it could further benefit from the critical anthropological models that
address humanitarianism through a focus on the impulses that inspire engagement in
humanitarian work as opposed to its outcomes (e.g., Bornstein 2012), and use a bottomup ethnographic approach that valorizes local over expert knowledge (e.g. mass media
and Western aid agencies), to counter the top-down humanitarian vision (e.g., Malkki
1996, and Redfield 2013).

Since 3.11, countless volunteers have gone to disaster-affected areas, and many havebecome regular participants in localized matsuri festivals, participating every year byhelping to carry mikoshi20, playing instruments, singing, and dancing. Kodani Ryusuke said
that some matsuri have become so dependent on volunteer participation that they
recruit volunteers via Facebook because there are not enough people remaining in theregion to carry mikoshi. The desire to revive and continue musical activities needs tocome directly from the affected communities first, and it is these efforts that outsiders
should work to support in the continuing crisis of disaster.

References

Bornstein, Erica. 2012. Disquieting Gifts Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Chiba, Shu. Interview by author. Sendai, Japan, August 20, 2015.

20

A divine palanquin110Getz, Donald. 2010. “The Nature and Scope of Festival Studies.” International Journal of
Event Management Research 5(1): 1-47.
Harrison, Klisala, Elizabeth MacKinlay and Svanibor Pettan, eds. 2010. Applied
Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
橋本裕之(Hashimoto, Hiroyuki) 2015. 『震災と芸能—地域再⽣の原動⼒』Shinsai toGeinō-Chiiki Saisei no Gendōryoku (The Disaster and Performing Arts: The Driving
Force Behind Regional Rebuilding) . ⼤阪：追⼿⾨学院⼤学出版会 Osaka:
Otemon Gakuin Daigaku Shuppan Kai (Osaka: Otemon Gakuin University
Publishing Organization).
懸⽥弘訓(Kaketa, Hironori) 2014. 『福島県域の無形⺠俗⽂化財被災調査報告書

２

０１１−２０１３』。Fukushima Ken’iki no Mukei Minzoku Bunkazai Hisai Chōsa

Hōkokusho (Field Survey Report for 2011-2013 on the Effects of the Earthquake,
Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster on Fukushima Prefecture’s Intangible Folk Cultural
Properties) 。福島：⺠俗芸能学会福島調査団 Fukushima: Minzoku Geinō
Gakkai Fukushima Chōsa Dan (Fukushima: The Fukushima Research Group of theSociety of Folkloric Performing Arts).
Kaketa, Hironori. Interview by Oshio Satomi and author. Sendai, Japan, July 4, 2015.
Kodani, Ryusuke. Interview by author. Tagajō, Japan, February 6, 2015.
Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, andDehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377–404.
Mengel, Maurice. 2013. “Anthony Seeger. On Epistemology andEthnomusicology in a Postcolonial World.” El oído pensante, 1(2): 1-25.

Applied

Pandolfi, Mariella. 2010. “Humanitarianism and its Discontents.” In Forces ofCompassion: Humanitarianism Between Ethics and Politics. Erica Bornstein andPeter Redfield, eds. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Pp. 227-248.

111

Redfield, Peter. 2013. Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Shiraishi, Yu. Interview by author. Sendai, Japan, May 15, 2015.
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago andLondon: The University of Chicago Press.

Nana Kaneko is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California,
Riverside. She is currently a visiting researcher at Miyagi University of Education. Her
dissertation research focuses on the role of musical performance as a mechanism forcommunity building and humanitarian efforts since the March 11, 2011 disaster.

112

VORAZ[Ravenous]: Reflections on Butoh Fu Notation from Mexican

imagery in times of crisis and violence

Laboratorio Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual

From our interest in Butoh Fu Method, we start a research process based on two
principal sources of Mexican imagery to talk about the catastrophe that currently affects
Mexico: on one hand, Mesoamerican iconography, focusing specifically on the myth of
Coatlicue and Coyolxauqui, as a metaphor of matricide. On the other hand, the work ofTeresa Margolles, a Mexican visual artist who recently exhibits, the horror of drug war.
Thus, Ravenous is intended as a reflection of the violence that has been present in our
history until now. We gather past and contemporary elements, to describe power
ambition that contaminates our social tissue and also nature. Mexico as a field of corpses
that makes us think about our corporeality, from here we propose the creation of amexican butoh.

Our wish to participate in the Tohoku Conference is to share the construction of ourcreative process and show the first scene of this work. PSI made us reflect of theencounter of two cultures —Japan and Mexico— as a result of the dialogue that
impregnated and contaminated our dance expression.

Ravenous arises from the existential restlessness that makes us wonder about our reality.
The noise, the rush, the violence, makes the sheer ground where Ravenous takes root.
Ravenous is an open question presented in PSI 2015 Tohoku, a first approach to chaos, tothat moment of uncertainty and vagueness that seeks to be completed and shared withthe glance of audience.

113

The research and creative construction of Ravenus will continue in Mexico, gathering all
the questions and dialogues that we attend in PSI Tohoku.

Creative Process Research
Mexican contemporary artists:
Teresa Margolles (1963): Since belonging to the group SEMEFO, this Mexican artist works
recently with the violence-ridden streets of Mexico product of drug war. She is interested
not so much directly with the remains of bodies but rather with the traces of life. The
nameless and anonymous victims draw attention to inhuman relationships in modern
overcrowded societies.

Arturo Rivera (1945) is a Mexican contemporary painter. In 1978 he began utilizing theform of hyperrealism for which he is renowned today. Rivera portrayed dark, anatomic,
and sometimes macabre themes.

Mesoamerican imagery, myths and simbology:

Codex Borgia: Is the most important manuscript remained from the mesoamerican
culture.

Coatlicue: Mother Earth, Tonantzin, the goddess of abundance, life, death andtransformation.

Coyolxauqui: moon goddess, daughter of Coatlicue, die dismembered by pretending tokill her mother Coatlicue. Her head is thrown into the sky to become the Moon.

Crow: according with American Indian’s mythology means metamorphosis. It isconsidered symbol of wisdom and helps to clarify the visions of the shaman.

114

Butoh Fu approach :Script1. Tlallocan: paradise, spiritual world, resonance with life and existence.
2. Channel : the shaman becomes messenger and sees the horror.
3. Scandal : the world without spirit, violence, noise, possession.
4. Dry woman : terror, infertile land, murdered mother, pile of corpses.

Scene one: Tlallocan
The creative process of this scene, began describing the most important elements of ourpersonal travel in Japan as a resonance of life and existence. Inspired by teachings ofseveral butoh masters, as well as nature and landscapes. To build this scene, we wrote
some verses and create a collective poem that draws the essence of our experience.

Poem:

Fog
Wind dispels doubt
Subtle life force

Crow feathers
Feathers in the heart of fire
The cicada sings

Images for the first scene script:
Stone
Lotus
Sun
Raven scavenger
Flight115

Bonfire
Heart mirror
Second scene: Channel

From the study of images, we sculped in our bodies the lines to create basic forms.

-

Shaman-Cosmic Terror-

Snake Head-Offering-

Priest-Coyolxauqui

Costume
It has been done by materials and objects collected as a synthesis of our dance travel
experience in Japan, being scavengers [pepenadoras] who rescues what others discarded.

Collected objects:
Feathers
Shells as analogy of coyoles (rattles) and skulls that Coyolxauqui load symbollicaly
ClothesLaboratorio Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual: Founded in 2008, the Laboratorio
Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual is a Mexican dance company that explores the expressive
possibilities of the body from the butoh dance. Organizing artistic residences withJapanese teachers has led us expand our work from production to training andpromotion butoh dance in Mexico.

116

Save your own skin: Performative Text

Tanja London

This text is a verbal reconstruction of the work in progress shared with the PSi
Workgroup: Corporeality in Aomori, Japan. Save your own skin looks at fear culture aslong term contamination and discusses the War on Terror as disaster response. It
explores issues that arise regarding cultural routines of innovation and synchronizationfrom a global, military, biomedical and bio-artistic, cultural, and somatic perspective. It
stands in dialogue with key questions of the Corporeality Workgroup: How do bodies
perform during and after a catastrophe? What happens to our corporeal memories ofextreme physical duress as time passes? How do cultural practices shape, censor, limit,
and expand our physical capabilities in times of disaster or extreme demands? This
discussion offers a different perspective of fear culture, Self and skin, and raises
questions on the predicament of terror as contamination.

[LIGHT: The room is mostly dark. Yamate Shizuka picks up the flashlight from the floor
from the end of her performance and pans its dim light. A figure appears standing in the
shadows, starting to tap on her smart phone. Her face is now only illuminated by thedigital screen in front of her.][SOUND:

Kavina,Lydia.

1999.

Free

Music

#1

for

Four

Theremins.][MOVEMENT: The female figure sets the smart phone on the ground. The soundemanating from it. Standing again, she sinks slightly into the heaviness of the floor yielding her weight of the pelvis to push gently upwards, circling her pelvis clockwise.
The circular motion is driven upwards, spiraling through her torso, right shoulder, along
her right arm, reaching beyond her digits, stirring the space.
In return, space is moving her counter clockwise, back along her right arm, torso, over toher other shoulder. Forces are moving through her in bigger and more demanding117

circular patterns. Simultaneously, she is moving and is moved - seemingly from a andbeyond her skin - no bones, no joints.]‘The time of the crime of the monstrous’ [surprising lunge forward,

Sloterdijk 2012, 165

circling the arms expansively to the back]Peter Sloterdijk’s poetic philosophy on the justification of the artificial.

165[taking further steps forward, addressing the audience]
He is a controversial German thinker, yet it is worth following his train of thoughts. [picking up the smart phone,
stopping the sound, seating herself][Theatrical reading from her smart phone follows:]

For him the Modern Age is the era of the ‘man-made monstrous’,

165

consisting of:‘man-made time’

167‘man-made space’167‘man-made thing’.

167

118

‘Man-made time’:167

The ‘millenium as end-time without end’.

167

The Modern Age is made to lastthrough innovation – progress
through a ‘shared world time’ – synchronization

171

through cybernetics.

The Modern Age, as Hans Christian Dani would put it,an accelerating, controlled closed-loop system,

Auf dem Hövel, 2013
1-3

a perpetual motion machine gaining momentum
by integrating feedback

by appropriating protests.

3,4
Sloterdijk 2012,‘Man-made space’ - ‘geodicy’:167

The ‘explosion of Old European space’ in the 15th century,

167

made possible by technical innovation.

119Amongst it: the globe,
a model of the planet Earththat you can hold in your handthat you can possess a 3-dimensional access map.

Globalization,a logical consequence.

Sloterdijk thinks that Europeans did not discover instead,they opened new spaces for their extended operations

Sloterdijk 2012,‘by means of new procedures.’167 - 170, 167

We became ‘European earth-users’.

168

Claudia Benthien illustrates how just a century later120

Andreas Vesalius

Benthien 2002,

opened up the first corpses.

7, 43

Vesalius opened new spaces
for extended medical operations
by means of gathering anatomical knowledge.
This time,
the spaces were closer than the skin allowed.

Claudia Benthien argues in her critical,
cultural analysis of the perception of the skin that:‘The dissection of the body in anatomy
created a model for knowledge
based on dismemberment,
extraction,

Benthien 2002,

and disembodiment.’

11

121

We became body users.
Sloterdijk 2012,‘Man-made thing’:167

Sloterdijk thinks of ‘Modernity
as a campaign for the increase of comfort and routines of competence,(which) implies furnishing subjects with evermore
effective equipment for self-enhancement.’

175
Benthien 2002,‘A mechanizing view of the body (…) took hold’, Benthien writes.
Transplantation medicine, nanotechnology, neuroscience,
biotechnology, science-fiction, bionic devices, bio-art, neurorobotics.

I argue - We continually open spaces, possibilities, markets,for extended medical and military operations
by fusing our imagination with the Sciences all under the ethical umbrella of care and security.

122

11

This is by far not a new procedure but rathera tried-and-trusted concept:
We always have been using things.

But the history of innovation goes hand in hand with the history of war.

DARPA 2014

In our digital, creative, engineering, and biotechnological times,
this means, that medical procedures, software, the internet, robots,
as well as innovative human and material enhancement

are first tools in service of national power mechanisms - to gain anedge over the enemy,
the other to then become ordinary appliances to shape life worlds, which others
disagree with:hardwaresoftware‘wetware’.

Safire 2002, 2

Spider silk is a very promising biomaterial:

123

biodegradable
5 times stronger than steel -Essaïdi 2012,even stronger than Kevlar.

17

For over two decades scientists have experimented

Heos 2013,

to mass-produce spider silk.

Introduction

The most common procedure is to splice the protein of the spider’s
DNA responsible for the spider silk into another double-helix of:goats
alfalfa
ecoli

Heos 2013,

silk worms.

7

Envisioned applications are:high-tech clothingfishing line
parachute rope

124

airplane arresting wire
space suits
surgical sutures
ligaments and tendons

Heos 2013,bullet proof vests.

8

Currently, bulletproof vests are made out of 64 layers of Kevlar.

Essaïdi 2012, 34

The US military imagines spider silk lightweight under-armor.

Hammes 2010, 5;

It could be worn like a T-Shirt.

Valdes 2010, 145,146

Jallia Essaïdi, a Dutch bio-artistEssaïdi 2012,

wanted to create a dialogue about the relativity of safety.

19, 31, 75‘Without a doubt
the [spider] silk makes great material for bulletproof vests.
But why even bother with the vests?
Why not apply this material directly under our own skin?’In 2011, she created in collaboration with dermatologists
and textile technologists

125Essaïdi 2012, 18

a prototype of a ‘bulletproof skin’.

Essaïdi 2012, 19

Spider silk from transgenic goats was used to manufacture a bioscaffold for human skin cells to grow into.
The artificial skin was shot at.
It repelled a slightly slowed down bullet ripped
at the impact of 2.6g at 329 m/s the impact of a regular bullet at full speed.
They used 4 layers of the spider silk skin.

Essaïdi 2012, 34-37

Successful technological solutions are first groundbreaking innovations
then function as the foundation for a new normal.

Singer 2009, 165;
DARPA 2014

Are we reaching a global thresholdwhere our solutions the inanimate, animate, personal, cultural and sociopolitical productsof our procedures - our possibilities,
create impossible life worlds -126contaminated by fear?

Sloterdijk insists that ‘(…), the Modern Age is the era of the exitof the house of being’.

Sloterdijk 2012,166

I argue: ‘the house of being’ is the skin.
Do you think you are your skin?
Or do you feel it is some kind of biological architecturethat protects you from the outside?

Claudia Benthien's thesis isthat starting in the 16th century,with the model of knowledge based on
dismemberment, extraction and disembodiment -that since then,the skin is perceived more and more as an unyielding dress,

Benthien 2002,

house -

1, 6, 10, 11, 17 - 36,border.

39, 62

Linguistically, in some pre-modern versions of European languages the word skin ‘is a stand in for

Benthien 2002,
18 - 20,127‘person’, ‘spirit’, ‘body’, or ‘life’.

23

Can we not risk to be our own skin today?
We only have hollow figures of speech,
which remind us that we used to be our skin:save your own skin.

Today,
it has the negative connotation of acting only in one’s own interest but essentially it describes a survival necessity.

Before 1503,
before advanced medical wound care,before skin grafts,
cadaver-, pig-, cultivated - or artificial skin transplantations
were possible one’s survival chances with a severe burnto a third or more of the body surface

Halim, Khoo & Yussof

were slim to none.

2010

128

The skin is a vital organ.
We cannot survive without it.
It is the largest organ in our body.
It envelopes everything.
It is crucial for us
to not get infected by bacteria.
It is water resistant,keeps necessary fluids inside the body - nonethelessallows for temperature regulation through transpiration.

It is also our sense of touch:
We feelhot, cold

129

Juan 2003, 21 - 58

pressure, itch, pain, andMcGlone and Reilly

pleasure.

2010

It is the first sense to be active in an embryo.

Montagu 1971, 169‘Touch is our most immediate and extensive interaction with the world(…) but also a crucial agent
in the construction of our self-consciousness.’

Haggard 2010, 234

The skin is also known as the peripheral nervous system,

McGlone and Reilly

directly connected to and impacting our central nervous system -2010

the brain.
Both - are ectoderm.

Juan 2003, 35

The ‘sense of touch’ is seen to play a fundamental rolein what makes us human -Neuroscience 2010
Editorial

our innate drive for creating, nurturing, building and maintaining
social networks.’

147

When we are scared,
evolutionary psychologists believe

Cantor 2009,130

that we tend to use only one of our three sub-brains.

1038 - 1041

Anxiety - potential threat:

1038

Hypothalamo - pituitary - adrenal axis’.

1039

Fear - direct threat:

1038

Reptilian brain,1039

speaking in evolutionary terms.

Freeze - Run!
Fright - Flight!
Flight - Fight!

Avoidance, attentive immobility, withdrawal,

Cantor 2009,

aggressive defense, appeasement, tonic immobility -1040 - 1044

PTSD as defence phenomenon.

1039‘Rates of con-specific induced Post traumatic stress disordertend to be higher than environmental PTSD.’

131

Cantor 2009, 1039

Chronic PTSD - stressGaisler-Salomon

is inherited through generations.

2014, 1-3

White - Black
Good - Evilreact [fight connotation]!

Random acts of violence.
Deadly force as cultural, historical or evolutionary messages?
Terrorism as the ‘axis of evil’ - only from the victim’s perspective.
From a research perspective terrorism is a disaster,calling for a disaster response:

Bush 2002, 2
Zack 2009,
Introduction

react [emotional connotation].

Disaster responses are to alleviate immediate suffering,
but also call for preventative measures:react [cognitive connotation].

132

Short term.
Long term.

Is the war on terror an effective disaster response?
Do you feel safe?
Is there an option to not participate in the global crimes committed to produce our food,to maintain our Western wealth and peace?
What is the difference between globalization, safety and security?

In times in which sci-fi writers work for the Pentagon,

Hall 2007

soldiers train in virtual worlds
9V circuit attached to their temples,Radiolab 2014

military research goals are soldiers who can digest grass,have sensor enhanced noses to detect smells and chemicals like dogs,
soldiers who have the ability to climb walls like lizards,
and use implemented brain-computer interfaces,

133

Valdes 2010, 148;

which allow for synthetic telepathy.

Lin 2010, 318

Times in which sci-fi is now, a reiteration of modernity
dedicated to speed.
Times in which people get shot by drones via face recognition software
get either traumatized, injured, displaced or killed by shadow wars,
by shadow wars,

Rasler and Thompson

the perpetual mobile of the global economy.

2000, 306

Times in which terrorist attacks loom over everybody’s headin the Western and Eastern - Northern and Southern World -stock markets and other ordinary applications are run by algorithms the disembodied artificial intelligence.

Steiner 2012, 11 111
Singer 2009, 78 - 80

‘Automate this’, easyfy that!

Singer 2009, title

Times, in which AI starts to teach itself,

Singer 2009, 75 - 79

nanotechnological blood cells are developed to cure us from within,robots in general are getting more autonomous and organic:

134

Schanze 2010

At the University of Texas, [for example]

Singer 2009,

researchers have built a tiny fuel cell that draws electricity
from the glucose-oxygen reaction in human blood.
It is called a ‘vampire bot’.

87

A group of Japanese scientists working on a similar project87

found that such systems could draw about 100 watts,
equal to a bright lightbulb, from the blood of one human being.’

The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot - the EATR - discussed atthe 2006 military robotics conference ‘(…) would power itself by
scavenging about for anything organic that burns.
As a scientist put it nonchalantly:‘the EATR’s potential battlefield diet [is]grass,
wood,

broken furniture, [and]dead bodies.’

Singer 2009, 87

In such times Did we create a global environment that is less and less inhabitable?

135

Because our survival strategies get engraved in our DNA?
Because we are driven by reptilian brain reactions?
Because we do not take advantage of neuroplasticity do not take the time to overcome trauma?
Instead perpetuate fear contaminated cultures
for the sake of power structures?

In such times Do we have to make a pledge for vulnerability?
A pledge for an environment that we are an integral part of?
A pledge for a life world that allows for all three sub-brains to be
active.

A pledge for our time-space-effort triangulations to slow down,
for a sensible use of movement, emotions and thoughts,
for lived corporeality permeability, that allows us to sense and communicate
with the outside,136

inside,and the other?
To hedge our own risk and cost-benefit calculations
as collective venture - moving beyond trauma.
To feel danger,
to feel what is at stake to make sense to come to our senses.

In such times Do we have to save our own skinbefore it becomes another man-made thing?

References

Auf dem Hövel, Jörg. 2013. “In einer Utopie der Idioten sehe ich die größte
Gefährdung für die kapitalistische Maschinerie: Hans-Christian Dany über die
Wurzeln der sich selbst kontrollierenden Gesellschaft in der Kybernetik.”

Telepolis, September 1. http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/39/39754/1.html.

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Benthien, Claudia. 2002. Skin: On the cultural border between self and the world.
New York: Chichester England: Columbia University Press.

Bush, George W. 2002. “The state of the union: President’s Bush state of the union
address to congress and the nation.” New York Times, January 30.

Cantor, Chris. 2009. “Post-traumatic stress disorder: Evolutionary perspectives.”

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 43:1038–1048. Accessed at the
University of Utah July 13, 2015. www.anp.sagepub.com.

DARPA. 2014. “History and Timeline: Where the future becomes now”.
http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-history-and-timeline?PP=1

Essaïdi, Jallia. 2012. Bulletproof skin: Exploring Boundaries by Piercing Barriers’.
Netherlands: Jallila Essaïdi.

Gaisler-Salomon, Inna. 2014. “Inheriting stress: Gray matter.” New York Times,
7. http://nyti.ms/1fdIwnV.

Halim, A. S., Khoo, T. L., and Yussof, S. J. M. 2010. “Biologic and synthetic skinsubstitutes: “An overview.” in Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery, September
43: 23-28. doi: 10.4103/0970-0358.70712

Hall, Mimi. 2007. “Sci-fi writers join war on terror.” USA Today, May 29. http://
usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-05-29-deviant-thinkerssecurity_N.htm

Hammes, Thomas X. 2010. “Biotech impact on the warfighter.” in Bio inspired
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innovation and national security, edited by Robert E. Armstrong, Mark D.
Drapeau, Cheryl A. Loeb and James J. Valdes, 1-8. Washington DC: National
Defense University Press.

Heos, Bridget. 2013. Stronger than steel : Spider silk DNA and the quest for betterbulletproof vests, sutures, and parachute rope. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books
for Children.

Juan, Deane. 2003. Job’s Body. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, Inc.

Kavina, Lydia. 1999. SONG “Free Music #1 for Four Theremins” in Original Works for

Theremin: Music from the Ether.

Lin, Patrick. 2010. “Ethical blowback from emerging technologies.” Journal of

Military Ethics 9:4: 313 - 331. doi: 10.1080/15027570.2010.536401.

McGlone, Francis and Reilly, David. 2010. “The cutaneous sensory system.” inNeuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 34:2, 148 -159.
doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.08.004

Montagu, Ashley. 1971. Touching: The human significance of the skin. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews. 2010. “Editorial.” 34:2, 145-47.
doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.08.008

Radiolab. 2014. 9 V Nirvana. WNYC Public Radio. http://www.radiolab.org/story/9volt-nirvana/.

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Rasler, Karen and Thompson, William R. 2000. “Global War and the political
economy of structural change.” in Handbook of War Studies ll edited byManus

I. Midlarsky. University of Michigan Press.

Safire, William. 2002. The But - What - if factor. New York Times May 16.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/opinion/the-but-what-if-factor.html

Schanze, Jens. 2010. DOCUMENTARY: Plug & Pray. Germany.
http://www.plugandpray-film.de/en

Serino, Andrea and Haggard Patrick. 2010. “Touch and the body.” in Neuroscienceand Behavioral Reviews 34:2, 224 - 236. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.04.004

Singer, Peter Warren. 2009. Wired for War: The robotics revolution and conflict inthe twenty-first century. New York: Penguin Press.

Sloterdijk, Peter. 2012. “The Time of the Crime of the Monstrous: On the Philosophical
Justification of the Artificial.” In Sloterdijk Now, edited by

Stuart Elden. Cambridge, UK:

Polity Press.

Steiner, Christopher. 2012. Automate this: How algorithms came to rule our world.
New York: Portfolio/Penguin.

Valdes, Erica R. 2010. “Bio-inspired Materials and Operations.” in Bio inspired

innovation and national security, edited by Robert E. Armstrong, Mark D.
Drapeau, Cheryl A. Loeb and James J. Valdes, 139-158. Washington DC:
National Defense University Press.

140

Zack, Naomi. 2009. Ethics for disaster. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

141

Body as a place of poetry: memory and imagination in Antonin Artaud

Samantha Marenzi

Antonin Artaud's experience is one of a dynamic equilibrium between theatre and writing,body and poetry. At the time when he was institutionalized, in 1936, he already had acareer as an actor, several publications, adaptations and directions, but above all he was
stubbornly devoted to the research of a theatre that instead of mimic life wanted toexperiment it. The work encompassing his thoughts, that would change significantly theunderstanding of the 20th century theatre, is issued in 1938, whilst Artaud isinstitutionalized. That is The Theatre and its double.

Institutionalization is a dramatic cut in his life. Before that, there is the rich andmeaningful intellectual ferment Artaud was part of while in Paris. In addition to thetheatrical work there are the participation at the surrealist movement, the relationships
with writers and poets, the public lectures, the bohemian life and the participation in thedebate on Western Culture decadence. Moreover, the interest in esotericism, themassive drug use as a way to cure his uneasiness which briefs admissions into mental
health care units and psychiatric therapies would not alleviate. Finally, there are his two
major travels, in Mexico and Ireland, looking for alive cultures, genuine, not tamed bymodern culture.

Artaud is repatriated from Ireland and immediately institutionalized, admitted into
several asylums where he suffered various therapies, up until his admission in Rodez
Hospital, in 1943, where he was subjected to more than 50 electroshock treatments.
During those years, outside the walls where he is confined, the world is wracked by thewar, there is the Nazis occupation of Paris, the whole entourage of which Artaud was partis completely dispersed, his isolation is utmost. The two catastrophes, the private and the142collective ones, trace within his body and mind the map of an extreme experience,leading to the edge of a human adventure where, between 1945 and 1948, Artaud iscoming back from.

There are not so many human beings who have made a return trip from madness.

Artaud regained his speech in 1945, after almost ten years of silence. His return towriting is literally a coming back to life. In his writings and drawings he reconstructs his
body, his thought and his memory. His return to writing moves in two parallel directions:
letters and notebooks. Way before writing essays destined to publication, letters andnotebooks are consciously oriented to the reconstruction, or with Artaud's words, bodily
makeover.

What does it mean to make over the body? And what does it mean to do so with the actof writing? The more adherent sense is that of the physical exercises. During the years in
Rodez, Artaud starts practicing some breathing, gestural and vocal techniques, comingfrom his long experience in the theatre, with the intent to recover the perception of abody no longer belonging to him. It doesn't belong to him anymore as it is in the hands ofthe mental health care institution, he suffers hunger and abstinence, he is deprived of his
freedom. Artaud doesn't own himself anymore. His moving to Rodez improves slightly his
condition, but opens the harshness of electroshock treatments, described by him as not
only a physical coercion but also an assassination of the memory. Physical exercises,
removed from the descriptive use, become a daily effort to regain his consciousness, hiswill, somehow his health, definitely room for freedom. It is a rehabilitation to life throughtheatrical techniques, they are not meant for the actor anymore, but for the man.

Those practices are intertwined with the act of writing. First of all because the breathing
techniques become vocalization, the voice generates a poetic speech bonded to the body,a genuine word, it recovers its invocational strength and gains its effectiveness over143

reality. Moreover, the fighting body is the absolute key player of his writing.

Letters and notebooks are the building site of such reconstruction of the body, thatrecalls everything that has lost its control to recuperate its strength: organs, bones,
muscles, consciousness, memories, but also friends, faces and voices that return to him aconnection with the external world. Artaud understands that the body matter iscomprises of memories, history, language, and those are the elements he intertwines tohis breath, to his heart, to his flesh, to be the owner of his life again. Letters are always
been for Artaud the shared territory between writing and life. When in Rodez he started
to write to the people he finds in his memory, asking them about other people, till hemanaged to let his name circulating outside the asylum and recreating a relationships net.
Artaud reports to them what he lived himself: what he has seen with his eyes isoverlapping with what he saw through his eyes. Looking at the extreme verge of madness,
Artaud is depicting the landscape. The effect this has on his readers is extraordinary, on
one hand because they became aware of his real condition and on the other hand they
discover his poetical imagery and realize the deep connection between the twodimensions.

Artaud starts to write his notebooks in February 1945. He is going to do so until his death,in March 1948, after he spent two years in Paris being in a sort of probation regime. As it
is with breath and nourishment, the act of writing becomes fully embedded in his
routines, participating to the process of recreating his body and memory. Artaud uses
them to put together the essential elements of existence and experimenting their
combinations. The body, above all. Consciousness, that he transforms in characters goingin and out of his thoughts. Those are female characters Artaud is bringing back to lightfrom his past: his grandmothers, some of his friends, some of them are dead some otherseem to be only imaginary figures. They have to free and nourish him, to reinstate hismemory so that his existence can be remembered to the world. Those women that hecalls ‘daughters to the heart to be’, they have a pivotal role in his writing and his body,144

both inhabited by their faces and their names, raw material for a new birth. Artaud gives
them a voice, he tells their stories melting their biographies with the new roles he gives
them in his own adventure. He invokes them, screaming and singing their name in thepages of his notebooks. Catherine Chilé, Neneka Chilé, Cécile Schramme, Anie Besnard,
Elah Catto, Ana Corbin, Yvonne Allendy. He describes their bodies, their fighting for his
liberation, waiting for a sign from the world they come from.

By writing his notebooks Artaud is reconstructing his memory. What he is doing on his
past life is not cleaning up the mess, though. Instead, he allows for places, faces, events,
thoughts, texts, to surface and to be read through his current experience, giving newroles and meanings to the scheme of his existence. Artaud reinvents his past to write his
future, to have a say over his destiny, making his body the place where memories andimagination melt to become poetical experience.

It is not only life to influence his writing but it is also the other way round.

This overturning allows Artaud and the persons of his entourage to live in the reality ofhis poetry. ‘If I am a poet or an actor is not to write and recite poems, but to live them’.
And he lives them, not in a metaphorical sense. Thanks to the letters, where Artaud
shares the notebook themes with his readers, a small community is formed around theinstitutionalized poet, and eventually they manage to have him discharged from theasylum. This group comprises of young poets and actors who see him as a master andsoon become his disciples. They believe in his words. His envisioning perfuses their lives
and allows them to take part in an extraordinary human experience. Artaud is a survivorof a generation of poets that the war has deleted. He survived the madness, he survived
the oblivion. By saving him, is themselves that they restore.

The two years he spent in Paris (1946-1948) are very prolific: publications, exhibitions,
events that are somehow to be considered his return to the theatre. The group takes part145

to all this and enters the scene of his poetry. What Artaud is writing becomes reality. To
the list of his ‘dead daughters’ he adds the names of living people who participate at his
new life, overlapping the mythical family of his poems with the idea of a theatricalcompany, a human community that responded to his call and that gives life to his writing.
Arthur Adamov, Roger Blin, Marthe Robert, and especially Colette Thomas, a young
actress, his favorite pupil. And moreover, the poet Jacques Prevel, and Paule Thévenin,
who will edited all his writing after his dead. Through these people the reconstruction ofbody became, for Artaud, reconstruction of life.

The body, in Artaud's conception, is not a symbolic one. The act of writing during the lastyears is a proper workshop of the reconstruction and it has been widely interpreted inliterary and philosophical terms. The huge richness of meanings has risked to shadow thepragmatism of his work, its practical dimension and the imposition of a poetical body ineveryday life. Such departure from an ‘incongruous’ body, Artaud experimented it in thetheatre, before his institutionalization, and within his poetry after the catastrophe of theasylum and the war. The body he is speaking of is one to be, embedded in the debris fieldthat he has inside and outside himself, is a body about to be born, and it is to be theresult of his own will. ‘I have not entered yet this body with all my consciousness andwhen it will actually join me, it will explode’ we wrote in 1945.

The body from which Artaud restarts to reconstruct his life is a place.
Is the place of the speech: a place where speaking means to make something exist. To
give a name it means to evoke, bringing back to life, rendering present. The research on
the language is for Artaud a physical process of producing a sound. He investigates thesound of words, their bodily vibration, their meaning, their power to evoke images and totransform what is said in what is seen. Moreover, the speech retains within itself
elements of ancient languages, bearers of a lost culture. It is the sound of the mother, ofthe nourishment, of life itself; it is the articulation of the thought, of the emotion, thatallows to whatever constitutes a person to materialize itself outside the body, for the one146moment when we enunciate. Artaud breaks the language, forces it to recover its sacredand magical dimension. He writes lists of names and things, he repeats the words,
organizes poetic fragments made of syllables, and each sound is a point of contact with azone of the body and of the memory, it lets an organ and an emotion vibrate together.
Outside logical sense, the body is made of words.

It is the place of the image: Artaud sketches his figure and those that inhabit his
imagination. He drops them on sheets of paper as they were angels falling on earth. He
starts to sketch at the beginning of 1945, in Rodez, there he fills sheets with names andphrases, often linked to his ‘mythical daughters’. His sketches render visible his imagery.
It is not an aesthetic elaboration, they are gestures instead, with them he materializes
what inhabits his imagination. Once discharged from Rodez he will start to draw thepersons of his entourage, replacing his memory figures with their faces. It is a progressive
embodiment being possible thanks to Artaud's will, who uses images to summon what
has been lost and what it is about to be born around his personality.

It is the place of the myth: our body is not only composed of our personal history. It is thecollective one, it is the history before history. It is a non chronological time that
substantiates the tale of human adventure. Artaud, in order to reconstruct his life,
elaborates a dynamic mythology of which he explores the variations. He assimilates in his
biography fragments of Christian history, the big Western culture narration, andinterweaves connections among individuals and characters making his body the field of a
new genesis. He is saint and scapegoat, martyr and heretic, he made himself theintersection between East and West.

It is the place of the theatre, seen as the workshop where to rebuild your life. It is thetheatre, in which Artaud is again involved during the last years, ultimately changing themeaning of this word. A slab, a healing process, a possibility to observe the body andfreeing it from its persecutors: God, society, medicine. The theatre, embedded in the147techniques, in the sketches, in the writings and in the public speeches, is a state of the
body through which one can be born again.

At the roots of the recovery of the human relationships and the writing there is the
republication of The Theatre and its double, in 1944. This book, but with a delayed
effectiveness, becomes a talisman, not only because of its contents. Artaud reads his own
book, recovers some strong elements of his thought and retrieves his vocabulary (e.g. thedefinition ‘theatre of cruelty’). But above all, theatre people read it and recognize there a
guide. That book is like an island where he would have many important encounters for
his liberation, such that with Colette Thomas, his only proper disciple. Colette approaches
him as an actress, and becomes a living character of his poetical imagery, a daughter of
his heart, author of an extraordinary poetic testament. In Artaud's relationship with
Colette it can be identified the heart of his idea of theatre, an idea of poetry and life.
Teaching Colette has been an initiation, the transmission of a secret hidden inside life andthe body, that again, responds to the name of theatre. ‘The theatre is the state, the place,the point, where one can apprehend the human anatomy; with the human anatomy, one
can heal and direct life’. Artaud wrote this text, called Aliener l'acteur, in 1947, and it will
be read by Colette Thomas in a public lecture at the Galerie Pierre, where an exhibitionshows Artaud's drawings. There are many versions of Aliener l'acteur in the notebooks,
where one can see the hand of Colette Thomas taking sometimes the place of theArtaud's hand. The poet dictates to her this text on the theatre as a cure for life, written
to be read by this actress of a new Theatre of cruelty, by this girl who became a real
daughter of the heart of Antonin Artaud.

Artaud managed to include in his books the secret within the body, without unveiling it.
Among the worldwide readers who have been fascinated by him, among those academics
who understood him, among people of theatre who emulated him, some have truly‘recognized’ him. The notebooks, where Artaud articulates his reconstruction of the body,are published in the ‘Complete Works’ since 1981. With the exception of some extracts,148they have not been translated in any language. Readers who properly recognized
Artaud's discourse about the body, found its traces in the books prior his
institutionalization (Héliogabale), in the last essays (Van Gogh. The man suicided bysociety and To have done with God's judgement), and in The Theatre and its double.

Beyond the fascination for the cursed writer, for his personal history, for the main
themes of his work, in his words they identified the body of the poet, a body without
organs, a backwards dancing body. It has been acknowledged that such body is not
merely literature, not even autobiography. It was life, that can not be observed, and thathas manifested itself in Artaud's speech.

Artaud's influences on butō's founders are well-known, and widely investigated. Theirability to identify western culture heretics and have them living in corporeal experienceof other memories, of other cultural ruins, has been extraordinary. Such transfer has
nothing to do with aesthetics fascination. It is the proper owning of the deep Artaud's
legacy, it restores artistic gestures to the physical and natural energies. Theatre is thedomain of gesture and action, and Artaud's theatre is the extreme edge of poetry inaction.

To restore artistic gestures to life, and not only the other way round, is the huge
trespassing that establishes Artaud at the very centre of a knowledge hidden within
practices, not to be unveiled by any interpretation. Outside the huge numbers ofinterpretations there is the acknowledging of his truth, completely embedded in the bodyas a place of memory and imagination, a place of word and image. It is in the perceptionof a non linear time, that experiences the body through figures and survivals. Memory is
attached to the bones, consciousness goes in and out of the body, life weaves itself
among organs wrinkles. Words free their energy, not a meaning.

It is the body of the dance. That is what Tatsumi Hijikata acknowledged. It is such a body149

that wanted to work with anatomy, invoked the flesh revolution, gave fire to the edges of
the theatre field. It is the body becoming landscape, that welcomes the wounds of theearth and the men's curses, horrors and prayers, and using itself, it shows the invisible
and inconsistent element called life.

Samantha Marenzi: PhD in Performing arts, she is Research fellow at Roma Tre
University, and adjunct professor in Iconography of dance and theatre. Professional
photographer, she is teaching techniques of analog photography. Member of Butō Dance
Company Lios, she collaborate with the Akira Kasai Dance Company.

150

Transmission of Gestures in Dance: the Spectrum of Corporeality of Kazuo
Ohno in « Ô sensei » by Catherine Diverrès

Mariko Miyagawa

1. About Catherine Diverrès’s career
In 2012, Catherine Diverrès, French choreographer and dancer, created the piece
entitled Ô sensei. We will analyse it especially focusing on the transmission of gesture of
Kazuo Ohno’s Butoh. Kazuo Ohno is known as the co-founder of butoh with Tatsumi
Hijikata and he gave a lot of influence to Diverrès. The piece was created by Diverrès
after the death of Ohno in 2010 and she dedicated this piece to Ohno as the title signifies.
‘Sensei’ means master or professor in Japanese, and Ô suggests the initial of Ohno.

It should be better to mention the background of Diverrès’s career. She is one of theearliest dancers who came to Japan to study butoh under Ohno. Before departure to
Japan in 1982, she had learned classical dance and was trained in Mudra, which was
created by Maurice Béjart before she jointed Dominique Bagouet at Centre
chorégraphique national de Montpellier, where she met Bernardo Montet. She andMontet got fellowship for studying in Japan and stayed in Yokohama, at the Studio of
Ohno during a half year. The experience under Ohno changed everything about thedance for her. She talked of the impression later.

There is no Japan lived for me without the presence of Ohno. And it was the deep,
radical revolution of all of my existence. All choreographic language and vocabularyaccumulated during years of learning, I took back everything. Arrived as a dancer inJapan, I became a choreographer there. (Catherine Diverrès. “Ô sensei…” Programof Ô sensei. Théâtre national de Chaillot, November, 2012. )151

Diverrès and Montet created their first piece, at the end of their stay in Japan. EntitledInstance, this duo was presented in Nakano Terpsichore, Tokyo for the premier. It wasrepresented in Europe and got a prize in the festival (Premier prix au concours
International de Chorégraphie de Nyon, (Suisse), prix de la ville de Vernier en 1983) so it
could be said that the piece opened the door as a choreographer for Diverrès. Then,
Diverrès and Montet created the company, Studio DM and became the central company
on the French contemporary dance scene. In 1994, she was elected the director of theCentre Chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne. As a choreographer in thisgeneration, she had a distance from the influence of American modern dance, which isbased on the vocabulary of classical dance and post-modern dance. According to Slyviane
Pagès, the French researcher of dance, there were two different ways that young Frenchchoreographers took for their research in the 1980s. Some of them went to USA to study
the post-modern dance with Merce Cunningham or Trisha Brown, and the others visited
Japan to study butoh. Diverrès was among latter ones and the precursor. What remainedwith her from the lessons of Ohno was really huge, and it changed her notion about
dance. So, we have to look at the lessons of Ohno here.

2. Ohno’s lessons
But there are few documents that tell us what happened in the studio in this era. We can,of course, refer to the writing or the words of dancers who had participated in his
workshops. Also, there are some documents, including the book and video that recorded
his lessons in 1990. So we mainly focus on the words of Diverrès and Montet but
sometimes, it will be useful to cite these other materials to understand the lessons. Of
course, there were problems of language for foreigners who visited his studio. Some
Japanese students or Ohno himself tried to speak in English or conveyed what he thought.
But for Diverrès and Montet, the interpretation of his words was always necessary. She
wrote about his lessons like below.

152

Ohno was a master who taught nothing that you search as a function, attribute,technic, method, knowledge, system, secret, or philosophe. He Is. (Catherine
Diverrès. “Kazuo Ohno a 100ans!” Lettre d'infos du Centre chorégraphique nationalde Rennes et de Bretagne, 2006)
Ohno said, “The sole waits a longtime in the bottom of water, endures thepressure and suddenly stands up.” (Catherine Diverrès. “Ô sensei…” Program ofÔ sensei. Théâtre national de Chaillot, November, 2012.)
In Europe, we say that “it’s good” or “not”. Ohno could wait 10 years to say one
thing to someone. It’s each one to raise a question. Ohno encouraged to improvise
and said to dance without arms and legs. The dance returns zero. (Catherine
Diverrès. “Croisade contre l’inconscience.” Les Saison de la danse 243(1993): 4041.)

She also tells her impression of the first day with Ohno:

When we arrived his house, he offered us the meal that his wife had prepared and
immediately, he told us about The Dead Class of Tadeusz Kantor, repeating with araised finger: number one. Then, he spoke about the sole. And 2 meters squares inthe salon, he danced. Our first class started like this. (…) So was the voyage withthe dead the heart of his work? Questions that he posed us non-stop like theillegible riddles turned us upside down. The more we looked for the means, themore we stuck an obstacle. When finally we released everything, something
profound began to move. Dance with being immovable. That absolute reverse, for
the western dancers, of the concept of dance, who, for us, is associated with the
movements expanding into the space of organic way, idea of the expense of physic,
energy and so on. (Catherine Diverrès. “Un jour avec Kazuo Ohno.” In Catherine

Diverrès mémoires passante, ed. Irène Filiberti, L'œil d'or, 2010, 74.)153

To know how Ohno taught in the studio, we can also read the comments of Bernardo
Montet. He wrote that he was demanded to dance only with arms. Ohno took Montet’s
hand and said, ‘Be conscious of the space between fingers, the space under your hand,that of outside, temperature of your hand, and that of the air, sense your hands, be
conscious of your bones. Turn your hand.’ (Bernardo Montet. Témoignages, In Butô(s), ed.
Odette Aslan et Béatrice Picon-Vallin, Paris: CNRS Editions, 2002. 332-333.)‘Are you free?’ and ‘Is it new?’ these are the words of Ohno. (…) There was no
training, no warm-up. We had to improvise during two, three, four ours, it was
horribly long, we didn’t know what to do anymore, we were tired of ourselves, andit had to continue searching, continue endlessly. We couldn’t catch on something.
We were alone. And the body had to work alone. (…) Sometimes, Ohno told,
offered us some teas, he didn’t teach anything formal. He told us to dance without
psychology, thoughts, desire, nor memory; to remember the moment to move.
After a huge wait, the accumulation, it led us, we didn’t know by what, to dancealmost without willpower to dance. (Ibid.)

These comments suggest that Ohno’s lessons were really surprising for the dancers who
used to the custom of the ‘training of dance’. The characteristics of his lessons are mainly
consisted of the improvisations, the story like the sole he told (it is the basic attitude formovement, it is to say Ohno’s philosophy) and the demands to search themselves. Ohno
also proposed the thought that, for Diverrès, to turn the dance to zero. Like the dance
without moving, only with arms, be conscious of the space between fingers, the space
under the hand, sense the hands, be conscious of the bones etc. It is also important that
Montet noted Ohno told them to dance without psychology or thoughts. It seems
contradictory to Ohno’s words that refer to his mother or La Argentina1, who are thesource of his dance. But it is the proof that Ohno sloughed off the tradition of ‘Modern
1

Ohno watched the dance of La Argentina, who was the pioneer of modern Spanish dance, only one timein 1929 and 50 years later he created the piece as homage for her.

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Dance’ that express and start one’s emotion. In summary, Ohno didn’t teach his
fundamental posture or how he uses his body in the dance or how he creates a piece. We
have to analyze what Diverrès learns from Ohno’s lessons. So there, we return to thepiece of Diverrès, Ô sensei.

3. Ô sensei
At first, we have to search the fundamental structure of this piece, especially thedramaturgical viewpoint. The piece is separated three parts. In the debut of theperformance, there is an only little white screen on the stage. One dancer, Katja Fleig
appears there2. She wears the male suits and stands in front of the screen. This image
evokes the dance of Ohno wearing the black suits, for example in his piece, My Mother.
Few minutes later, Katja enters the wing and Diverrès appears the stage wearing thesame suits by crossing. Then she puts off her jacket. Her walk looks like a somnambulant.

The second short part is mainly the projection of the screen. The silhouette of Diverrès
recalls the image of the dancers of Expressionism. The long robe suggests those of Harald
Kreutzberg or Mary Wigman, and also we can imagine the costume of Ohno, like thekimono in My Mother.

Last part, Diverrès reappears on the stage wearing the red bright dress. She dances withthe music ‘Abe Maria’, Elvis Presley’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight? ’ and ‘Prelude andFugue’ of Bach that was used in Admiring La Argentina, the part called the marriage ofthe heaven and the earth.

At sight, we can recognize that there are some characteristic gestures that are same in
Ohno’s dance. The movements of hands like a butterfly in dance of Katja, the walksomnambulant of Diverrès, the look toward the sky or contrary toward interior in
Diverrès etc. But before analyzing these gestures, the dramaturgy of the piece has to be
2

It must be noted that in the premier presentation, Diverrès herself interpreted this role and the piece wasreally composed as her solo performance.

155noted. As Diverrès talked in the interview, the first part, the figure expresses the youngman. Diverrès uses the reverse device of Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina. And this young
man becomes a woman dressed in the red robe. What does this structure mean? We cansay that the third part especially is not the presentation of herself (even if it is difficult torecognize this point at sight). To dedicate homage to Ohno, Diverrès chose the logic thatis common in the way Ohno paid homage to La Argentina. And that aspect oftransformation into male and female is a notion that Diverrès interpreted through Ohno’s
lesson or his performance. As he talked in the interview, Ohno himself didn’t perfectly
imitate La Argentina. Or it would be said that he used his memory and emotion (there isthe contradictory problem as Ohno said to dace without emotion). He expressed his
respect for La Argentina by this performance. The method he used in his dance has no
relation to the technic of Spanish dance. His way of dance starts from his memory of La
Argentina and usage of his body in a completely original way. Diverrès also uses theimage, that appears in some silhouette of the gestures and uses her way of dancing, that
includes the technic of classic or post-modern dance. We also see in her body the gestureof Pina Bausch and traces of expressionism dance.

4. Ohno’s corporeality in Diverrès’s dance
Even if the lesson of Ohno didn’t transmit the gesture as a form, and he didn’t teach how
he used his body in his dance, there is some corporeality of Ohno in Diverrès’schoreography. For example, the movement of hands that flows in front of the face like abutterfly, the steps wandering the stage, the shape of the fingers, the somnambulant
walk, the inclination of the head, the look that turns to the sky etc. It would be regarded
that these gestures are simple imitation. But some of these aspects were already pointed
out by French researcher Sylviane Pagès as the traces of corporeality of Ohno or the
heritage of buto in her analysis of Diverrès’s works3. I quote her analysis about Diverrès’s
dance from Le Butô en France: malentendus et fascination (Pantin: Centre national de ladansehere. 2015).
3

Her study is not about Ô sensei, but about the other works of Diverrès.

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(…) the posture of dancers gives the impression of humble or weakness. The mostcharacteristic element of this posture appears in the absence of projection of
openness of the rib, retraction of the sternum that links Ohno’s work, when heevokes (…) removing the ego and the plexus. (206)Indeed, there are the lessons of Ohno, in 1990, that refers to the basic posture like that.
Ohno instructed to pull the last bone of the rib and make the bust flat. For Ohno, todance with the dead or to tell ‘I love you’ in dance, the openness of the rib is not
acceptable. He told this point cleary in the lessons.

The same decline of a head or a body itself appears in Ohno’s and also Diverrès’s danceand Pagès notes that there is no triumph of verticality and elevation is not affirmative(208). Probably, it is the trace that Ohno’s lesson changed her way of thinking about
dance. Diverrès said the human is not in the center. It connects the words that in theirdances, the verticality is not triumphant. The decline of the head is Ohno’s habit but thefundamental posture itself is already in a forward-bent one.

Weakness appears in the specific mode of movement of steps and the singular
relationship to the space. The slippery and scraped steps (…) are light and fragile,
and always leading by the weight in one point of the body. (210)

These words are the common characteristics that appear on the critics especially inFrance4.
The usage of the space is also significant.

4

For example, Pierre Lartigue. “L’emotion pure.” (L’Humanité, June 16.)157

(…) no projection, no conquest the territory in their movement, but the spacemust be created and transformed by their own metamorphose of corporeality.
(210)

For Ohno and Diverrès, the inner sense is more important than the form. Ohno said ‘thespace is filled by the atoms. Don’t destroy it.’ So we can consider Diverrès organized thespace starting from this point of view.

It is interesting that by reading Diverrès’s words, she almost interprets Ohno’s words as aphilosophy or insists on the spiritual aspect. But as Pagès suggests above, there is thesame corporeality as Ohno in her dance.

By the movement of the dancer, Katja Fleig, we can look at her own corporeality thatsuggests the technique of a dancer. The straight line of her spine, the pointed toe remain
this trace and with this condition, there are also some gestures of Ohno, for example, thecrossed bending legs, decline of the head or body. She did these gestures not changing
her corporeality and kept strength tension. This tension gives spectators a different
impression from Ohno’s fragile gesture.

Another difference exists in Diverrès’s movement. In comparison with Ohno’s posture,
the openness of her rib is more than Ohno’s. Although there is the extinction of thesternum, the space in front of the body, which is created by the position of the rib isgreater than Ohno’s. And her steps are stronger than his. Ohno used the body almost
seeming short of falling down on the ground. These gesture of Ohno come from not only
his age but also from his technique of the usage of the body.

It is also interesting that Diverrès said it’s not possible to imitate Ohno, nevertheless herdance becomes close to his. There, we remain the possibility to analyze the strategy of158

Diverrès’s choreography, that is to say how she cited the corporeality of butoh incontemporary dance.

And the transmission of some gesture in Diverrès’s movement suggest that byunderstanding Ohno’s words as a philosophical or spiritual one, although she inherits
some corporeality. It means that Ohno’s words in lessons could carry his corporeality bypoetical words.

Also, we can recognize the traces of Ohno’s desire to change or reconstruct the body andmovements of Diverrès and Montet who trained in western styles of dance. His poeticalwords and ‘free improvisation’ guided them to change the notion of dance and to
discover another corporeality. In Diverrè’s Ô-sensei, there is a spectral remains of Ohno’s
lesson and what he transmitted to her, that is his corporeality and it is the essence of his
butoh.

Mariko Miyagawa is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural
Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Science at the University of Tokyo, and a research
fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS 26-9560). Her work focuses on
Butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno, especially the relationship between his words and his
movements.

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Butō Workshop

Lori Ohtani

Presentation Proposal
A self-composed poem reading followed by a site specific butō performance entitled

Shadow Walking. The estimated time duration for the presentation is about 20 minutes.

Artist Statement
In butō I have found a continual life journey into the layers of the body/self.
The intricate inner workings of this ancient place of one’s existence. A person should berooted and connected in this sense of place to begin this unending journey back to it’svery beginnings.

Description
The simple act of walking will act as the initial steps of a metaphorical movement timeline
for the body to experience a journey back to the roots of its founder and for me todiscover a connection to the Tohoku homeland of Hijikata Tatsumi.

In Hawaii many traditional Japanese customs & rituals are celebrated annually and heldvery close to the heart. One being the season of O-Bon which begins in Hawaii in May
and culminates with an annual Okinawan Festival on the Labor Day holiday observed on
the 1st weekend in September.

With the passing of my Father in 2011 I found that the season of O-Bon has a much moresignificant meaning for me to deeply understand where we come from, what are thebeginnings of ourselves.

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Our ancestors, family and teachers play an integral part in how we structure our lives.
They act as a solid base in our understanding of our culture, how they may color ourworld view and strengthen our own interactions with people in our community.

The journey to the homeland of butō founder Hijikata, Tatsumi is one that I havedreamed of taking for a long time. Being in Tohoku I feel I can come to a deeper
understanding and experience the world of butō through my senses. A sensorial
investigation of the beginnings of butō in it’s homeland, so to speak. Maybe somemessage or strong feeling could form? This is what I am hoping for.

Introductory Poem to Shadow Walking

Portal (looking for my shadow)

Walking pathways of my ancestors,
Walls of blackness rise,
Pushing heavy on my spine.
Old woman scowling above her flowered lei,
Lava erupts beneath her feet.
Pele’s1 lapping tongue of fire
Brings death, destruction, laughter…change.

Spinning in a blackened sky,I gather stars from the dark,
Weaving a crown for Pele’s head.
I watch my body burning.

1

n. Lava flow, volcano, eruption, volcanic, (named for the volcano goddess, Pele). Mary Kawena Pukui &Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary, Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian, Enlarged and Revised Edition,(University of Hawaii Press 1986), 323.

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Inside is outside.
Honu2 is dreaming in the mist.
His salty tears sting my blackened feet.
Nose to nose we exchange one breath.
Honu is in me.

I ride waves that crest and fall,
Into the night to a faraway land.
I am chasing spirits.
Searching for the genius who once danced with a wild man’s shadow.

(Composed in homage to Hijikata Tatsumi for my performance at his studio: Asbestos-kan,in Tokyo Japan 2002).

Lori Ohtani received her BFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Hawaii at
Manoa. A butō artist of 26 years she has performed throughout Hawaii, the U.S., Canada,
and Japan. She is the Director of Tangentz Performance Group, and teaches butō at theJapanese Cultural Center of Hawaii.

2n. General name for turtle and tortoise. Pukui & Elbert, 79.

162

A Fly in the Light - The Corporeal Presence of the Organic and Inorganic
Other

Krisztina RosnerI.
A fly flies through the beam of the stage light. A tiny movement, which draws andmomentarily dislocates the attention of the spectator. That specific fly is a local one, andmost of the time, it appears without (against) the artists’ consent – at least it is how theaudience often interprets it. The fly is a miniature and mobile ‘V-effekt’, a living denial, acounteract of the functional sterility of the Western theatre conceived as laboratory, justas its fellow insect flying through the air at the doctor’s or at the butcher’s.

The wider context of the following essay is framed by the similarities between theatre
and laboratory defined by the intersection of natural sciences, alchemy and theatricality(Case 2007), and by the performative qualities of the notion zooësis (Chaudhuri 2003,
2007). To the question of staging (insceniert, színre vitt) the Other (animals, androids,
robots), I approach from my previous research on the question of performative presence
and the phenomenon of silence (Rosner 2012): my thesis is that the presence-absence
relation is best considered not as a binary opposition but as a play of complementary
phenomena. In this process the importance of the notion of play and playfulness in the
Gadamerian sense should be emphasized (Gadamer 2004, 104). The to-and-fro
movement, noted by Gadamer, is also imminent in the process of theatrical perception,as an oscillation between the performative and representational (Alter), or as a ‘binocularvision’ (States). The relationship between presence and the performative event can be
described through three main concepts according to Fischer-Lichte: the weak, the strong,
and the radical concept of presence (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 94-100). Attempting the same
gesture of offering a description for the three main modes for describing the modernist
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concept of presence are the fictional, auratic and literal mode of presence is the central
issue of Power’s critical analysis (2008). Power assumes that the presence brought intoplay in the theatre enables us to reflect the construction of ‘reality’ in our contemporary
world (Power 2008, 9), and argues that ‘that presence should not be seen as something
fixed which theatre has or doesn’t have, but as the subject of a constantly shifting
interplay between theatrical signification and the context in which a performance takes
place’ (Power 2008, 14). Keeping these points in mind, I have been researching the nonhuman elements/agents in a performative situation: starting from examining theappearance of animals in a theatrical event (Rosner 2012b), turning to the inorganic‘other’, the robot, to see how our concept of theatre is challenged. This paper doesn’t
intend to give definitions – it attempts to cover some fields of an imaginary map
representing a theatrical territory that is inhabited by humans, animals and androids.

In the attempt of positioning animals in theatricality the essays written by States (1985)
and Ridout (2006) are particularly insightful: while States compares the onstage presenceof animals to that of the elements (water, fire) and children, and introduces the notion ofoscillation (binocular vision) between the semiotic and phenomenal reception, Ridout’ssocial approach, on the one hand, renders the onstage presence of animals beside thestage fright of the actor and the embarrassment of the audience, as phenomena thatpoint to the contradiction hidden in the constructed-consensual character of theatre, on
the other hand, he draws the attention to the theatrical aspects of sacrifice, thousia.
‘Sacrifice is not exactly where the killing begins, but it is where the killing starts getting
turned into something else, where killing begins to make an effort not to feel guilty about
itself.’ (Ridout 2006, 126)

In the vertical, theological relation of the (utterly problematic) notion of Westernmimesis, the onstage (insceniert) presence of the human being celebrates the primaryand distinguished position of the man as an image of God. And by doing this, thetheatrical-dramatical representation of animals is often degraded to a metaphor of164

counterpole, a bearer of a forbidden and secret knowledge (Mephistopheles as dog, andthe monkeys of the witch in Goethe’s Faust). This is fortified by thenormality/abnormality dichotomy claimed by the positivist natural sciences (Linné,
Darwin). From this point of view, the presence (presentation) of animals as spectaculumin circus and fairs) and the zoo phenomenon (as the mobile exhibition of the positivist
taxonomy) are very close to each other, amplifying each other: the first one lists andpresents the aberration from a presumed norm (the wild and/or trained beast), thesecond one sustains the process of norm-construction based on a semiotic consideration.
This discourse is challenged by the essays of animal studies from the late nineties:emphasizing the moral issues (Coetzee 1999) has become fundamental for the animal
rights activists, while Derrida draws attention to the untenability of the human-animal
bipolar distinction, the necessity of the plural (animals), and the problematic
phenomenon of the animals’ gaze (Derrida 2002, 400). In the following paragraphs, I
investigate the theatrical consequences of what I call the three paradigmatic secrets(mysteries? challenges?) of our relationship towards the animals: looking into the eye ofthe animals, becoming animal, the lives of animals in which the human is not present).

II.
That specific fly mentioned in the title is an exception: an animal that accidentally (?)
enters the realm of the stage, the performative space. This can be linked to Chaudhuri’s
observation that the human fear of insects is deeply connected to spatial aspects: to theidea of home (that is secure and free from invaders), and the insects that are constantly
disregarding its boundaries, the walls, the skin (Chaudhuri 2013, 323). Based on this, we
can say that our reaction to the ‘stage fly’ is a deeply inprinted reaction (keeping theinsect out), tamed by the socially, traditionally framed theatrical event (not getting out of
our seats to take it out). In most cases, however, the animals that appear onstage aretaken there by humans. From the point of view of theatrical framing, the animals taken
onstage might seem like a homogenous group, but there are major differences
165depending on the species (amongst other variables), insects, mammals, etc. and the levelof trainability (= controllability). Taking an animal onstage is by definition is an act ofcontrol, and in most cases, it is acted out by acknowledging (desiring, inviting, celebrating,embracing) a certain degree of unexpectedness.

The spatial characteristics of the shared presence becomes important in the case of the
opening scene of Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (2011, directed by Robert Wilson),where the static image of the three female bodies lying still in the open coffins isdynamized by the dogs sniffing on the bloody carcass bones, wandering around ‘freely’(limited by the horizontal line of downstage). The dogs kept away from the edge of thestage, but they didn’t pay any attention to the side curtains, going off- and onstage –pointing at the relativity of the framing offered by the traditional theatre space. This
scene was an interesting combination of keeping the control on a minimal level, while
maintaining (although ironically questioning) the voyeur form of theatre.

One of the dedicated forms of staging animals is the equestrian theatre. One of the latest
shows of the Hungarian Equestrian Theatre, Honfoglalás (The Settlement, 2011), forexample, stages one of the super-patriotic rock opera based on the movie by Gábor
Koltai (1996) that pictures a romantic-heroic-fictional image of the arrival of the
Hungarian people in the Carpathian basin around 895 AC: besides ‘showcasing’ thehorses, the performance also builds on the stereotypical national (populist) pride of the
Hungarian as ‘a nation born on horseback’ identity. In this show, quite doubtfully, thehorses are on the same semiotic level as other attributes (flags, traditional weaponry) of
the gloriously fictionalized past, as ‘Hungarian signs of Hungarian horses’. (It is worth
noting the spatial-vertical hierarchy of the image: men on horseback, women on thesame vertical level as the horses). And, because of this involuntary usage of live animals
as mere patriotic signs, the horses seem replaceable, mere mobile horse-representations.

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The Hungarian Equestrian Theatre is the imported version of the French Zingaro
Equestrian theatre founded by Bartabas. But meanwhile the Hungarian one is merely
reinforces the traditional hierarchy stereotype, the goal of the popular Zingaro is the
opposite: to deconstruct these stereotypes, by shifting the focus from ‘rhetoric’ to‘poetic’ perception (to quote Coetzee-Costello’s conclusion). By integrating Ko
Murobushi’s butoh in their recent performance, The Centaur and the Animal (2011)
explores the possibility and the impossibility of experiencing, knowing, becoming the
Other. One of the central image of the show is an inverse centaur: the horse headed –human bodied ‘centaur’ covers the eyes (of the horse) with the (dancer’s) hand – thismetaphoric image of withdrawal, mutual enclosure and trust adds another layer to theaforementioned mystery of the animals’ gaze towards the human. However, even if it
operates with sensible visual, the attempt for performing mutuality is per definitionem
fails: mutuality, the will for encounter with the Other is not mutual, it is (most probably) a
one way direction, and eventually Bartabas is the one who thematizes this relationship bymatrixing the presence of the horses into a performance, not the other way around.

Under the tab ‘Horses’ on the Bartabas website, instead of information on the horses,
there is an essay with the title ‘The Other Bartabas’, assuming that ‘it is the horse who
reveals the man and not the contrary’. After having described that names andtemperament of the horses, the essay concludes with a ‘post scriptum for those whohave preferred the story of the master to that of his horses: just replace their names byhis own; the same of him is true’ (Nauleau 2012). In this case, the director (with anillusory humility) hides behind the persona (personality) of the horses as masks, theanimals are his metaphors. However, the homepage of the Hungarian equestrian theatre
systematically lists the horses – their names, breed, temperament and year: ‘Peti wasborn in April 2001. Being on stage means everything to him’ (Magyar Lovas Színház). Peti
the horse (Peti is a nickname for Peter, but also includes the English ‘pet’) has thepotential of a pet star. However, pet stars are more popular in the movies, where they
get famous by their ‘character’ name, not their ‘personal’ one: Beethoven, Benji, etc.
167

Their ‘real’ name appears in the cast list – a name that is given to them just as arbitrarily
as the fictional one. This (playful? bizarre? self-ironic?) anthropomorphic approach,widened by the aura concept of Benjamin, offers the illusion of the familiarity, andreinforces the bourgeois tradition that treats the animal as a member of the family (seethe painting One of the Family by Cotman from 1880).

In the cases indicated above, the onstage presence of the animals is the illusion of ‘acting’(double-layered illusion?), simultaneity of parallel patterns (in opposition of circus, forexample, where the action of the trained animal is the point in itself). This illusory
simultaneity is achieved by framing (matrixing) the trained action in such a way that it
overlaps with the dramatic narrative (see Peterson 2007, 36). By analyzing the effects of
the animals’ onstage appearance, Fischer-Lichte states that ‘animals unfold an almost

uncanny ‘presence’ of the strong order whenever they appear onstage’ (Fischer-Lichte
2008, 106, italics mine, K. R.) In this, I emphasize the ‘uncanny’, which implies a presence
evoking a presence, somewhat similarly to the notion of phantom by Ridout (Ridout 2006,
121). Fischer-Lichte emphasizes the elusive presence of the animals in the performative
event (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 106). Staging the animals always locates the spectators’ focus
on the event, the phenomenon of bodies – partly because of the unexpectedness it
involves. The risk (or, in more extreme cases, the possibility of physical danger) thatenters with the animals therefore seems evident. What is surprising in accepting thisstatement, in my opinion, is that how easily we put the omnipresent risk of ‘human’
theatre into brackets: if there is an actor and an animal on stage, then the actor (orfellow human) is almost automatically understood as ‘reliable’, and the animal is the onethat gets rendered as filled with contingency. The intensity of the contingency caused byletting the ‘reality’ enter is usually measured by either controlling the behavior of thegiven animal, or the clear marking of the space the animal may temporarily inhabit. It
does happen even in those performances where the movement of animals is ‘free’, like
Rachel Rosenthal’s Painting is Hell from 2005.) Based on these, for describing these168

qualities from the creators’ side, I suggest the term zone, which is the space/time of thecalculated contingency.

III.
The issue of theatrical (semiotic) framing of animals is raised usually in relation of living
animals – however, taking dead animal parts (corps etc.) on stage is probably morecommon than it seems at first glance; this might be one of the major differences
between staging the human and non-human. While staging a dead human body is still
considered as taboo (not counting the funeral services etc.), this doesn’t apply so strictly
to animals. One of the most ‘transparent’, widely used form is the preparatum, the skinthat is stuffed with a foreign material to give the shape of the ‘original’ species: this is themoment when the animal becomes a puppet, an ‘actor/agent’ becomes a prop, amoving/mover becomes moved, animal becomes animated, from phenomenallyperceived to symbolic: the seagull, Hamm and Clov’s dog, Beuys’s dead hare, the ravenon Sheryl Sutton’s arm. The glance of the animal is shortchanged for that of the glass eye.

One of the special forms (a form that is definitive for the history of theatre) of staging a
stuffed animal is when the animal skin is filled with a living human body. Publicly wearing
fur (an act that is condemned by radical animal rights activists) evokes the birth of thetragedy, opens the discourse to the wide literature of ‘talking’ animals and the world of
the actor ‘embodying’ an animal character. However, of course, the focus usually remains
anthropomorphic, there are only slight perspective shifts (Black Beauty, Zoo Story, The
Goat, the blue bird of happiness, rhinoceri, cats, book of jungle, lion king, La Fontaine andWilson Fables). Of course, in these cases, the shift in the focus is always only illusory, it
couldn’t be anything else: as through the eye slot of the animal skin it is always a humangaze that looks at us.

Here the animals’ ‘surface’ visible for man is ‘utilized’: this theatre doesn’t consider thematerial that ‘fills the skin’: it makes the flesh hidden – eats, burns, digs, throws it out. In
169the following, I focus on artworks that operate with the flesh/meat of dead, ‘turned out’
animals, evoking and questioning the image of theatre/laboratory/butcher and the flies.
Hermann Nitzsch’s actions or Marina Abramovic’s Cleaning the House point at thesacrificial-ritual, substitution-based concept of the animal corps (corpus). Maybe themost disturbing representation of this relationship is the installation called A Thousand

Years by Damian Hirst (1990, also mentioned by Chaudhuri 2003, 14). One doesn’tnecessarily have to be a loud advocate of animal rights to see how Hirst’s installation
relates closely to the fundamental issue of the human responsibility and the animals’consent. (In what cases it is possible / essential to consider this? Is even the question ofconsent a deeply human approach?) The two halves of the horizontally positioned glass
prism (positioned in the white gallery space) is divided by a glass wall with holes in it: in
one of the cells there are maggots from and flies, in the other half there is a rotting headof a calf and an Insect-O-Cutor. Through the holes, the hatching flies fly directly to their
death. In this case, the human (in its physicality) is not participating in this work; however,this absence (exodus) is only illusory: as the author of the concept, in this absently
theological position, he decides the life and death of the flies. In this sense, the fly(mentioned in the title) is enclosed - not only virtually, but also physically – in the glass
space of performativity.

IV.
In this essay, the appearance of the preparatum, the stuffed animal that is ripped of its
ability to move and becomes animated leads to the realm of the recent (practical andtheoretical) challenges raised by sharing the performative space with the animated but
inorganic other: robots and androids. However the number of robot / android theatre
performances is increasing and becoming widely known, in the following I focus
exclusively on the works of Seinendan Company, directed by Oriza Hirata, one of theemblematic figures of mid-generation directors in Japan. (For context see Uchino 2010and Eckersall 2015).

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One of the first performances of the robot theatre project (the collaboration between
Seinendan and Osaka University Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics) is the twentyminutes-long ‘I, Worker’ (2008). The story is set in the near future when the human androbot coexistence is already normal, and it is about the daily routine of the Mayama’s
living with two service robots (Takeo and Momoko). Through her work, Momoko plays anessential role in the family, but Takeo, who suffers from depression and lack ofmotivation, is unable to work: the contradictio in termini (the non-working robot) is oneof the central topics of the play, with dialogues that discuss the limits of a robot’s
capacities compared to human (eating, giving birth). In the minimalist space, thespectator’s attention is directed towards the four actors (two human, two robots); thestructure of the performance is an exquisitely timed quartet that utilizes all the variationsof its four elements. While the (human) performers’ acting is mostly subdued, reserved,
quiet, offering the illusion of casual and directness (a way of acting that appears in many
Seinendan performances), the robots’ gestures and movements are (understandably)much less detailed. When the audience enters, the actor is lying on the stage, silently
reading a newspaper, the robot is standing downstage, facing the audience, sometimes
blinking, its hand sometimes moves a little. These first minutes of the performance offera very specific relation between the layers of theatricality, especially considering thedirection (the vector) of the participants: the actor’s gaze is ‘hidden’, directed to themagazine, the spectators are mostly looking at the robot. And the robot is looking at us.
Or is it? Who is looking at us, and who we are looking at in this particular moment? It is
the oscillating layers of representational and performative (Alter) that are brought intoplay here, and it raises awareness to the spectator’s mental process ofconstructing/deconstructing the fictional layer for the favor of the presence literal mode.
After a couple of minutes, another robot crosses upstage, without much ado, still insilence. The distinctive signs between the (same type, different colored) robots are thatthe ‘female’ is wearing an apron (in that relation, the ‘male’ robot is ‘naked’). The most
specific sign of gender is the clearly different female/male voice attributed to the robots.

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The section I wish to focus on this time is the closing scene of the performance and thecurtain call (applause). The last scene involves the two robots only (with the actors being
offstage). After their dialogue ends, there is a blackout – the usual, emphatic and strong
code in the (Western) theatre history that marks the end of a performance. The audience
lights come up, the applause could start, the robots scroll downstage, as if expecting toreceive the applause. But none of us in the audience starts it. In the sense of ‘collective
theatrical contract’ the applause is the tradition of acknowledging the closure of theperformative event and of expressing gratitude (respect) towards the artists; the lack ofapplause is mostly a symptom of either a collective catharsis (big words), or the wish forextending the ritual (Grotowski). Although one could mention the strong group sense ofany (Japanese) audience, and argue that it was a single occurrence of a given
performance (therefore not a representative pattern), this specific pause of ‘nonapplause’, the momentary silence instead of the clapping in front of the robots has adifferent meaning: we are waiting for someone whom we can applaud (somebody togive a clap to) – the applause starts exactly at the moment when the human actors
appear from backstage and join the curtain call line formed previously by the robots.
While the whole concept of the performance is pointing at the widening of the theatricalpossibilities of presence, this specific moment is a reminder of the importance and the
deep anthropological roots of presence.1

V.
In his latest piece of the robot theatre project La Métamorphose, Hirata sets Kafka’s
stories in a near future and a French small town – where one morning Gregoire Samsa
wakes up to discover that he has transformed into an android. Instead of showing thenarrowed and intensified physical disgust (so strongly present in Kafka’s work), the toposof ‘anything can happen’ and the importance of facing the given situation areemphasized in Hirata’s version. The stage reflects the conceptual shift from insect to1

Similar is mentioned by Fischer-Lichte, when she analyzes the famous staging of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot,
directed by Frank Castorf (Ficher-Lichte 2008: 71).

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android: the set is a cooler, airier, white-based room, with the android Gregoire’s bed in
the center. The inorganic lifelessness (?) of the android is counterpointed by the living
decoration plant placed next to his bed: as caring for the ‘new’ Gregoire gradually
becomes burdensome (if not impossible) for the family members, they turn to the plant
to water it as a substitute activity. The absolute focal point of the stage is the neutral,
white, larvae-like face of the android, which equally evokes the humanoid features ofcontemporary robotics and traditional noh masks. The fundamental questions raised anddiscussed by the characters (‘I think it’s me’- says Gregoire, the android; ‘my son is arobot’; ‘he is French, even if he is not a French make’; ‘do I have the right to decide who
is human and who is not’) aim towards the rational processing of an unexpectedly
occurred radical change, thus creating a slow-paced ‘essay theatre’ with an optimistic
ending: the family opts for the coexistence with the android and the acceptance of theunchangeable circumstances.

For the performance, the android design is by Hiroshi Ishiguro, the android direction is by
Takenobu Chikaraishi (Osaka University). Hirata’s long lime collaborator Ishiguro’s
primary research is to develop humanoid robots that are ‘lifelike’ (my oversimplificationof the term, K. R.) – and doing all this from a profoundly humanist belief: ‘If you are able
to give me a definition of human, I will happily design a robot matching that definition.’2
Through creating performances featuring robots, Hirata and Ishiguro don’t attempt todefine what a robot is, but what human is: whether a ‘core’, an essential quality exists bywhich it is possible to define ‘human’. In this concept, the shape of the humanoid robot is
considered as a shell. 3 The activity of the robots is integrated into the performative
event in three different ways: by software (by recording the gesture sequences of a given
actor in advance), by pre-programming, by remote control. The programming and timingof the gestures, facial expressions and vocal utterances are done by Hirata – in his
2

http://trafo.hu/en-US/metamorphosis (last accessed: 25.01.2015.)

3

http://www.aec.at/origin/2011/05/20/android-theater-und-ein-paar-fragen/ (last accessed: 25.01.2015.)173

opinion, programming of emotions refers both to the more narrow, theatrical sense andthe wider, humanist approach to the question of (re-) producing emotions. (Can we talkabout spontaneous human emotions at all, or there are only socially pre-programmed
and acquired reactions? – asks Hirata in the discussion following his show.)

The robot can have a technical failure, but theoretically it can’t fail by itself, nor can it
make mistakes (this must be with reservations). The occasionality of mistake and failureis the possibility of the performer’s human condition. As the robots featuring in Hirata’s
shows don’t have artificial intelligence, they can’t solve unexpected situations; therefore
lack the ability of improvisational cooperation and creative activity. It means that theperformative process is a one-way action: the robot executes the programmed sequence,
the actor adapts, adjusts, reacts (and makes mistakes). Of course, this distinction is lesssharp in those cases when the robot is ‘real time’ remote controlled. Hirata gives thesame instructions to the human and robot actors, mostly focusing on the duration of
pause, the exact timing and tempo of the utterance, avoiding psychological didascalia.
The plays and acting can be described as ‘quiet’ theatre (Boyd 2006, 9), with its often
overlapping lines of dialogue, the soft, sometimes hardly audible voice, the meticulously
composed and timed speech that has the impression of spontaneity. La Métamorphose,
being a Japanese and French coproduction, considers the differences between the
traditions of social interaction, as it is the case of the most emphatic gestures in theperformances: the Mother (Irène Jacob) holds the android Gregoire’s hand, and theFather (Jérôme Kircher) leans his forehead to the android’s head. These metonymic
moments also emphasize the direct proximity between the human and the android, thephysical contact between skin and shell. In this divided closeness, only the voice thatconnects the two layers of reality: the voice and movement of the android ‘originallybelongs’ to Thierry Vuu Huu, who plays the role of the Tenant. In the scene between
Gregoire and the Tenant, these presence modes are multilayered. Also, in terms offictional mode, how does the ‘Mother: Irène Jacob’ relate to the ‘Grégoire Samsa: Repliee
S1 (android)’ statement? What sort of critical remarks can be made in regards of the174android’s acting? Of course, these questions – these also reflect on the different
perception of robots on stage and in film and other forms of fiction.
The aforementioned sentence – ‘I think it’s me’ – from the android Gregoire, with
Ishiguro’s concept of shell, reflects on Descartes’s idea of humans and animals, naturalelements operating as machines, and raises again the question of the need for profoundsecurity (how can one relate to the other? how is it possible to make statements
concerning one’s own existence?). But the meaning of the famous sentence shifts withthe context and the ‘person’ who utters them: from stating cogito ergo sum (I think
therefore I exist) it becomes a hesitant and insecure, objectified ‘I think it’s me’ – said byan android, in the voice of a human, in a theatrical situation.

Again, the organic is transformed into inorganic here: not only on the level of fiction, buton the phenomenal aspect of performativity. It also means that Hirata’s robot/android
theatre is eventually a ‘luxury puppet theatre’: the difference between the more
traditional forms of puppet theatre and this way of object animation is merely the factthat the mover and the moved (object/puppet/robot/android) are more distant in termsof space and time. At the curtain call of I, Worker, the actors and the robots come to thestage, but the ‘mover’ of the robot doesn’t. It means that conceptually actors and robots
are considered as ‘equal level’ agents in the process – and at the same time the physicalabsence of the mover adds another layer to the question of presence. From this historicalpoint of view, Hirata’s performances are not necessarily pioneering, as they are equally
linked to bunraku, Craig’s vision of the ‘übermarionette’, the Bauhaus experiments – and,above all, to Descartes. The importance of his experiments lies more in their selfreflective act of questioning our relationship to our presence and to the other withwhich/whom we are to share the space.

Looking at the final scene with only the two robots present in I, Worker, it might besomewhat comforting to think of Chaudhuri’s remark of ‘no stage is ever free of insects—
invisible or nearly invisible, they are always there’ (Chaudhuri 2013, 329). In this sense,175the fly becomes a reminder. Gregor Samsa, the character that is ripped off not only hishuman, but its fictional insect self, provisions a sterile and infertile environment where
one would be grateful for any fly that crosses the stage, as a trace/proof/hope of anorganic presence.

References

Boyd, Mari. 2006. The Aesthetics of Quietude. Tokyo: Sophia University Press.
Case, Sue Ellen. 2007. Performing Science and the Virtual. New York: Routledge.
Chaudhuri, Una. 2003. Animal Geographies: Zooësis and Modern Drama, Modern Drama
46:4, Winter, 646-62.
---. 2007. (De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance, The Drama Review 51:1,
Spring, 8-20---. 2013. Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality, Theatre Journal,
65:3, October, 321-34.
Coetzee, J. M.1999. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), Critical Inquiry
2, 369-418.
Eckersall, Peter. 2015. Performance, Mourning and the Long View of Nuclear Space,
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 6, No. 2, February 16,
http://japanfocus.org/Peter-Eckersall/4278/article.html (last accessed2015.08.12.).
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance, A New
Aesthetics. New York: Routledge.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum.
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Magyar Lovas Színház (Hungarian Equestrian Theatre). 2012. Lovak,
http://www.lovasszinhaz-komarom.hu/2011/lovak.php, last accessed2015.08.13.
Nauleau, Sophie. 2012. L’Autre Bartabas, http://www.bartabas.fr/fr/Bartabas/leschevaux, last accessed 2015. 07.26.
Peterson, Michael. 2007. The Animal Apparatus: From a Theory of Animal Acting toan Ethics of Animal Acts, TDR: The Drama Review Spring, 33-48.
Power, Cormac. 2008. Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence.
Amsterdam – New York: Rodopi.
Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosner, Krisztina. 2012a. A színészi jelenlét és a csend dramatikus-teátrális játékai.
Budapest: L’Harmattan.
---. 2012b. Légy a fényben – Színre vitt állatok. In: Balassa, Zs. – P. Müller, P. –K. (eds.). A magyar színháztudomány kortárs irányai. 45-53. Pécs, Kronosz.

Rosner,States, Bert O. 1985. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology ofTheater. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Uchino, Tadashi. 2010. What about the machines? Performing ‘J-type’ Technology inJapan’s Contemporary Performance Culture,https://www.academia.edu/12687688/What_about_Machines_Performing_Jtype_Technoloty_in_Japan_s_Performance_Culture (last accessed 2015.07.20.)

Krisztina Rosner is an associate professor at the University of Pecs, Hungary. She
wrote her PhD on the actor’s presence and silence (2011). She was a Japan Foundation
Fellow (Hosei University, Tokyo, 2014). Currently she is a JSPS Postdoctoral Scholar at
Waseda University (‘Reconsidering the Performer's Presence: Non-Human and NeoHuman Aspects of Contemporary Japanese Theatre’).
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178

We’re Here Now: Site-specific theatre beyond place in Canadian Jewish
Diaspora

Jenny Salisbury

In 2014, the Kiever Synagogue, located in Toronto’s bohemian neighbourhood of
Kensington Market, became the site of a new play by Evan and Rafe Malach, A Simple

Twist of Faith. As the play moved its audiences throughout the synagogue, it allowed thehistory of the physical context to lend authority, atmosphere, and pathos to the second
space of the play. The synagogue is not the setting of the narrative, but generates acomplicated and layered horizon of meaning between the history of the building, thelived experience of the audience, and the emotional landscape of the story.1 As the site,
the people, and the narrative interact with one another, it generates a layered space ofmultiple meanings, pushing beyond the historical facts of the play, and creating acomplicated landscape of community identity and imagined futures.

The Kiever Synagogue: Jewish people in Toronto
Since 1927, the Kiever Shul has stood in Toronto’s eclectic and bohemian neighbourhoodof Kensington Market.2 A site of cultural flux and encounter, Kensington Market is acentre for many of the city’s immigrant communities. The neighborhood is in Toronto’s
downtown core, bordered by College Street, Spadina Avenue, Dundas Street, andBathurst Street. It was the second Jewish centre of Toronto, after the St. John’s Ward1

. The term ‘horizon of meaning’ comes from Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. Horizon of meaning isdefined with the work as ‘a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now
one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of – and for the sake of – a particularaction’. Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),
222.
2. The company Harmony Over War and the community participants who know the Keiver Synagogue
generally refer to it with the familiar ‘shul’ as oppose to the more formal ‘synagogue.’ Shul is a Yiddish
world, derived from the German ‘schule,’ meaning school.

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area was closed in the early 20th century to make way for the city’s central hospital and a
grand avenue leading from the train station to the provincial parliament buildings. By
midcentury, supported by post-war prosperity and an influx of European immigration,
Toronto’s Jewish community moved north into suburban neighbourhoods, where theJewish cultural hubs are found today. However, unlike the many early synagogues,
whose congregations built new worship centres in the suburban communities, the Kiever
Shul remained in its original location, serving the downtown Jewish community, andacting as a Jewish representative in Toronto’s ever increasingly multi-cultural landscape.

The early history of Jewish people in Canada is not well documented. There is no recordof who the first Jew or group of Jews might have been in English speaking Upper Canada,
as the records of early colonization did not chart religious affiliation. Much of theresearch into the historical record comes through the noticing of names that are likely
Jewish, such as a Charles Goldsmith, who is recorded in the Toronto city directory in theyear 1838, but according to Toronto historian Shmuel Mayer Shapiro, is more likely to be
Dutch Christian, than Jewish.3 Canada’s first Jews likely settled in Montreal, as Montreal
was and continues to be home to Canada’s largest Jewish population. In 1846, Toronto’s
Jewish population was approximately 12 people.4 The first recorded organized group
was in 1852, the ‘Hebrew Benevolent Society’, recorded in the provincial registrar of
Ontario – but there are no society records maintained. 5 However, by 1856, Jewish
Synagogues were being established, and the written and documented history of Jewish
people in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, began. By 1890, there were approximately 1500
Jews living in Toronto. 6 Today, there are well over 100,000 Jewish people living in3. Shmuel M. Shapiro, The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community (Toronto: Now & Then Books, 2010), 12.

4. Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman, Only Yesterday: collected pieces on the Jews ofToronto (Toronto: Now & Then Books, 2013), 12.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

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Toronto, representing a range of cultural backgrounds and religious practices.7

A Simple Twist of Faith is one of several recent Toronto plays that make use of sacred
Jewish space and ceremony within a theatrical context. In the last five years, plays such
as Julie Tepperman’s YICHUD (Seclusion), Hannah Moscovitch’s East of Berlin, andNatasha Greenblatt’s The Peace Maker have explored questions of contemporary Jewish
identity in North America at the beginning of a new century. As it has now been acentury since the First World War, and the 70th anniversary of many of the Second World
War events, a new generation of artists and playwrights are attempting to make meaningout of Jewish experience in North American Diaspora. A Simple Twist of Faith is part of a
network of plays written by playwrights under the age of 30, who are trying to reconcile
history and inherited religious practice with contemporary experiences. A Simple Twistof Faith does this through allowing their story to be haunted by a historical site, and to
make meaning in and amongst a host of other stories, surrounding and shaping theirworld.

The play - A Simple Twist of Faith
The play’s historical story is set between Germany and the United States, and has little to
do with the specific history of Kensignton Market’s synagogue. The play tells first a WWI
narrative, followed by a holocaust narrative, and spans a time frame of 1917 to 1960. It
could be argued such a setting shares little with a prewar, Canadian Synagogue. Yet, by
never masking the contemporary reality of the synagogue, and moving the audiences inand out of the worship space, A Simple Twist of Faith blends its specific, historical context
with the history of the Jewish Diaspora in North America, and the hauntings of all theother stories told and memorialized in the space of the Kiever Shul. In doing this, the7. “Community Highlights for Toronto” from Statistics Canada, last modified August 26, 2013,
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/profil01/CP01/Details/Page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=3520005&G
eo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=toronto&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=35&B1=All&Custom=

181

shul, its members and visitors, claim ownership of the story, and create a hybridity ofidentity within the audience members, as though through claiming this particular story
within this specific geographical and cultural site, the story and its implications may also
be set amongst and between its Toronto audience.

A Simple Twist of Faith is a complex example of community-engaged, documentary
theatre. It is the researched, historical story of one family’s immigration to the UnitedStates during the height of Nazi oppression of German Jewish people. Artistic director
Evan Malach first encountered the story while he was on pilgrimage with a Jewish youth
project, ‘Heritage Retreats’ in Yellowstone National Park. An article, published in Jewish
Magazine, written by Yisrael Nathan, later verified the story for Malach.8 Malach and his
company then worked with American history professor Gil Troy from McGill University toverify its authenticity and accuracy. All this led to a musical adaptation of the story,
which has been touring Toronto synagogues and schools since its premier at the Toronto
Fringe Theatre Festival in 2014. Evan Malach has since located the decedents of thefamily the play is based on, the Rosenaus and Weinbergs. Sigbert Weinberg, who in theplay text is the very young grandchild who triggers the family’s migration to America, now
resides in Israel. Malach met and interviewed him and his sister, and has documented
that experience. Through this research, Malach is working on a new edit of the play, totour in the autumn of 2015.

The play follows Alex Lurye, an American Jew from Duluth Minnesota, who is stationed inGermany during the First World War. One evening, while enjoying some leave-time fromhis unit, Lurye visits a German synagogue to celebrate traditional Friday night service.
There he meets the Rosenau family, who invite him home to share the Sabbath meal.
They share a warm and memorable evening together, and the next morning, Lurye
returns to his unit. The war ends, and Lurye moves home to Minnesota. He sends a

8. Yisrael Nathan, “The Kindness that Came Back,” Jewish Magazine, November 1997.
http://www.jewishmag.com/3mag/story/chessed.htm

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thank you letter to the Rosenaus, but never hears back. 21 years later, despite only
meeting once, and never keeping in touch, Lurye rescues the Rosenaus from Nazi
Germany. They are the only Jews to survive from their small town of Seldas.

The play is performed in three locations within the synagogue, and the audience is
moved together from one station to the next. Act one is staged in the synagogue’s
garden, during sunset. For the Jewish calendar, the new day begins at sunset, so as Lurye
is contemplating attending Sabbath services, the audience is aware of the ending of one
day, the beginning of the next. It is a subtle suggestion, and convenient that thenarrative itself begins at the same time of day as traditional theatre performances.
However, already the play’s staging is making use of its host’s body, compelling theaudience not to ignore the geographical setting of the play. Often, in traditional theatre
staged in a formal performance space, the audience is taught to ignore the surroundings.
The real time of day, the location of the auditorium, the situation of the audience, isrendered as neutral as possible, so that the premise of the play may take priority. Yet
here, Malach is situating the audience in a blended, hybrid space. The staging says Alex
Lurye is outside, just as the audience is. It is evening, and the sun is setting, both in theworld of the play, and in our world. Lurye is about to go into a Synagogue, just as we are.
This insists that the audience reads the site as much as the narrative, for the play ispulling on its geographical reality to enhance the story.

Act two is the meeting of Lurye and Rosenau, in the synagogue. As the audience is led
from the garden into the sanctuary, Rosenau greets them as though they are members of
the 1917 German congregation, arriving for Friday night services. Through this, theaudience themselves populate the mise en scène, filling the sanctuary with bodies in thepews, as it would have been for Lurye and Rosenau’s first encounter. The audiences findthemselves in a double role of both spectator and theatrical context, having the play’s
story happening around and between them. They are encouraged to sing along with thehymns and songs of the sanctuary, sway to the music, pick up prayer shawls and kippahs,183(the Jewish skull cap), and open prayer books. As Karen Zaiontz notes, in this way‘audiences retain their role as interpreters and witnesses of the stage action, but theyalso labour as role players and aides to the performance’. 9 This creates a ‘sensory
ethnography’, where audiences learn of another’s experience through how theyencounter a site and its subjects. 10 By having the audience members animate thesanctuary of the synagogue, their role becomes doubled as both spectators andcongregation. Further emphasizing this doubling is how the actors interact with theaudience as they enter the sanctuary. Malach, as the German Rousenau, welcomes each
person as a member of the town of Seldas. He asks about marriages, Bar and Bat
Mitzvahs, and imaginary siblings who are fighting at the front. Individual spectators areawarded names and back stories, character and setting information, all to place theburden of the historical time period on the audience members. It is clear that thetemporary community of the audience is not animating the Kiever Synagogue ofKensington Market. There are countless elements of the contemporary shul that areanachronistic to a 1917 setting, such as present-day newspapers, magazines, andinformation material. The 1917 synagogue would have been gendered differently, likely
with different seating for men and women. No such attempt is made here. The historicalburden placed on the audience is light. This brings awareness to the audience that thetheatrical ambitions of this play are not historical accuracy, but something else entirely.

By being invited into the sanctuary as welcomed, familiar members of the community,
the audience is encouraged to feel a kinship with this hybrid identity. First, by being
warmly greeted at the door of the Kiever Synagogue, they are being told ‘you arewelcome here’ or perhaps, even more strongly ‘you belong here’. In the contemporary
portion of this hybrid identity, audiences find themselves fully embraced by the9. Karen Zaiontz, “Ambulatory Audiences and Animate Sites: Staging the Spectator in Site-Specific
Performance,” in Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, eds. Anna Birch and Joanne
Tompkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 167.
10

. Ibid, 179.

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geographical site of the play, not just within the walls of the shul, but right into its heart,
within the sanctuary. The sanctuary of the shul is a lush and sensuous space.

It isrelatively small and square, with pews to the far left and right turned at 90 degrees, toface the centre of the room, where the bimah is located. A bimah is the elevatedplatform from which the Torah is read. These turned pews are rare in any synagogue,
particularly one that tends to be more orthodox, as the Kiever Synagogue is. Traditionally,
all pews or chairs face the Eastern wall, where the aron ha-kodesh, the ark that holds the
Torah scrolls, is located. However, these turned pews, which were not turned for the
performance, but are secured in place, create a natural thrust stage, where audience
members are able to see each other, and witness one another animating the space, andresponding to the roles Rosenau assigns. The space is filled with light, sound and sent.
Candles and incense are lit. Above the bimah rests the ner tamid, the eternal light that
guards or marks the Torah. Behind the audience, on the Western wall, stands a large
memorial of names, with electronic light bulbs next to each name, where family
members can come turn on a light to pray for their loved one. During the show, all thelights were on. The play did nothing to dress this contemporary sanctuary for theirperformance, instead allowing whatever filled the space to inform the world of the play.
In this way, the Kiever Synagogue has more authority over the space and its inhabitants,
than the world of A Simple Twist of Faith. The actors and audience members are more
like pilgrims or trespassers, lightly entering the space together for their story, and thenleaving again. In not forcing the host space to acquiesce to the demands of the play, thespace generates the idea that this story could have happened here. This meeting, thisfriendship, could just as easily have happened in this shul as in any shul. As act two
rapidly moves through time, from Rosenau and Lurye’s 1917 encounter, through to 1938,
and the Nazi oppression of the Jewish people, this hybrid space and story becomes awarning of war, genocide, fear, and death, which could also happen in this space, as inthat space.

The final moment of the act is a Shema, a song of mourning, and prayer for deliverance.
185

In the song, the audience learns that the synagogue in Seldas, the synagogue they were
just imagining, populating, dancing and laughing within, had been destroyed by arson,
along with its books and holy images.

ShemaG-d, hear my prayer
Times are hard
Here in Seldes
If you can, please help
G-d, if you’re there,
It’s unsafe for my family
If you care, please help
Burned to the groundYour house of prayerYour books and pages
If you can, please help11

As the audience sits in the sanctuary, surrounded by evocative features, from the deep
red carpets, up to the painted, domed ceiling, Rosenau mourns for its death anddestruction. This moment generates an unstable temporal reality. Which shul his hemourning?

Is he mourning something that has happened, or something that will

happen? Will the Kiever Synagogue also be destroyed one day? Which time period,
which narrative, has primacy in this moment? His song is interrupted by loud knocks andshouting. The premise, that this story could have happened here, becomes a warning.
The audience is told that the Gestapo has arrived, and that everyone must flee into thebasement, ‘The only safe place is underground’.12 As the plays’ fiddler forces jarring,
hurried chords on her instrument, the audience is compelled down the stairs, and into
11

. Evan Malach, A Simple Twist of Faith. (Unpublished script, September, 2014), 16.

12. Ibid, 17.

186

act three.

The third act of this play, while still following the historical lives of Lurye and Rosenau,reflects the story of the Jewish Diaspora in North America. Lurye runs a successful
furniture factory. Because of his place of prominence in the community, he is able tosponsor the Rosenau family to immigrate to the United States, where they build a life
together. At the end of the play, surrounded by children and grandchildren, the two men
sing of their wish for war to be over, that it is only through peace that understanding canbe found. This third act is staged in the Keiver’s community room, next to the kitchen.
This multi-purpose room of the synagogue is where meals are shared, meetings are held,
and work is done. While, again, it is not the setting of the play, which here consists of
Rosenau’s home, Lurye’s office, a political campaign room, an ocean liner, a pier and a
Sabbath table, it is the context of the play. The community room has portraits on thewall of people who have done great work for the shul and its community. There are
historical photographs of Kensington Market. The tables and chairs not needed for the
performance are rolled up into one corner. No attempts have been made to hide thecoffee station and the lending library. The play happens amongst and through this space,and is served by it. Repeatedly, this demonstrates the production’s argument, that A

Simple Twist of Faith is not a German story, or an American story, but a Jewish North
American story, one that belongs here, at the Kiever Synagogue, among all the otherstories resonating throughout the space. The play becomes site-specific, not because it isoutside of a theatre, and occurring in a specific geographical context that the audience
moves through, but because it is being staged in a context that is necessary for theunderstanding of the play. If this play were staged in a traditional theatre, with a lighting
design and a robust set, the context and meaning of the play would be lost. For it is not
the story of one family moving to America. The details are specific, but the underlying
subject belongs to the shul and the congregation, the world that the audience, both
Jewish and non-Jewish, inhabits and animates during the performance. The play suggests
this story belongs in this geographical place and this geographical time, among this187

multicultural group of people, and in so doing, allows the story to be incorporated into
the lives of the spectators who animate the story.
Avogadro (pseudonym) is a volunteer with the Kiever Synagogue. When asked about the
specificity of the story, and why a Minnesota/Germany narrative is being staged in a
Toronto Synagogue, he argued ‘There’s no question. I would never think that it’s a
Minnesota/Germany story. It is North America/Europe, clearly. I could have written
down that show easily with Winnipeg, my hometown. My grandfather came, he didn’t
come during the holocaust, he came in 1919’.13 This was echoed by Rabbi W, who
explained read this as a fundamentally Jewish story. He reads rabbinical teaching into
the historical context of play. When asked if the play was powerful, W. reflected that,

It is most clearly said in Exodus 23:9, where it says ‘Love the stranger
because you know the soul of a stranger, because you were strangers in
the land of Egypt. […] It’s not just that you know what it’s like to be astranger, it’s that you know the soul of the stranger, because you’ve got
one. People can turn us into strangers, and have, [snap] like that. Like
Herr Rosenau, who had no thought that he was a stranger, and thenboom, he was. So, that’s why it’s powerful.”14

It is clear to see why a Rabbi would find the teachings of Torah woven into this largely
secular play. W. continues

For us Jews, we teach each other Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la-zeh, which means all ofIsrael, meaning not the country, but Jews, are responsible for each other. And sothat is the message, if you ask me. Obviously, in a more pluralistic world, thelesson can be expanded to all people are responsible for each other. I think, that in13. Avogadro, interview with author, August 4, 2015.

14. Rabbi W, interview with author, July 30, 2015.

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that way, there’s probably is a universality to the story. At least you hope thereis’.15In this way, community members read universal themes into a local, specific narrative.

Beyond Space: Meaning generation between site, people, and narrative
As Sophie Nield notes in her recent chapter ‘Siting the People: Power, Protest, and Public
Space’, 16 there are two central metaphors that have traditionally been used tounderstand the relationship between site and performance. One metaphor is that of thepalimpsest, put forward by both Mile Pearson and Cathy Turner, in 2004. Just as thepaper that has been scraped over and used again, the place of a performance stages thestory over the scratchings and grooves of the space’s previous uses. In this way, ‘theperformance may overwrite but cannot (and does not seek to) erase’ the history andsignificance of what has come before it.17 The second metaphor is ‘the host and theghost’, put forward by Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas, where the performance isunderstood as an ephemeral, temporary item that animates, but does not alter the hostsite.18 Both of these metaphors are evocative images for understanding performances inceremonial space, such as A Simple Twist of Faith. However, these metaphors present
the space as more stable and consequential than the performance, because the spaceenjoys a longer timeline than the performance. The writing and the ghost can be erased,
while the paper and the host remains. Neither metaphor confronts how the space ischanged, or interpreted differently, through the lens of the play. How is the Kiever
Synagogue changed through the interaction with the narrative?

15. Ibid.

16. Sophie Nield, “Siting the People: Power, Protest, and Public Space” in Performing Site-Specific
Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, eds. Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2012).
17. Ibid, 222.

18

. Ibid.

189

The site-specific reality of A Simple Twist of Faith can be understood as not within thegeography of the Kiever Shul site, but within the site of the people and history that
populate the shul and host the play. The ‘site’ becomes the people gathered, thememories and hauntings of all the other stories contained within the shul. There is
moment when Malach, as Rosenau, turns around to face the audience, wearing theyellow star on his coat that the Nazi regime forced upon Jewish citizens. The star is not
mentioned, it is not indicated, nor explained. It is simply present, where it had not been
before. This action would have had no weight if the history and context were not alreadyknown. If an audience member did not know the historic significance of the star, thereveal would not be understood with the same historical weight and threat as others
understood it. As it was, when Malach turned to reveal the star, one could hear an
audible breath from the audience, who grew suddenly still where there had once been
dancing and laughing in the pews of Kiever Synagogue.19 The site-specificity of the play,especially in this moment, was not the bimah of the sanctuary, though that was where,
geographically, Malach stood. The site was a people’s history, the inclusion of all theother holocaust stories known and remembered in that space.

The relationship between the Kiever Shul and A Simple Twist of Faith is not a stable one.
Throughout the performance, the authority and authorship of the moment oscillate backand forth, first the shul lending pathos and authority, than the play contributing context
and history, and back and forth again. The play itself is both a simple and specific tale,
but also indicative of a wider, cultural history and identity. Returning to Nield, this play is
not ‘a single inscription onto a scraped-out parchment, but a larger narrative: a changing
sequence of superimpositions, inscriptions, occupations, and clearances; not a single sitespecific performance, but a dramaturgy of space’.20 This generates a horizon of meaning,
Lefebvre’s idea of an understanding that is layered and fluid, allowing several meanings

19. Author’s observation, October 23, 2014.

20. Nield, “Siting the People”, 231.

190

to interact with each other, and never settle. It creates a ‘both and’ space, both
Germany/Minnesota and Toronto, Canada, both one family’s story and the audience’s
story, both a site-specific play animating a historical site and an act of community withina specific cultural group.

With none of these items taking primacy, all of these

ingredients encounter one another in a complex, meaning-filled space. The audience isleft with resonances between the different items, reading each through the other. As
Nield argues ‘the site and the performance can be seen to be producing each other in areciprocal exchange of nuanced and subtly shifting meanings’. 21 The relationships
between the site and the history, the narrative and the audience, the current cultural
condition, and the questions of the future, all produce and indicate each other, while
never settling. In this way, the place of the performance is not simply the Kiever
Synagogue, but the generating/generated space in between all the various elements ofthis site-specific drama.

References

Avogadro, pseudonym. 2015. Personal interview with author. 4 August 2015.
Kayfetz, Benjamin and Stephen A. Speisman. 2013. Only Yesterday: collected pieces
on the Jews of Toronto. Toronto: Now & Then Books.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson- Smith.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Malach, Evan. 2014. A Simple Twist of Faith. Unpublished script. September, 2014.
Nathan, Yisrael. 1997. “The Kindness that Came Back”. Jewish Magazine. November 1997.
http://www.jewishmag.com/3mag/story/chessed.htm

21. Ibid, 232.

191

Nield, Sophie. 2012. “Siting the People: Power, Protest, and Public Space”. Performing
Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Edited by Anna
Birch and Joanne
Tompkins. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rabbi W. 2015. Personal interview. 23 July 2015.
Shapiro, Shmuel M. 2010. The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community. Toronto: Now& Then Books.
Statistics Canada. 2013. “Community Highlights for Toronto.” Last modified August
26, 2013.
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/profil01/CP01/Details/Page.cfm?
Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=3520005&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&Searc
hText=toronto&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=35&B1=All&Custom=
Zaiontz, Keren. 2012. “Ambulatory Audiences and Animate Sites: Staging theSpectator in Site-Specific Performance”. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics,
Place, Practice. Edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Jenny Salisbury is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance
Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her teaching and research interests include
contemporary Canadian play creation and devising processes, with a focus on audience,
community-engaged theatre, and the role of the artist as researcher.

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Trauma and Survival in the Art of Yoshiko Shimada and Soni Kum

Eliza Tan‘In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.’1

Engraved in stone, this laconic phrase from Jenny Holzer’s Survival Series (1983-85) — acollection of aphorisms on ‘the subject of survival [as a] modern preoccupation’2 — reads
as an epitaph not to the dead, but to the living who still dream. What do we dream ofsurviving? Everyday survival is a struggle; and in the most primordial sense, we dream ofsurviving death— the violent negation of our bodies and final traumatic event. Thus in life,
trauma haunts contemporary culture like a waking nightmare, a ghostly figure that struts
and frets its hour upon the stage, yet does not disappear, but returns to cast its longshadow over the future. Trauma, as Kirby Farrell puts it, is ‘both a clinical syndrome and atrope something like the Renaissance figure of the world as a stage: a strategic fictionthat a complex, stressful society is using to account for a world that seems threateningly
out of control’.3 Indeed, given the relentless narrativisation of catastrophic events whichdaily unfold to remind us of the seemingly inevitable and unknowable, ‘trauma’ is nolonger just a private response or collective reaction to an occurrence, but an
uncontainable public culture that weighs between fascination and bathos.

Manifesting most visibly in the realm of visual art and in the wider media representationof events, trauma is ritualistically replayed through words, images and gestures, and is a1

Jenny Holzer, Survival Series (1983-5): In a Dream You Saw a Way…, 1998. Marble sculpture, 43.2 x 61 x
43.2 cm.
2

Jenny Holzer, ‘Interview’ in Diane Waldman, Jenny Holzer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 33

3

Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore & London: The
John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2

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bedfellow to our contemporary obsession with memory, which Andreas Huyssen
describes as a ‘mnemonic fever caused by the virus of amnesia that at times threatens to
consume memory itself’.4 Here, a double-bind arises. In our image-driven world, trauma
and memory acquire a virulent quality in the pathological public sphere; sites ofcatastrophe and disaster, alongside emotionally torn, wounded and suffering bodies,readily become mass mediated spectacles which expose, as Mark Seltzer suggests, ‘atraumatic yielding to representation’, that affirms the spectacular power of ‘woundculture’ and its desensitising effects.5 And yet, finding ways to express, memorialise, andnegotiate the attendant anxieties that follow painful experiences and historical upheavals,
remains part and parcel of surviving as a society. How can art engage trauma andrepresent the unrepresentable? How can it be conceived to negotiate current social andpolitical concerns in light of previous conflicts, and contribute towards the politics ofremembering, re-writing and surviving our anxious present?

The burden of bearing witness to legacies of trauma associated with WWII and histories
of violence inscribed onto women’s bodies underpins Yoshiko Shimada’s and Soni Kum’s
art, which offer meaningful responses to questions concerning art’s potential to mediate
memory. Their practices, I hope to show, steer away from the reification andobjectification of (T)rauma, to place renewed emphasis on the act and responsibility ofrevisiting and reviewing the past as trace and as testament. In this scheme, therelationship between trauma and survival is re-conceived, opening up a perspective on
the notion of survival which extends beyond an instinctual call to individual selfpreservation premised upon acts of violence and aggression, to one conditioned by theperformance of memory as potentially transformative.

4

Andreas Huyssen, ‘Trauma and Memory: A new Imaginary of Temporality’, in World Memory: Personal
Trajectories in Global Time, Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003:16-29), 27
5Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October 80 (1997): 3-26

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A Woman Shooting : Re-Vision, Re-Citation, Re-Performance
To perform memory is to continuously review the past in the present. The poet Adrienne
Rich persuades us that ‘Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, ofentering an old text from a new critical direction — is for women more than a chapter incultural history; it is an act of survival’.6 The idea that survival is also an act of ‘seeing’cleaves an opening for us to think about the staging of memory in art when an artist
revisits narratives of trauma from new critical angles, and as Rebecca Schneider observes:

Entering, or re-enacting, an event or a set of acts (acts of art or acts of war) from a
critical direction, a different temporal angle, may be […] an act of survival, of
keeping alive as passing on […] survival […] may be a critical mode of remaining, as
well as a mode of remaining critical: passing on, staying alive, in order to pass on
the past as part not, indeed, as (only) present.7

In this same vein, re-vision in art, as it is in performance, is not so much about playing out
trauma as an object then it is about enacting an alternative mnemonic strategy; amethodology that unmoores the reified historiographical economy of the archive and its
materials. The performance of memory in art ‘plays the ‘sedimented acts’ and spectral
meanings that haunt material in constant collective interaction, in constellation, intransmutation’. 8 For memory does not function in a vacuum, but is actively stored,
retrieved and transmitted in a dynamic state of interactions between individuals andpublics, and encountered in connection to multiple places and times. It is ‘always re-calland re-collection […] it implies a re-turn, re-vision, re-enactment, re-presentation: making

6

Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected
Prose, 1966-1978 (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1979:33-50), 35
7

Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon,
Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 6
8Schneider, 143

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experiences from the past present again in the form of narratives, images, sensations,performances’.9

In Shimada’s body of work, memory is performed through the re-citation of images ofwomen and war drawn from institutional archives and popular media; through roleplaying and re-enactment. The two works I will discuss are informed by a specificmoment in the 1990s when Pandora’s box was opened, so to speak; when war memory
and the private histories of women surfaced in public consciousness in an unprecedented
way. Although women’s movements in Japan and Korea had as early as the 1970s sought
to challenge the silence and taboo surrounding the issue of war and sexuality, former
Korean ‘comfort woman’ Kim Hak Sun’s 1991 human rights lawsuit against the Japanese
government brought the issue of military sexual slavery to international attention, alongwith a host of other issues including the resurgence of Japanese nationalism and history
textbook revisionism. In a broader context, the fierce debates surrounding these matterscoincided with post-Cold War prodemocracy movements occurring on an international
scale, and the re-politicisation of sexual violence by feminist transnational networks.
Shimada’s work poignantly illustrates how some of these issues have been mirrored in
the realm of art.

I want to begin by revisiting one of her earliest etchings, A Woman Shooting (1992). It
derives from a 1930s photograph taken in the Northern part of the Korean peninsula thatoffers a glimpse into the history of Japanese colonialism across parts of Korea, Taiwan
and Manchukuo between the wars. Flanked on both sides by crumbling buildings, awoman stands amongst others as they take shooting lessons from soldiers. As part ofself-defence civilian forces, formed to counter anti-Japanese guerrilla troops, women
were taught to shoot ‘local barbarians’ to protect the land they occupied and for the9

Liedeke Plate & Anneke Smelik, ‘Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture - An Introduction’ in
Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture Liedeke, Plate & Anneke Smelik, eds.(New York & Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013), 6

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survival of their families. A trademark of the National Defence Women’s Association —the prominent voluntary organisation whose function was to mobilise women's patriotic
support for the military and community 10 at the home front — the white apron or

kappōgi served, as art historian Hiroko Hagiwara observes, as a symbol ‘to cover up a gap
between femininity and armed action’. 11 Women’s donning of aprons cast into thefraught and anxious public space the safe silhouette of homeliness. This image is arecurrent motif across the artist’s body of work, reappearing in different pictorialconfigurations, but shifting in critical emphasis to interrogate narratives of women’s
wartime collectivism; the ideology of group survival over individual needs; and different
facets of women’s ‘proper’ roles, as encapsulated in tropes such as ‘Good Wives, Wise
Mothers’ (ryōsai kenbo),12 ‘mother of the nation’ and ‘children of the emperor…one inmind, many in body’.13

It is worth noting that Shimada’s treatment of the image moves away from simply
appropriating the photograph as a fetishised object that has survived the wear of time to
10

The National Defense Association or Kokubō fujinkai grew from a modest count of about 100 voluntary
members from the time of its inception in Osaka in 1932, to a formidable 10 million by the end of the
1930s. Their activities included sending off and welcoming soldiers at ports and train stations, laundering
their clothes and serving them food and refreshments, preparing battlefield ‘comfort packages’ filled withletters, photos, wartime sundries and senninbari ‘thousand-stitch belts’ believed to be protective amulets,
assisting bereaved families and mentoring other women in practicing their ‘proper’ wartime roles as ‘Good
Wives, Wise Mothers’. For a brief history of women’s activism and the formation of patriotic women’s
associations during the war, see Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, ‘Women during World War II: Kokubo Fujinkai and
Aikoku Fujinkai’ in Japan at War: An Encyclopedia, Louis G. Perez ed. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013:46972). Young notes that the organisation was ‘the most dramatic expression of the more broad-based publicdefinition of women’ to arise at the time. See Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the
Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 168-74
11

Hagiwara Hiroko, ‘Comfort Women, Women of Conformity: The Work of Yoshiko Shimada’ in
Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts - Feminist Readings, Griselda Pollock, ed.(London & New
York: Routledge, 1996:253-265), 256
12

The ideology of ryōsai kenbo is an amalgam of European and Confucian ideas, and has transformed overtime from an initial emphasis on the relationships between husband and wife, and mother and child, to aversion that linked these relationships to nationalist goals. See Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan:
Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28
13David C. Earhart, ‘Warrior Wives’, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media (NewYork: M.E Sharpe, 2008:147-83), 179

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qualify as an authentic and unmediated link to the past. Recalling Siegfried Kracauer's
suggestion that, ‘in order to make history appear, the simple surface coherence ofphotography must be destroyed’, 14 Shimada subjects the photographic image to arelentless process of duplication and re-citation. Re-materialising as a discontinuous andhighly textured surface that is recuperated through its very disappearance, thephotograph — divested of its nostalgic power, is re-performed as a trace and analogy forthe screening effect of memory. Having sifted through such images in what entails a
deeply individual process of interpretation, before re-incorporating them within thediscursive space of art, it is not a nostalgic tableau vivant that Shimada presents us, but are-assemblage of unassimilable fragments of the past which return to be repeated, recoded and critically re-evaluated. The artist’s re-vision of these images interrogates thenature of memory as a selective operation, complicated by processes of replication,
deletion and distortion, and equally pliable to the effects of sanitisation andcontamination. There is indeed, as Catherine Osbourne notes of Shimada’s penchant forreconstructing narratives that have barely survived by the official accounts of history
textbooks, ‘something of a performance in this way of working’.15

If, to put on the white apron was for women to perform the role of ‘Good Wife, Wise
Mother’, Shimada's donning of the kappōgi during her 1994 performance Comfort

Women, Women of Conformity, interrogates the extent to which the valorisation of
motherhood had left women open to exploitation. She appears on stage masked andholding a bundle symbolising an ‘emperor’s child’; a mirror stands in for its face.

Partial portraits of former ‘comfort women’ are projected on a screen behind her
through the use of a slide carousel, as Shimada recites each survivors’ biography andtestimony. Their accounts of rape, torture and forced abortions, are interspersed with
14

Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, Critical Inquiry 19 :2 (1993): 425

15

Catherine Osbourne, ‘Divide and Rule’ in Divide and Rule: Yoshiko Shimada, Meg Taylor, ed. exh. cat.
(Toronto: A Space Gallery, 1997: 5-14), 9

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pro-war sentiments and pledges of allegiance to the Emperor made by prominent
suffragettes such as Ichikawa Fusae, who had consistently promoted pacifism, but lateraligned herself with the imperial wartime state, claiming that adopting a patriotic stancewould buttress the campaign for women’s political rights. These are juxtaposed with thestatements of mothers who had after the war, clung fervently to the belief that their sons
were heroic ‘gods’ and therefore indemnified from all wartime responsibility.

Taking into wider consideration that women in all combatant countries had been
mobilised in various ways, the question here, as Vera Mackie observes, is ‘not whether
such mobilisation is inherently fascistic or totalitarian, as is often suggested, but rather
how such activities fit into the whole pattern of relationships between individuals andstate institutions in a particular country’. 16 In the aftermath of war, the ambivalentrelationship between women and the wartime state was filed away, the contours ofmemory blurred by the imperative of everyday survival. Ueno Chizuko observes that inreconstructed memories of war, few women demonstrated any awareness of themselves
as perpetrators and invaders; there was ‘a tendency to disregard the rape [and]sufferings of other women on the grounds that ‘we all suffered’, or that ‘these things
were only expected given the times’; such was a rose-tinted view of the past articulated
by women who were colonists in Korea, ‘a privileged class, filled with nostalgia [as theyhad] no interest [in] questioning the injustices that brought about this privilege’.17 On theother hand, in a bid to garner widespread support for former ‘comfort women’, activists
later fell into the trap of creating the ‘model victim’. Though well-intentioned, narrativesof the young, hapless, non-Japanese virgin who was captured, suffered hell and survived— reinforced a sexual double-standard that drew the line between ‘good women’ (virgins

16

Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 103-4

17

Ueno Chizuko, ‘The War Responsibility of Ordinary Women’, Nationalism and Gender, Beverley
Yamamoto, trans. (Melbourne, Vic: Trans Pacific Press, 2004:38-42), 39

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and mothers) and ‘bad women’ (prostitutes), making it difficult for anyone who did not fit
into this narrative to come forward.

Bringing to bear these competing narratives and complexities informing the histories offeminism in Japan, Shimada’s performance plays on two conceptions of the body: kokutai— the ideological body of the imperial nation state, and nikutai (flesh) thephysical/carnal/sensual body famously invoked by the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata; or as it
relates, for instance, to the transgressive, sexualised body we see in the Japanese ‘pinkfilm’ genre of the 1960s and 70s. She explains:

I was representing the woman’s body as part of kokutai (the ideological body of thenation state) — woman’s nikutai (the physical/carnal/sensual body) was part of theimperial kokutai […] I was treating my body not as my own personalised body, but
as nikutai — flesh of woman, which is also applicable to comfort women andsexuality.18

The ‘good woman’ and her chaste, maternal body, subsumed within the national body,here faces the unsettling image of her overtly racialised, sexualised and traumatised
Other — the prostitute’s body as historically and ideologically framed as a locus ofcontaminable abjection. 19 The strategy appropriately collapses the neat antinomy
between ‘victims’ and ‘aggressors’, and ‘survivors’ and ‘sufferers’, as the artist subjects
her own historically constructed role as a Japanese/Asian/woman to critique. Whereas
she materialises the figure of the ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ on stage, the absent body of
her Other manifests as a ghost on film. Their testimonies overlap polyphonously as the18

Author’s Interview with Yoshiko Shimada, 24 June 2013, London.

19

Claudette Lauzon discusses the spectacularisation of the prostitute’s abject and contagious body in ‘In
the Presence of the Absent: Rebecca Belmore’s Art of Witness’ in The Politics of Cultural Memory, Lucy
Burke, Simon Faulkner and Jim Aulich, eds. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010:76-91), 81

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artist gives voice to each woman’s contrasting position, turning her audience into
members of a jury.

Here, the stage — a space for the re-performance of memory, strikes a contrast to thefilmic screen as a retrospective lens into war memory and its nostalgic re-construction
during the postwar years. I am reminded of the 1950s hahamono or melodramatic‘mother film’ genre which depicted the unrecognised sufferings of its screen heroines
and, as Aaron Gerow observes, ‘was central in the postwar construction on a popularlevel of the myth of victimisation that reconfigured a war of aggression as one in which it
was (only) the Japanese who suffered’.20 The archetypal ‘good mother’ characterised inthese films embodied the ‘victim and bystander’, functioning also as an emotional screen
and anchor for a viewer’s sympathetic over-identification.

Suffering, sorrow and nostalgia, as firmly coded in the female body, were played out by
these characters who served in supporting roles as emotional conduits for the impassive‘men of action’ whose abstracted bodies, by contrast, dominated the screen as the film’strue central protagonists.21 Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Ritchie have in their prescientcritique of Japanese film noted that during the war, the hahamono genre contributed toefforts to mobilise the home front, and in its aftermath, to ‘show how mother still loved
and waited for her imprisoned boy, no matter how many people he had tortured, [thesefilms] sought to prove that imprisoning mothers’ sons was very immoral since theircaptivity caused mothers so much anguish’.22

20

Aaron Gerow, ‘Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan: The New Neonationalist Revisionism in Japan’ inCensoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States, Laura Hein, Mark
Selden, eds. (New York: M.E Sharpe, 2000:74 - 95), 76
21

Jennifer Coates, ‘Victims and bystanders: Women in the Japanese war-retro film’, Media, War & Conflict
6:3 (London: Sage, 2013:233-248), 234-42

22

Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, 1959 (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 221

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Conversely, in deploying the 35 mm slide projector — a hybrid medium situated between
still photography and moving image, in juxtaposition with the ‘live’ and embodied time ofher re-enactment of the white apron-clad ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’, the artist affectively
gestures towards the constructedness of the one-dimensional screen image of thesacrificial haha (Japanese mother) so effectively portrayed in pre and postwar Japanesecinema.

Shimada thrusts the ‘baby’ towards the viewers, its mirror ‘face’ reflecting the glare of
the slide projector so acutely that it momentarily blinds the audience. She proceeds tostab, kill and squeeze blood out of it23 — a doubly ironic and darkly humorous take on
Lady Macbeth’s taunting jibe to dash the brains out of her suckling babe. A riposte to thedeified figure of the ‘good mother’, Shimada’s melodramatic shot at maternal filicide
culls the image of the benevolent ‘Good Wife’ as a victim and bystander, to confront uswith — to cite the artist, ‘our tendency towards masochism’.24 And if, as film theorist
David MacDougall suggests, photographs and ‘films […] testify to bodies that were
present before the camera’ such that ‘the image is affected as much by the body behindthe camera as those before it’,25 Shimada’s re-citation of the images and statements offormer ‘comfort women’ otherwise implicates the spectator in an affective encounter
with the disappeared bodies whose unspeakable and unrepresentable memories westruggle to account for. Rejecting a filmic narrative which flows towards a sense ofresolution, her work presents us instead with a disjointed assemblage of history in freezeframe, its traumatic imprint held in narrative arrest and but poorly approximated throughwords and images which offer no closure. As the performance draws to an end, a final
23

Hagiwara Hiroko, ‘Comfort Women, Women of Conformity: The Work of Yoshiko Shimada’ in
Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts - Feminist Readings, Griselda Pollock, ed. (London & New
York: Routledge, 1996: 253-265), 264
24

Yoshiko Shimada, ‘Japanese Women and the War, 1930-40’ in Gender - Beyond Memory, 5 Sep - 27 Oct
1996, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Michiko Kasahara, ed. , exh. cat. (Tokyo: Tokyo
Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, 1996:104-5), 104

25David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton & Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 13, 27

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image of Emperor Hirohito appears on screen, akin to the central protagonist so
commonly portrayed in the war film genre, except that it is not the body of a male herothat the audience witnesses here, but the spectre of imperialism juxtaposed with theperforming female body.

Monstrous Inheritance
Whereas Shimada comes from a second generation of Japanese women whose mothers
had experienced the war, Soni Kum speaks from a position as a third generation ‘Zainichi’
Korean, born and raised in a North Korean community in Tokyo. Her practice draws on
embodied repertoires, including dance and oral histories, as a well as on materials in thearchive — precedent works of art and literary texts. These coalesce in her work as a ‘revision’, ‘re-citation’ and ‘re-telling’ of historical entanglements associated with herfamily’s WWII migratory experiences. About 600,000 Koreans from multiple generations
and with diverse legal and residential status live in Japan today.26 Many trace their roots
back to the colonial era (1910-1945), when Koreans, many of whom were deprived ofland and other means of production, moved to Japan to fill labour shortages ensuingfrom Japan’s wartime conditions.27 Kum’s grand uncle was amongst those mobilised forwartime labour, while her paternal grandfather was drafted to the frontline as a Japanesesoldier.

While the majority of Koreans who moved to Japan during this period were repatriatedafter the war, those who chose to remain found themselves in an ambiguous position.28
The Alien Registration Order of 1947 changed the registration status of ‘Zainichi’ Koreans
26

Sonia Ryang, ‘Introduction: Between Nations - Diaspora and Koreans in Japan’ in Diaspora without
Homeland: Being Korean in Japan, Sonia Ryang and John Lie, eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2009), 3
27

Between 1940 to 1944, Korean civilians were subject to forced labour as part of wartime mobilisation
drives. Many were assigned to hard labour. Korean males were conscripted to the Imperial army by law,while hundreds of girls and women from the peninsula were taken as military sex slaves. Ryang and Lie, 78

28

Sonia Ryang, Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (New York & Abingdon, Oxon: Routlege,
2000)

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from Japanese to Chōsen-seki (Korean domicile). Following the North and South Koreanpartition in 1948 Zainichi Koreans were allowed to change their registration from Chōsen-seki to Kankoku-seki (South Korean citizen); those who did not apply for Kankoku-sekiremained under the former title, which was assigned to ethnic Koreans who neither held
Japanese nor South Korean citizenship.29 For most of her life, Kum remained stateless;her family had not applied for South Korean citizenship following the North and South
Korean partition in 1948.

Historian Sonia Ryang explains:

In the world of Koreans in Japan, there are no clear-cut north-south boundaries orJapan-Korea borders which can provide them with a permanent location. Theiridentities are perpetually ambiguous, torn between the nation-states of Japan and
Korea, between the two halves of the Korean peninsula, and between the ideals of
the older Korea-born generation and the reality of younger generations born inJapan and experience contemporary Japanese life with no experience in Korea.30

Produced in 2005 before she gained South Korean citizenship, Kum’s Beast of Me reflects
this precarity. The work opens with footage of middle-school girls in hanbok, performinga propaganda piece in a North Korean school in Japan, similar to the dances the artist had
been trained to perform. Like a skin she could not shed, working through theserepertoires became a necessary, if self-excoriating means of dealing with what she, and29

The Alien Registration Order of 1947 changed the registration status of ‘Zainichi’ Koreans from Japaneseto Chōsen-seki (Korean domicile). Following the North and South Korean partition in 1948 Zainichi Koreans
were allowed to change their registration from Chōsen-seki to Kankoku-seki (South Korean citizen); those
who did not apply for Kankoku-seki remained under the former title, which was assigned to ethnic Koreans
who neither held Japanese nor South Korean citizenship. See In-Jin Yoon, ‘Understanding the Korean
Diaspora from Comparative Perspectives’, Asia Culture Forum (2006):1, and Hyoduk Lee, ‘The Politics ofPostcoloniality and the Literature of ‘Being-in-Japan’ (Zainichi)’ in The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking
Boundary, Culture and Society, Naoki Sakai & Hyun Joo Yoo, eds. (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing,2012), 161
30
Sonia Ryang, Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (New York & Abingdon, Oxon: Routlege,2000), 10204many others like her, had experienced as targets of violence and frustration wheneverconflicts between North Korea and Japan or the U.S sparked anti-North Koreansentiments. As the narrative shifts to the artist’s memory of her daily commute to school,
she recounts that wearing the Korean national dress was a mandatory performance ofanti-colonial nationalism and ethnic pride; it also drew unwanted attention. Whilerelating her intensely personal experience of sexual assault, she refers also to the spateof attacks in the 1990s on mostly female students attending pro-Pyongyang schools inJapan, who became victims of skirt slashings, beatings and theft. At the time, anti-nuclear
and anti-North Korean sentiments had escalated in conjunction with the North Korean
government’s threats to launch into nuclear testing, while sensational reports of North
Korean espionage and the kidnapping of Japanese fuelled further public suspicion of anation historically shrouded in secrecy.31 She explains:

The memory of these things that happened…I could not process it. I just wanted todance the dance I learnt as a child and sing the songs I learnt then. It was adisplaced memory — because [they] were about worshipping ‘our leader’ and ourcountry, the socialist government. And I knew I was not supposed to dance suchdances or sing such songs in the U.S and in Japan, but I was trained heavily, and I
couldn’t really forget this. It has been so deeply ingrained in my body, it isn’t easily
forgotten — it was part of me.32

The work makes evident how memory comes to be stored and transmitted in andthrough disciplined bodies; Kum describes it as ‘a kind of cultural DNA’. Certainly, as
Diana Taylor suggests, ‘embodied performances have often contributed to the31

See for instance newspaper reports including Teresa Watanabe, ‘Koreans in Japan Targets of hostility’, LA
Times, June 17, 1994, accessed 27 Jun 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-17/news/mn5259_1_korean-schools, and Justin McCurry, ‘Japan’s Korean schools being squeezed by rising tensions
with Pyongyang’, The Guardian, 15 Sep 2014, accessed 27 Jun 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/15/japan-korean-schools-tensions-pyongyang

32

Soni Kum as cited in Soni Kum, A Video Interview, 2008205

maintenance of a repressive social order […] We need not polarise the relationshipbetween these different kinds of knowledge to acknowledge that they have provenantagonistic in the struggle for cultural survival or supremacy’. 33 The artist’s reperformance of this memory signals the uneasy relationship between her previous
enactments of the performance and its trace which refuses to vanish, but finds
sublimation through the recorded image. Looping endlessly in the white space of thegallery, Kum’s video registers on the one hand, the inherent failure of communicating
personal trauma, while at the same time drawing a viewer into the work’s compulsive
terrain, enacting what Jill Bennett describes as ‘empathic vision’ — an ‘affective
encounter’ engendered by ‘[exploiting] forms of embodied perception in order topromote forms of critical inquiry’. 34 It reads as an attempt to weave what may besalvaged of a traumatic encounter, into a new narrative; to de-code and re-incorporate aprior repertoire within a different temporality and context.

Personal geographies fold into a larger map of the social; as Kum’s camera pans across a
nuclear power plant in the U.S, where she was residing at the time, the artist reflects on
the implications of North Korea’s nuclear program on its population, and re-narrates anuclear radiation survivor’s testimony drawn from Dennis O’ Rourke’s 1986 documentary
which investigates the U.S nuclear tests carried at Bikini Atoll between 1946-1958, which
subjected unsuspecting islanders to contamination.35 As the work closes with an idyllicscene of two sisters — one in Japanese school uniform and the other in Korean colours,
this utopian portrait is blighted by the artist recitation of Korean poet Yu Chi-Han’s verse
as invoked in the work’s unhomely title: ‘Like Cain, long pursued, even though it makes a
33

Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire - Performing Culture in the Americas (Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2003), 22
34

Jill Bennett, Emphatic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), 1-21

35

Dennis O’Rourke’s Half Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age was produced in 1985 and features interviews
with residents of the surrounding areas who were affected by the nuclear fallout, and includes declassified
American military footage.

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beast of me, I will endure this suffering’.36 Here, the biblical narrative is recast as anallegory of monstrous inheritance; of the fight and flight of fugitive bodies, inescapablymarked by histories of violence and conflict. Yet it is through Cain — an irredeemablefigure of failure, that the work signals palpably towards a need to re-view themechanisms behind contemporary systems of violence, aggression and discrimination.

In the wake of the 3/11 disasters, Kum’s first response was to embark on a pilgrimage toHiroshima, where she conducted a performance ritual and dance with local residents.
Her simple gesture of folding paper cranes joined the accumulation of similar acts ofmemorialisation held across Japan and the world, where the tradition of 1000 paper
cranes was invoked as a symbol of peace and as part of fundraising efforts. Burning thecranes and scattering their ashes into the same river in which thousands had leapt totheir deaths when the bomb dropped, her gesture was also a counterpart to the antinuclear protests taking place in the streets of Japan, which women, and in particular,mothers, played a crucial role in initiating. Apart from being an act of mourning, protest
and petition for peace, the work opens up to broader questions concerning performing
the private in public, where the body that empathically embodies trauma, is also avulnerable body and site of profound anxiety. No longer under the yoke of performing
national identity, however, here, her re-choreographed dance repertoire marks thetransformation of its prior function.

Survival
To return to the analogy which prompted my thoughts for this paper, Jenny Holzer’s The

Survival Series invokes the language of aggression and appropriation as a means of daring
us to imagine, and to struggle for an alternative conception of survival. It challenges us toconstruct a vocabulary more audacious than the melancholic language of violence andvictimhood. Reflecting on the notion of survival a little closer to home, curator Michiko36

See the artist’s website, http://www.sonikum.com/?page_id=481

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Kasahara proposes that, ‘Feminism is not a dogma […] being a feminist means finding a
positive way to survive’.37 Echoing this view, Shimada intones that:

In Japan [today], we do not have a clear enemy […] Our lives and world politics
have become much more complicated. Art can show people where they are in
relation to this world and make them see it from a completely new viewpoint.
Feminism gives hope to this impossible situation.38

Feminism as a politics of hope raises its own set of questions; I find compelling Claire
Colebrook’s proposition that while hope is structural to feminism, it may be productive toestablish a dialectical (but not substantive) distinction between hope and utopianism,39 if
Utopia sequesters a desire for radical difference needed to construct a genuinely feminist
future — but that is a subject for another paper. For now, I see in Shimada’s and Kum’s
efforts to ‘re-vision’ archives and difference repertoires; to rupture the existing
frameworks of meaning to which we have been habituated, and to re-perform memory inthe spaces of its ellipses, an attempt to grasp after a strategy of moving through trauma
and hopelessness in search of this hope. And if, as Claudette Lauzon puts it, ‘to bear
witness […] is to acknowledge both the inarticulability of the traumatic experience andthe imperative to articulate, if stutteringly, on its behalf’,40 the artists hardly flounder atmaking out of trauma the proposition of survival.

37

Kasahara Michiko as cited in Monty Dipietro, ‘Feminist life actually: singing in the pain of Japan’, The
Japan Times, 9 Feb 2005, accessed 23 Mar 2015,
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2005/02/09/arts/feminist-life-actually-singing-in-the-pain-of-japan/
38

Yoshiko Shimada - Feminist Art Action Brigade, ‘Art, Feminism, and Activism’ in Another Japan is Possible:
New Social Movements and Global Citizenship, Jennifer Chan, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2008:242-248), 243
39

See Claire Colebrook, ‘Toxic Feminism: Hope and Hopelessness after Feminism’ in Hope and Feminism,
Rebecca Coleman and Debra Ferreday, eds. (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2011:11-24)
40

Claudette Lauzon, ‘In the Presence of the Absent: Rebecca Belmore’s Art of Witness’, in Lucy Burke,
Simon Faulkner and Jim Aulich, eds. The Politics of Cultural Memory (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2010:76-91), 76

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Eliza Tan is a London-based art historian and curator, who has trained and worked at
institutions including the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University (London), Courtauld
Institute of Art (London),Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, Asian Art

Initiative) and National Arts Council (Singapore).

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Hijikata Tatsumi—Artaud ’s True Heir? Corporeality and Spirituality in Hijikata and Artaud

Tsu-Chung Su

Introduction : Hijikata Tatsumi—Artaud ’s True Heir?
Some people say that Jerzy Grotowski’s vision comes closest to that of Antonin Artaud.
For example, Peter Brook once stated that ‘Grotowski’s theatre is as close as anyone has
got to Artaud’s ideal’ (67). Others claim that Hijikata Tatsumi is Artaud’s true heir. In her
article ‘Butō —Revolt of the Flesh in Japan and a Surrealist Way to Move,’ Joannes
Bergmark argues that ‘Antonin Artaud’s texts about theatre, Balinese theatre and Indianpeyote-dances in many ways forebode the view that butō has. His homage to theBalinese theatre (1931) could in many aspects very well have concerned a butō
performance.’

Is Hijikata Tatsumi the rightful heir of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty? According to Sondra
Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura, ‘Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double wastranslated into Japanese in 1965 and had a profound influence on a new generation ofJapanese directors and performers including Hijikata’ (84). The links between thedevelopment of the language of butō in the 1960s and the theories of Artaud were
substantial. For Laura Cull, Artaud’s project fueled ‘what would become Hijikata’s lifelong
interest in and influence by Artaud’ (2012: 16).

In this paper I attempt not only to trace the links between Artaud and Hijikata but also tocompare and contrast Artaud’s vision and Hijikata’s butō praxis in terms of corporeality
and spirituality. The aim of the paper is to seek out the conceptual thoughts shared byboth of them and examine the words connecting their enterprises. While there are anumber of analogies and resemblances between Artaud’s work and that of Hijikata, they
are not reducible to each other. I argue that both Artaud and Hijikata present a
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fundamental contestation of theatre theory and practice that is accepted as foundational
to their societies. Their radical visions and praxes are at once a contest and a protest
because they are not satisfied with the status quo but intend to generate alternative waysof performing arts. This study is divided into two parts. The first part examines the aspectof corporeality in Hijikata and Artaud. The second part discusses the dimension of
spirituality in both of them and explores their projects in the light of the vision of the holytheatre proposed by Peter Brook.

1. Corporeality in Hijikata and Artaud
Both Hijikata and Artaud advocate that the performer should ritually take him/herself
apart and re-constitute his/her body anew. Like Artaud who constantly reformulates his
body, Hijikata also thinks that the body must be remade or reborn from time to time. He
says butō dancer should be ‘perpetually reborn’ (1988: 188). As Catherine Curtin points
out in her article, ‘Recovering the Body and Expanding the Boundaries of Self in Japanesebutō: Hijikata Tatsumi, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud,’ ‘butō’s emphasis on
metamorphosis has a source in Artaud’s endeavor for transformation, as Hijikata sought
to create a new body culture in performance. He too awakens the breaths of the bodyand responded to Artaud’s principal challenge, to the necessity of gesture, consciousness,in an immediate event that would be experienced directly by the audience’ (65-66).

Hijikata resorted to a radical corporealism, a body naked and in extremis. In his
exploration of darkness, death and metamorphosis, he ‘succeeded in constructing athinking body, a bursting body of thought very much like the one Artaud had given a voice
to,’ namely ‘the body without organs’ (Hornblow 2006: 26). Exploring the transformationof the body into different states and forms, Hijikata created many layers of bodily images
in his performances. In facing the chaotic vaccum of post-war, American-occupied Japan,
Hijikata adopted new routes from the West and called back his memories rooted in hischildhood and homeland Tohoku. It goes without saying that Japan was experiencing astate of ideological and identity crisis after the Second World War and Hijikata’s project211

was set against the perplexed background of Japan being a World War II initiator and acruel aggressor on the one hand as well as a war loser and an atomic bomb victim on theother. As Carol Martin points out, ‘The “rape of Nanjing” and “comfort women” stood incontrast to the fire bombings of Tokyo and the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki’ (47). During this time there was much student unrest and protest. Reacting
against American occupation (1945-1952) and traditional Japanese conservative culture,
Hijikata’s butō was born in a chaotic vaccum in the sense of identity, out of which a total
revolt against everything came. He longed for re-defining culture and identity. In what
follows, I propose to trace Artaud’s influences on the formation of Hijikata’s avant-garde
corporeal style and method by exploring the routes and roots of Hijikata’s butō.

The R outes of Hijikata’s Butō

Having witnessed the predicament of the Japanese dance scene after World War II,
Hijikata waged war on different fronts. On the one hand, his butō reacted against theWesternization of the contemporary dance in Japan and rebelled against the imitation of
the traditional art form such as Noh; on the other hand, it attempted to seek out theroots of the Japanese body and look for his personal identity as a native son of Japan
from his remote hometown region Tohoku. Hijikata has often been regarded as ‘thearchitect of butō’ (Allain and Harvie 47). He explored many dance idioms before
developing his own, including ballet, modern dance, salon dance, and flamenco.

Hijikata’s dance pieces, such as Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) (1959), Hijikata Tatsumi to

Nihonjin: Nikutai no hanran (Hijikata Tatsumi and the Japanese: Revolt of theBody) (1968), helped shape Ankoku Butō (Dance of Darkness) as an avant-garde dance
theatre genre. The routes that Hijikata took to formulate his Ankoku Butō are quite
diverse. In order to free from western and conventional ideals of beauty, Hijikata drew
inspiration from the art and poetry of Dadaism, Surrealism and existentialist Theatre of
Absurd as well as the expressive Neue Tanz from Germany. He was initiated into theworld of modern dance in Akita and studied with Matsumoto Katsuko, the disciple of212

Eguchi Takaya who had studied with Mary Wigman, one of the key figures in thedevelopment of German expressionist dance Die Neue Tanz.1 According to Kostelanetz,

Die Neue Tanz is ‘largely abstract, frequently dark and angst-ridden, focused on
fundamental forms and essential emotions’ (1993: 235). This nature of the New Dance
anticipates and corresponds well to Hijikata’s Dance of Darkness.

On the other hand, Hijikata’s unique vision was shaped and influenced by Japanese
thinkers, writers, and artists of his time, including Mishima Yukio, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko[scholar, writer of erotic literature and translator of the works of the Marquis de Sade,
Georges Bataille and Jean Genet], and Takiguchi Shuzo [an art critic and Surrealist poet],with whom he shared a marginal and oppositional relationship to the norms of society.
He met regularly with them in his training venue Asbestos-kan, engaging in lively
interdisciplinary exchanges, while sharing with them an interest in native and foreigncultures. They avidly read and discussed the sometimes obscene and erotic, and at othertimes theatrical and philosophical writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, the Marquis
de Sade, Comte de Lautremont, Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud, among others. Hijikata’s
work was situated at the confluence of these radical dialogues and was an interculturaland intracultural activity, in which he brought aspects from disparate traditions anddistant realities into a dynamic relationship. Probing the innovative potential within theseeclectic sources, he discovered new impulses and a sense of alterity for his own artistic
output.

Among these Japanese thinkers and artists, Shibussawa, the biographer and translator ofde Sade, is the principal source of Hijikata’s preoccupation with Artaud. Even though thetranslated version of The Theatre and Its Double was not published in Japanese until
January 1965, ‘Shibussawa had already read the entirety of Artaud’s published work in
French…and introduced it to Hijikata’ (Barber 2010: 30-31). With the help of Shibussawa,
Artaud has become the one who exerted long and lasting influences on Hijikata and
1

The German expressionist dance of Mary Wigman consisted of, writes Kostelanetz, ‘dancing barefoot,exploring primitive rhythms and motifs, and experimenting with costumes, props and masks’ (1993: 235).

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provided stimulations and inspirations for Hijikata in originating and shaping the body ofbutō. According to Stephen Barber, Hijikata had already taken inspiration from the notionof a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’—‘by word of mouth rather than from a comprehensive readingof Artaud’s work’ (2010: 31). After The Theatre and Its Double appeared in Japanesetranslation, Hijikata ‘read Artaud’s work assiduously’ (Barber 2004: 108). As for
Kostelanetz, Hijikata was especially struck by the writings of Antonin Artaud who‘imagined a western theatre that would neglect realism and narrative for kinetic images,
ritual and even magic. Such theatre could surround the audience, even enticing it toparticipate’ (1993: 11).

Artaud’s call for the return of theater to its primal roots in shamanism, ritual, myth,
mysticism, and the body resonated with Hijikata, and his 1968 performance Revolt of the

Body revealed the influence of Artaud. Hijikata danced, wearing an erect golden phallus
beneath a white kimono. What followed was an explosion of violence and violation,
dancing spastically, breaking the neck of a chicken, flinging his body violently against large
metal plates, and ending with his body suspended by ropes and pulled into a position of
crucifixion, as if about to be torn apart. It was Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty made flesh. Butfor Hijikata this piece represented his final break from Western dance. From then on his
dance would more and more search for the Japanese, in his own body, in his memories ofchildhood, and in the bodies of his dancers. As Barber argues, ‘The Japanese dance stylepioneered by the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, “Butō,” approached Artaud’s work with
its painfully contorted imagery of the dancing anatomy, steeped in desire. Its violent andsexual manipulations of chance and metamorphosis have a primary source in Artaud’s
vocal movements and screams’ (2003: 10). ‘Unlike his passion for Genet,’ Barberelaborates, ‘Hijikata’s attachment to Artaud proved to be life-long. As the 1960s went on,
Shibusawa shifted a focus of his literary research to the re-creation which Artaud had
written of the life of the Roman boy-emperor, Heliogabalus. All of Artaud’s work forms aferocious polemic about the body, and against social institutions; in his 1933 work on
Heliogabalus’s own body, as a compacted amalgam of excrement, semen, blood and gold,214

at the moment of his savage murder by his own guards, in the imperial latrines. Hijikata’s
dialogues with Shibusawa on the subject of Heliogabalus inspired, in part, his final solo
performance in 1968, Revolt of the Body” (2010: 31).2

Yoko Ashikawa, a serious and devoted disciple of Hijikata, met Hijikata in 1966 when she
was nineteen years old. Her description of Hijikata’s Revolt of the Body is very informativeand invaluable for us to catch a glimpse of the performance: ‘I remember the
preparations for his performance of Revolt of the [Body] in 1968. For about a year before
the performance there was a strong feeling that Hijikata was withdrawing into a period of
isolation or introspection. A month before, Hijikata prepared his body with a strict diet.
He drank just milk and a little weak miso, but no tea. He went running every day, even on
the hottest days. He also exposed his skin to artificial lights in order to get a deep tan. He
wore no makeup during the performance. The long-term preparation involved physicaltraining, fasting, and being alone and avoiding any association with other people. Only atthe end of his preparation did he concern himself with the staging of the performance.
The idea of raising himself on ropes at the climax came only at the end of his planning’(1987: 16).

The R oots of Hijikata’s Butō

Born as Kunio Yoneyama on 9 March 1928, in Asahikawa, an outlying area of the coastal
city of Akita, Hijikata was the youngest of a large family and grew up being told tales ofdemons and magic. After studying ballet for several years in the 1950s, Hijikata wasdissatisfied with Western ballet and finally understood that his own body was not suited
to this Western form. ‘He was not innately plastic and flowing in ballet, but rather bowlegged and tense. In time, he was to turn his liability into an asset, creating out of the wellof his frustration; turning first to the Japan of his rural roots, Hijikata began to work withthe givens of his own body’ (F&N 7). He wanted to find a form of expression that waspurely Japanese, and one that allowed the body to speak for itself, through unconscious
2

Fraleigh and Nakamura also hold the same view. They maintain that in Revolt of the Body Hijikata was‘under the influence of Artaud’ (86), especially Artaud’s From Heliogabalus, or The Anarchic Crowned.

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improvised movement.

Butō as a form of alternative dance, for Hijikata, has a lot to do with his hometown, thefreezing north country of Tohoku. As Hijikata expresses, ‘So when the weather gets reallycold, that’s butō. For example, when it’s cold, you rub your hands together. You can takeany part of the action out and it becomes dance’ (2000c: 50). Hijikata often talks about
the influences of his childhood experiences on his dance. ‘I had no master, after all, toteach me my first steps in dance. My influences came from those childhood experiences,
the trees and icicles I saw then, and from my father’ (2000c: 54). Through his life
experiences in Tohoku, Hijikata is able to chew on ‘cries and the profundity of esotericgestures by gazing closely and unceasingly at the mundane’ (2000b: 48).

From the very beginning, Ankoku Butō ‘resonated with Hijikata’s ambivalent nostalgia [forhis own root in the north east] where striking images speak louder than words. He missed
the profound darkness of the night skies of wintertime Tohoku, which accentuated thebrilliance of the stars; in Tokyo, the glow transmitted upwards by the colossal city ofburning neon hoardings and street-light illumination cancelled out the blackness which
he had been habituated to, and the stars were invisible’ (Barber 2010: 17). Hijikata traced
and resorted to his own roots unspoiled by westernization and lingering like ghosts in his
hometown. He was not only a migratory stranger roaming in the rural and mystical northeast but also a shaman mediating between the inner force and the outer reality, between
human beings and spiritual forces, between the sacred and the profane, and between
this world and other world. In her article, ‘Ghosts of Premodernity: Butō and the AvantGarde,’ Shannon C. Moore traces Hijikata’s roots and relates them to his avant-garde
performance. What Hijikata sought to invoke, suggests Moore, was the ‘ghost of
premodernity’—‘this resurfacing abjected past—in flesh form’ (45). Hijikata sought
alternative visions for his avant-garde butō. He re-examined traces of Japanese
premodernity buried under the westernization of the Meiji period. He wanted to returnto the mystical roots of Japanese culture but ‘did not look to the formal, fully developed
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traditions of noh or kabuki, but rather took inspiration from rural folk dances, populartheatre and agricultural ritual dances known as Kagura, often performed by “sacredoutcasts”’ (Moore 49).

When discussing his conceptualization of the body, Hijikata constantly recourses to hischildhood experiences in Tohoku. Using the example of a baby who plays with his body asa toy and ends up tucking his feet under his body. As Hijikata contends, ‘Western dance
begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas butō begins with a dance
wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet. What has happened to the tucked-in
feet? What has become of our bodies? Straight legs are engendered by a world
dominated by reason. Arched legs are born of a world which cannot be expressed inwords’ (1988: 189). From his roots of suffering and abjection, Hijikata tries to extract not
only bodily movements but also affective potentials. As a child growing up in the Tohoku
he was fascinated by how the mind turned inwards resulting in strange patternings ofphysical instinctual responses when traumatized or un-self-conscious. What he learned
from a child’s body has, to a large degree, influenced his own body.

It was in the 1970s that Hijikata reached a turning point. Four years after his mostmemorable and tour de force performance Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revoltof the Body in 1968, Hijikata in his Hosotan (A Story of Small Pox;《疱瘡譚》) (1972)[one of the 5 dance pieces in Shiki no tame no nijishichiban (Twenty-seven Nights for Four

Seasons) (1972)] ushered in a new performance style which, for many, was a watershed
piece which marked the drastic shift and change in his career. In this piece of work, the
now-known Ankoku Butō alternative style emerged and matured. It resonated with
Hijikata’s ‘sense of violent exploration, grim introspection, aggressive, erotic action and adesperate search for identity and cultural continuity’ (Moore 45). In his Hosotan (A Storyof Small Pox) (1972) and other later works, ‘Hijikata Tatsumi found importance andmeaning in the culture and folklore of rural and marginal traces of premodern Japan. He
delved into a world beyond the rational’ (Moore 51).
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Reconstructing the sensibility of premodern Japan ‘was so much a part of Hijikata
Tatsumi’s butō’ (47), argues Carol Martin. ‘The lingering heat of the idea of a local
premodern Japaneseness is evaporating into a staging of the presence of the mostprofound absence’ (Martin 47). Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura also point out that‘butō differs from earlier dance experiments through its inclusive return to Japanese folkroots, while at the same time exposing a postmodern jumble of cross-cultural currents’(2006: 14). Exploring the transformation of the body into different states and forms,
Hijikata’s performances created multiple layers of bodily images. In contrast to thewesternized, canonical, traditional Japanese bodies, the grotesque, rustic, and ghostly
bodies enacted by Hijikata are his way to reclaim and remake Japanese corporeality.

2. Spirituality and the Artaudian Spirit in Hijikata
Other than the spirit of revolt, perhaps the most ubiquitous Artaudianism which
resonates most powerfully in the work of Hijikata is the nature of spirituality. Both Artaudand Hijikata’s revolt focuses on the body; however, it is the spirituality of the bodily
performance that is what they are after and the nameless nature of life or cruelty that arewhat they are pursuing. The desire to get in touch with the inner recesses of life andspirituality as well as to be united with the spirit of nature, landscape and even universe isan ever-present concern for Artaud and Hijikata. Artaud uses the concept of the double inspeaking of the actor’s art in ‘An Affective Atheleticism’ (1936) and other essays. For him,
the actor must see his body as a double of a ‘specter,’ perpetual, plastic, and neverachieved, ‘like the Ka of the Egyptian mummies’ (134). Every part of the body has a
special mystic power, every motion an organic base. As for Hijikata, dance experience isalways ‘a marvelous spiritual journey. There is, I always feel an unfathomable ocean
before my body’ (2000a: 41). Both Hijikata’s and Artaud’s awakenings to the true natureof self exemplified their development as spiritual beings with heightened awareness andconsciousness. They want to get in touch with life and its forces by means of gesture andmovement. They explore deeper layers and the least-explored dimensions of the body218

mind continuum which Artaud names it cruelty.

As a result, both Artaud and Hijikata aims to produce performances which come closest
to ritual or ‘holy theatre’ as Peter Brook envisions it. They are at once avant-gardist andpre-modern, intending to awaken the inner life and affects in the deepest recess of ourbody and soul. Both of them were not affiliated with any religious belief but their visionsof performing arts were inclined to the holy theatre. Their visions of performance are inline with the spiritual and the ritualistic where ecstasy, trance, and spiritualtransformation are immanent. The performance they envision sought to transcend thepersonal and become a vessel for universal forces. What follows are two projects whichshowcase Hijikata’s efforts in realizing Artaud’s spirit and concerns.

Hijikata wrote a short essay on Artaud, called ‘Artaud’s Slipper’ (‘Aruto no surippa’) in
1972, in which, according to Barber, ‘Hijikata conjures up and reinvents the scene of thedeath of Artaud, who had been found dead, one snow-covered dawn, in his room in an
outbuilding of a convalescence clinic in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, sitting
upright on his bed with his shoe in his hand; in Hijikata’s own variant of Artaud’s death,
Artaud instead has a slipper in his mouth, gripped like a fish between his teeth, and he isengaged in conducting a final monologue with that slipper as he “advances towards theimpossible, over the barrier of death”’ (2010: 31-32). In ‘Artaud’s Slipper,’ Hijikata used
the image of a slipper in Artaud’s mouth to manifest and appeal to the Artaudian spiritthat is at once made of a raw, base, unformed materiality and corporeality as well as open
to disintegration, reinvention, and spirituality, irreducible to death.

Before he died in 1948, Artaud made the tape entitled To Have Done with the Judgmentof God for Radioffusion Francaise, but the director general banned its broadcast. The taperepresents Artaud’s scream in its primary and definitive essence, testifying thatthe scream is Artaud’s dense language—the tearing apart of meaning and representation,and the only way to project his authentic body. In 1984, this recording, in the form of a219

cassette tape, was brought back from Paris by Kumichi Uno, a student of Gilles Deleuze,and presented to Hijikata as a gift. According to Mark Holborn, when he visited Hijikata at
his Asbestos Kan studio in Meguro, Hijikata confirmed that the recording of To Have Donewith the Judgment of God was one of his ‘most precious possessions’ (1987: 14). What’smore, as Edward Scheer tells us, Hijikata even played the recording ‘to quests such as
Susan Sontag even as late as 1986, just months before his death’ (2009: 51). I believe it
was due to a shared sense and sensibility of corporeality and spirituality that Hijikata so
prized Artaud’s recording. As Barber points out, ‘Hijikata returned to Artaud’s work at theend of his own life, in the mid-1980s, and the resurgence of his engagement camethrough the intervention of that broadcast’ (2010: 32). With the choreographer Min
Tanaka, Hijikata worked on a performance called Ren-ai Butō -Ha Teiso (Foundation of theDance of Love) in August 1984, which was performed to the soundtrack of Artaud’s voiceand three other voices reading Artaud’s poem with xylophone and percussion in To Have

Done with the Judgment of God.3

At the end of his life before he fell terminally ill with liver failure in Tokyo in January 1986,
Hijikata was formulating a new work based on his engagement with Artaud and his own
revolutionary conception of the human body in crisis. As Barber informs us, his
engagement with Artaud ‘continued right up until his death in 1986 at the relatively
young age of 57, when he was planning a collaboration [which involved intensively
alcohol-driven ideas] with philosopher Uno Kuniichi to be called Experiment with Artaud’(2004: 33).4 The extent to which Hijikata was influenced by Artaud’s recording is quite
prominent and evident.
3

In his study of Artaud, Weapons of Liberation, Barber states: ‘The Japanese pre-occupation with Artaud’s
last scream of refusal led to the creation of work which was simultaneously more violent and moreexquisite than its equivalents in European, the United States, in the form of the dance performance stylecalled “Butō”’ (Barber 1996: 97).
4

According to Barber, ‘much of his work towards the project had entailed five-day non-stop drinking bouts
in the labyrinthine bar districts of Tokyo as he formulated his ideas with Kumichi Uno. In February 1998,
Min Tanaka undertook a series of three unique performances in Tokyo based on Artaud’s scenario The
Conquest Of Mexico, which undoubtedly marked the most astonishing choreographic experiment with
Artaud’s work to date’ (2004: 110).

220

C onclusion
The butō dance that Hijikata created bears a semblance to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.
Moreover, the similarities in the thinking of Hijikata and Artaud as well as the correlations
between their respective approaches to performance are really quite evident. As Barber
perceptively remarks, ‘Hijikata’s engagement with Artaud is manifest throughout his
Ankoku Butō projects, and in his fragmentary statements and formulations of corporeal
gesture as an act of anatomical refusal or transformation, first entailing a summaryleveling to zero of the body’s current state, before its constitution from a new point oforigin’ (2010: 33). My analysis is not intended as an exhaustive exegesis of Hijikata’s
oeuvre nor of Artaud’s influence. For me, Hijikata is not necessarily Artaud’s true heir andhis Ankoku Butō is not necessarily a part of ‘the Artaudian legacy.’ I think that no one candeny the fact that Artaud is one of those who inspired and gave fire to Hijikata’s Ankoku

Butō. Nevertheless, while there are a number of analogies and resemblances between
Artaud’s visions of theatre and Hijikata’s conceptions of butō, their ideas and impacts are
not reducible to one another because arising from different contextual and historicalframework, Artaudian vision of theatre and Hijikata’s Ankoku Butō carry their own distinct
characters.

References
Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theatre and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New
York: Grove Weidenfeld.
Allain, Paul, and Jen Harvie. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Theatre andPerformance. London: Routledge.
Ashikawa, Yoko. 1987. “Dance: Intimacy Plays Its Trump.” In Butoh: Dance of the darkSoul, edited by M. Holborn and E. Hoffman, 16-21. New York:
Sadev/Aperture. Barber, Stephen. Hijikata: Revolt of the Body. Chicago: Solar
Books, 2010.
221

-----. 2004. The Screaming Body. Antonin Artaud: Film Projects, Drawings & Sound
Recordings. New York: Creation Books.
-----. 2003. Artaud: Blows and Bombs. New York: Creation Books.
Bergmark, Johannes. 2010. “Butoh—Revolt of the Flesh in Japan and a Surrealist Way toMove.” Accessed February 28, 2010.
http://www.surrealistgruppen.org/bergmark/butoh.html.
Brook, Peter. 1990. The Empty Space. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Cull, Laura. 2012. Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Curtin, Catherine.2010. “Recovering the Body and Expanding the Boundaries of Self
in Japanese Butoh: Hijikata Tatsumi, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.”
Contemporary Theatre Review 20.1: 56-67.
Fraleigh, Sondra and Tamah Nakamura. 2006. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo.
New York: Routledge.
Hijikata, Tatsumi. 2000a. “Inner Material/Material.” Translated by Nanako Kurihara.
The Drama Review 44: 36-42.
-----. 2000b. “To Prison.” Translated by Nanako Kurihara. The Drama Review 44: 43-48.
-----. 2000c. “Hijikata Tatsumi, Plucking off the Darkness of the Flesh: an interview with
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko.” Translated by Nanako Kurihara. The Drama
Review 44: 4955.
-----. 1988. “Notes by Tatsumi Hijikata.” In Butoh: Shades of Darkness, edited by
Viala and Nourit Masson-Sekine, 184-89. Tokyo: Shufunotomo, Co. Ltd.
-----. 1987. “Kazedaruma.” Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. Translated by Kazue
Kobata, 124-29. New York: Aperture Foundation.

222

Jean

Hoffman, Ethan and Mark Holborn. 1987. Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul. Translated
by Kazue Kobata. New York: Aperture Foundation.
Holborn. Mark. 1987. “Tatsumi Hijikata and the Origins of Butoh.” Butoh: Dance of
the Dark Soul. Edited by M. Holborn and E. Hoffman, 8-15. New York:
Sadev/Aperture.
.
Hornblow, Michael. 2006. “Bursting Bodies of Thought: Artaud and Hijikata.”
Performance Paradigm 2: 26-44.
Kostelanetz, Richard. 1933. Dictionary of the Avant-gardes. Chicago: Chicago
P.

ReviewMartin, Carol. 2006. “Lingering Heat and Local Global J Stuff.” The Drama Review 50.1:
46-56.
Moore, Shannon C. 2006. “Ghosts of Premodernity: Butoh and the Avant-Garde.”
Performance Paradigm 2: 45-53.
Scheer, Edward. 2009. “I Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud’s To Have Done with the
Judgment of God.” Deleuze and Performance. Edited by Laura Cull, 37-53.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Viala, Jean and Nourit Masson-Sékiné. 1988. Butoh: Shades of Darkness. Tokyo:
Shufunotomo Co. Ltd.

Tsu-Chung Su, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, isProfessor of English at National Taiwan Normal University. His areas of teaching andresearch interest are performance studies and theatre anthropology. His recent
publications include essays on butoh, Antonin Artaud, Peter Brook, Richard Schechner,
and Eugenio Barba.

223

The Singer of Tales as Itinerant Performer: the Michiyuki Trope

Alison Tokita

In ancient Japan, travel was a profoundly significant but dangerous experience whose
danger had to be overcome or averted by magic spells and incantations. This is the originof the michiyuki, the expression of a journey in words. A michiyuki is at the same time averbal map, enumerating the place names along a route. Its origins are in the oral cultureof Japan before the introduction of Chinese writing. It could be seen as a theme in the
Parry-Lord sense of a generic scene type (Lord 1960/2000).

From ancient times, Japanese oral narratives have featured depictions of travel andpilgrimage; they can be read in the accounts of ancient myth and legend textualized in
the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters; compiled in 712 CE; see Philippi 1968), and theanthology of about 4000 ancient songs, the Manyōshū (compiled around 760 CE; see
Plutschow 1990). These verbal maps were developed as an art by professional singers oftales. As the performing arts developed, the michiyuki trope remained as a prominent
device for depicting movement between and to significant places. Destinations include
recognizable geographical locations such as pilgrimage sites and some day-tour jaunts
around the capital (miyako meguri), and also metaphysical journeys such as journeys
through Hell (jigoku meguri). The latter are circular, whereas most pilgrimages are linear,focusing on one route to a holy place. The connection between journey and shamanic
trance is expressed in the genre of jigoku meguri in Japanese tales such as the tale of
Koga no Saburō in the fourteenth century Shintō-shū collection of tales.

The michiyuki poetic journey trope further passed into a literary tradition of travel writing.
However, the concern of this paper is the michiyuki as a prominent feature of oral
performance traditions. The michiyuki appears as lyrical passages in the heike narrative224

(Tyler 2012), and as a structural device in nō plays, kōwaka mai, and jōruri (Tokita 2015).
The late medieval sekkyō-bushi narratives offer a rich array of extended michiyuki
sections, but without the poetic sophistication of the afore-mentioned genres. They are
surprisingly similar to the michiyuki in naniwa-bushi (rōkyoku), a musical narrative thatwas born in modern Meiji era Japan (Hyōdō 2000).

After an overview of the development of this trope, I will examine an example ofmichiyuki from a sekkyō narrative of perhaps four hundred years ago, and then will
discuss the michiyuki in contemporary naniwa-bushi narrative, focusing on a journey
between Tōhoku and Edo (now Tokyo). The route of the journey goes through the 3.11
tsunami and nuclear disaster areas, the route we all took to get to Aomori from Tokyo in
August 2015. I will point out the similarities between the michiyuki of rōkyoku and sekkyō
narratives and will argue for the residual orality of naniwa-bushi.

Michiyuki and lists of related objects (monozukushi)
Oral narrative is characterized by formulaic diction, including lists of related objects(Pigeot 1982, 1991). In a written text, such information is relegated to an index, anappendix, or a footnote. But in oral culture, accumulated knowledge must be continually
repeated in order to pass it on to the next generation. Knowledge about travel orpilgrimage routes too could be preserved and passed on by creating lists of place namesthat functioned as a verbal map. Passing on geographical knowledge in this way enabled
the listener to travel or make a pilgrimage vicariously. To enhance memorability, verbal
formulas encrust the place names, and poetic rhythm is used. Directionality is created byretaining the exact order of place names, and through the use of dynamic verbs of
movement (Tokita 1999).

Heike monogatari, nō, kōwaka, jōruri and sekkyō
The Tale of the Heike contains many travel sequences among its 200 chapters. They serveas lyrical scenic descriptions, but also reflect the mental state of the traveler. In many225noh plays, the entrance of the travelling priest takes the form of a journey from thecapital to the locality of the drama, ending with “arriving words” (tsuki-zerifu). Other
michiyuki in noh are more lyrical and take the form of a song such as the ageuta in Ataka,which depicts beautifully the journey of Yoshitsune’s loyal band from the capital to thedesolate and dangerous region where they will confront the Ataka barrier. In jōruri, there
are whole michiyuki scenes that depict a journey: sometimes a light-hearted interlude ina serious historical drama; sometimes a journey by two ill-fated lovers to their death. In
the entrance music of kabuki dance jōruri, the michiyuki becomes a structural section
where the main character enters along the hanamichi ramp to reach the stage: it is ajourney to the main locus of the action, delineated by the sung jōruri narrative (Tsunoda
1983-85).

Journeys take place in liminal spaces and times; the road itself (michi) was a liminal space.
The characters may be historical or fictional, but the route is that of the real world, giving
a sense of reality to the narrative. The most common journey depicted is along the
Tōkaidō, the main trunk road along the eastern seaboard that from ancient times linked
the central region of the capitals to the wild, danger-filled eastern region of Azuma (later
more civilized and developed as power shifted to Kamakura and Edo). In the Edo period,
the route was shared by daimyo processions, by visiting dignitaries from Korea and Dutch
traders from Dejima (Nagasaki), by merchants and pilgrims. Most significantly for themichiyuki trope, such routes were well-trodden by itinerant entertainers and story-tellers,
who knew all the wayside stops and stations, the beauties, the dangers, the historicalassociations and the poetic clichés associated with significant sites. Their own lives werefraught with danger and hardship, parting and discrimination, experiences that foundtheir way into the verbal art of the michiyuki.

Sekkyō has its origins in Buddhist preaching (Ishii 1989). It developed into a genre of
popular preaching and story-telling combining Buddhist and Shintō beliefs, and flourishedfrom the late medieval to the early Edo periods. It is known to us only by printed texts
226published in the early Edo period, by some visual documentation, and by accounts of its
influence on the formation of jōruri. (A direct connection with a twentieth-century
sekkyō-bushi genre has not been established.) Sekkyō texts reveal a narrative genre
replete with michiyuki passages, often placed at pivotal parts of the narrative. The highly
oral character of the texts lack the poetic refinement that Chikamatsu brought tomichiyuki scenes in jōruri (Schoenbein 1994), and are less poetic too than michiyuki
passages in heike and nō. In enumerating place names along a route, we see hackneyedphrases such as “…o hayasugite”, “…wa are ka to ya”, “…saki o izuku to otoi aru” that are
inserted to fill in metrical requirements. The emotions of characters are not woven into
the scenery as in jōruri.

The best known sekkyō narrative is Sanshōdayū (Sanshō the Bailiff), whose central
themes are travel and separation, loss and restoration (Hirosue 1988; Iwasaki 1994;
Muroki 1973; Torii 1994). The following passage traces the route travelled by the boy
Zushiōmaru, on his way from the Kokubunji temple in Tango province to the capital Kyoto,a journey of at least 100 kilometres, after losing mother and sister to slave traders anddeath, to claim his patrimony. It does not give any indication of the boy’s feelings, but
lists the place names with geographical accuracy. Rather than the experience of theprotagonist, it is a general view focalized by the narrator for the listeners. When aparticularly famous place is mentioned, the epithet kikoetaru (“you must have heard ofthis”) is added. The 7-5 syllable poetic metre is maintained even at the expense of
meaning, with filler phrases and ellipsis. Its verbal dexterity is full of gratuitous puns thatadd nothing to the story, but add to the rhythm of the verse, and the sense of movement
along the route.

Sekkyo: Sanshōdayū michiyuki passage

丹後の国を

⽴ち出でて
Putting Tango province behind him
227

Tango no kuni otachiidete

いばら・ほうみは

これとかや

Ibara Hōmi wa

kore to ka ya

鎌⾕・みぢりを

打ち過ぎて

Kamadani Mijiri ouchisugite

くない・桑⽥は

これとかHere is Ibara and Hōmi

Passing through Kamadani and Mijiri

Here is Kunai and Kuwata

On Kuchikobori are the famedやKunai Kuwata wa

kore to ka ya

くちこぼりにも聞こえた

Flowers creeping on the trees ofKameyama
Not old yet, but the Mountain of Aging

る
Passing Kutsukake Pass
Kuchikobori ni mokikoetaru

花に浮き⽊のHana ni ukigi no

⻲⼭やKameyama ya

年は寄らねどおひの坂Toshi wa yoranedo
沓掛峠をCrossing Katsura River

Oi no saka

Passing Senshōji and Hatchō Nawate

Hurrying, in no time we reach

打ち過ぎて

Kutsukake tōge ouchisugite

桂の川を

打ち渡り

Katsura no kawa ouchiwatari

川勝寺・⼋町畷を打ち過ぎてThe West of the Capital, the famed

West end of Shichijō avenue andArrive at the Suzaku Gongendō Temple

Senshōji Hatchō Nawate uchisugite
お急ぎあれば

程はなし
228

Oisogi areba

hodo wa nashi

都の⻄に

聞こえたる

Miyako no nishi nikikoetaru

⻄の七条

朱雀

Nishi no Shichijō

Suzaku

権現堂にも

お着きある

Gondendō ni mootsuki aru(Muroki 1977: 277. The original is not set out in lines. The above table shows the sevenfive syllable distribution. My translation.)

Those who performed these narratives were itinerant artists, who perpetuallyexperienced the trials depicted in the narrated journeys. Being on the road gave themthe sure geographical knowledge behind their narratives. Performers were outcaste
liminal people who experienced separation and rejection, always on the move, and on
the margins of society. All sekkyō narratives have happy endings of reunion andrestoration and vidication, a cosmic salvation indicative of the origins of these narratives
in Buddhist preaching.

Michiyuki in naniwa-bushi (rōkyoku)
Sekkyō was a purely oral narrative whose extant texts were recorded by literati listeners,
but not used by performers. We know nothing about its musical delivery, except that it
did not use an accompanying instrument until it started to be appropriated by jōruri
puppet theatres in the later seventeenth century.

Naniwa-bushi on the other hand is influenced by jōruri, not only by using the shamisen
accompaniment but also the use of a number of musical patterns and substyles, calledfushi. However, the texts of this neo-traditional genre of musical narrative that rose to229

prominence in the Meiji period show surprising similarities to sekkyō in their many oral
narrative features, one of which is the michiyuki depictions of journeys. In contrast tojōruri, the naniwa-bushi michiyuki is not poetic, but has lots of puns, and seems to reflect
the itinerant lives of performers as in sekkyō.

A few examples of michiyuki in naniwa-bushi: in Hidari Jingorō: Take no suisen, themichiyuki depicts a section of the Tōkaidō between the post towns of Kakegawa and Ōtsu,a distance of about 240 kilometres by the modern road route that would have been
travelled on foot by the character in the narrative. In Yūten Kichimatsu: Oyako taimen,
the michiyuki section covers a jaunt from Ginza to Asukayama to see cherry blossoms,
which would probably have taken just a couple of hours to walk. Similarly, in Mabuta nohaha the michiyuki is a short journey from Shibamata, just outside Edo at the time of thestory, to Yanagibashi (now Akihabara). In contrast, in Eikoku mikkō the michiyuki is ajourney that took place in 1863 from Kobe to London. The piece to be discussed below,

Sendai no oni fūfu, depicts a journey from Sendai to Edo, a road journey today of 365
kilometres.

Naniwa-bushi narrative and musical structure
The narrated text consists of third-person narrative, dialogue, and internal monologue. It
unfolds through a sequence of sections. First we note the alternation of spoken and sungsections: spoken delivery is called tanka 啖呵, and sung delivery is fushi 節 or フシ. Thereis no firm rule about use of fushi and speech; this can vary from one performer toanother, and even for the one performer on different occasions, except that a piecealways begins and ends with a sung section. The sung narrative is in the classical poetic
metre of lines of twelve (seven+five) syllables (shichigo chō), but the number of lines is
not fixed; this is because it is not song but sung narrative.

Each section of sung delivery calls on one of a number of different fushi or melody types.
There are also regional stylistic differences: Kansai region (Osaka-Kyoto) and Kantō region230

(Tokyo). Especially important are individual styles; as a relatively new genre, naniwabushi is still fluid and subject to much variation in performance.

Common to all styles is the melodic unit (called kikkake) that starts with a few lines orphrases in free rhythm when the shamisen only plays a few notes in between lines, thenchanges to a unit of rhythmic singing with strong regular shamisen accompaniment(usually called kizami).

Outline of fushi types and names (after Kitagawa 2011)

Shamisen prelude

Kansai-bushi

Kantō-bushi

Hikidashi

Hikidashi

Kikkake / Jibushi

Kikkake

KizamiKantō-bushi

or interlude
Opening unit infree rhythm
Sequence in fitted
rhythm(narrow sense)

Pathos

Urei

PrestoHayabushi

UpbeatUkare-bushi

AinokoPursuit

Seme

Seme

Dénouement

BarashiBarashi

Kunimoto (2010 and 2012) also lists hyōdaizuke, when the performer announces thepiece to be performed; and dōchūzuke, or journey (same as michiyuki), as formulaic
sections. The term dōchūzuke also occurs in kōdan non-musical story-telling. The
hyōdaizuke if present is always at the beginning of the piece (called the makura), so is231

part of the sequence of kikkake-kizami. Kitagawa’s outline of the fushi types does not
mention hyōdaizuke, nor dōchūzuke (michiyuki), because these are not fushi types.

A michiyuki is not found in all pieces; it tends to occur in those long series or cycles thatoriginate in kōdan narratives. The michiyuki section is always melodically delivered, butdoes not have its own specific fushi type. It is always in poetic metre, consistent with all
the sung narrative parts of this genre. The place names along the journey areembellished with sometimes gratuitous poetic clichés or epithets/formulas and puns
(kakekotoba). The michiyuki is not central to the plot but is an interruption, a transition
between scenes; it presents a character moving through scenery, not action; it is not achase or other urgent action, in which case the fushi called seme would be appropriate.
When summarizing the plot, there is no need to give detail about the michiyuki. It is ascenic, poetic interlude, covering a narrative transition.

Sendai no oni fūfu
Next, I will present a michiyuki from the piece Sendai no oni fūfu (The Demon Couple ofSendai; also known as Date-ke no oni fūfu). It represents a journey from Sendai to Edo,that is, part of the Tohoku region. This piece has been performed recently in Tokyo by atleast two female vocalists: Chitose Kadoya at the Mokubatei theatre in Asakusa on June 7,
2012, and on NHK radio, February 2, 2012, by Tamagawa Nanafuku, who belongs to the
Kantō-bushi lineage. This performance can be heard on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEyenKd-lak (23.28 minutes).

It is one minor scene from a long kōdan narrative cycle about an ahistoricaldemonstration of martial arts before the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, in 1632 or
1636. One of the participants was Yagyū Hida no kami Munefuyu, to whose dōjō the main
character went for training. The humorous depiction of a strong young wife whochallenges her spoilt husband to a duel is no doubt the reason this, of all the original232

episodes, is still performed in naniwa-bushi as part of the repertoires of two women
performers. It suggests that naniwa-bushi values women’s rights!

Outline of the music and a brief synopsis of the story(F = fushi, sung delivery; T = tanka, spoken delivery)

Musical sections

Narrated content(shamisen hikidashi)
F1 Makura

Platitudes about married couples. Osada is introduced as an(kikkake + kizami)

unusual girl who does not want to marry a conventional suitor,
but the dashing but somewhat dissolute Ii Naoto, son of afamous martial arts leader.

T1

Osada gives her husband Naoto one ryō (perhaps theequivalent of $1000 today) every day for 10 days to gamble
with, and he loses it every time. Before agreeing to give him
more, she challenges him to a kendō duel using bamboo
practice swords, and he loses.

(shamisen hikidashi)
F2 (kantō-bushi)

She sends him to Edo to train for three years (at the dojo of
Yagyū-ryū school of martial arts).

T2

When he returns he loses to her yet again, so, refusing him
even a drink of water, she sends him back to train harder.

F3 Michiyuki

The journey back from Sendai to Edo is performed as a fully(ainoko)developed michiyuki.

T3

After another three years, he can beat her so she takes him
back.
233

(shamisen hikidashi)
F4 (kikkake+kizami)
Reconciliation; Naoto continues training and becomes a greatmartial arts figure in his own right.
BarashiConventional phrase: That was the tale of Naoto and Osada;that’s all for today…( mazu kore made).

The trip between Edo and Sendai is made four times in the story, but it is only performed
in extended michiyuki fashion the third time. The route of the journey is the Ōshū kaidō,
one of five main highways recognized by the Edo bakufu; they were regularly inspected,
and were set up with post stations. These highways were used equally by daimyoprocessions and itinerant travelling performers. The Ōshū highway subsequently became
the modern arterial road from Edo/Tokyo to Tōhoku: it is the same as National Route 4(Tōhoku Expressway), the railway line to Tōhoku (Tōhoku honsen), and almost the sameas Tōhoku Shinkansen. It also goes through the 3.11 tsunami and nuclear disaster areas,
and it is the route we all took to travel to Aomori from Tokyo in August 2015.

The place names along the route
All except 3, 4, 6 and 7 are the names of JR stations today; those in italics are shinkansen
stations. 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 19, 19 and 20 were official post stations (shukuba) in the Edo
period.

1. Sendai

7. Adatarayama

13. Nasunogahara

2. Fukushima

8. Kōriyama

14. Nozaki

3. Shinobu Sanzan

9. Sukagawa

15. Yaita

4. Kurozuka Kanzedera

10. Kagami-ishi

16. Uji-ie

5. Nihonmatsu

11. Shirakawa

17. Okamoto

6. Abu Kamagawa

12. Kuroiso

18. Utsunomiya
23419. Koga
20. Kuribashi
21. Kuki,
22. Shiraoka
23. Ōmiya
24. Edo (Tokyo)

235

Michiyuki section from Sendai no oni fūfu
(15:40 to 18:20; duration: 2 minutes and 40 seconds)… tabi no sora (end of spoken section)…旅の空…on the road again.

(shamisen hikidashi)(fushi: kikkake)
Hanasaku ōgon no Ōshūji
花咲く⻩⾦の奥州路

The Ōshū Highway blooms golden

Masamune-kō no Sendai-jōka o ato ni shite Leaving behind Lord
正宗公の仙台城下を後にしてMasamune’s castle town, Sendai

Iro mo ka mo aru Date sugata A Date dandy with looks and aroma
⾊も⾹もある伊達姿(fushi: ainoko)
Kitakaze samuku Fukushima no

The north wind is cold at Fukushima

北⾵寒く福島のShinobu Sanzan fushiogami

Doing obeisance at Shinobu Sanzan three peaks,

忍ぶ三⼭伏し拝み
Migi wo mireba Michinoku noLooking to the right, Michinoku’s
右を⾒れば陸奥のMeisho Kurozuka Kanzedera Scenic spot Kurozuka Kanzedera Temple
名所⿊塚観世寺
Migi ni miageru meijō wa

Looking up to the right, the famed castle236

右に⾒上げる名城はSono taka jūman to nanahyakkoku Worth one hundred thousand and 700 bushels
その⾼⼗万と七百⽯
Niwasama jouka no Nihonmatsu

Here is Nihonmatsu, Lord Niwa’s castle town

丹⽻様城下の⼆本松
Kioku nagareru Abu Kumagawa

The clear flow of Abu Kamagawa River

清く流れる阿武隈川
Migi ni kasunda Adatarayama To right, misty Adatarayama ふぉ
右に霞んだ安達太良⼭
Natsu mo suzushiki Kōriyama Cool even in summer, Kōriyama
夏も涼しき郡⼭
Botan de shirareta Sukagawaya

Sukagawa, known for its peony blooms

牡丹で知られた須賀川やKokoro wo terasu Kagamiishi Kagami-ishi, that lights up the heart
⼼を照らす鏡⽯Atasha nan ni mo Shirakawa no“I know nothing” Shirakawa!

あたしゃ何にも⽩河のSekisho o buji ni sugimashitara

Got through the barrier safely!

関所を無事に過ぎましたら
Nami wa tatanedo Kuroiso ya No waves here, but this is Kuroiso
波は⽴たねど⿊磯やNasunogahara ni tatsu kemuri

Smoke arises at Nasunogahara Plain237

那須野が原に⽴つ煙Nozaki Yaita ya Ujiie no

Past Nozaki, Yaita, Ujiie

野崎⽮板や⽒家のHaya Okamoto to sugimashite

Wow! Already at Okamoto

はや岡本と過ぎまして
Koko wa Yashū no Utsunomiya

And here were are at Utsunomiya in Yashū

此処は野州の宇都宮(new section: fushi: ainoko)
Koga no kosenjō Kuribashi kara

The old battlefield of Koga then from Kuribashi

古河の古戦場栗橋からKuki Shiraoka mo itsushika ni In no time, at Kuki, Shiraoka
久喜⽩岡もいつしかに
Kuguru torii wa Ōmiya de

Ducking under the gate at Ōmiya shrine

くぐる⿃居は⼤宮でBuji dōchū o inoritsutsu

Praying for a safe journey

無事道中を祈りつつ
Yatto tsuitaru yoyaku tsuitaru Arrived at last, arrived at last
やっと着いたる、ようやく着いたる
Kutabihatetaru Ō-Edo e

Exhausted, at wonderful Edo!

くたびはてたる⼤江⼾へMusical analysis

238

The hikidashi opening phrase by shamisen announces the michiyuki section with aflourish. It starts with the kikkake melody in free rhythm and continues with its elongatedmelismatic phrases for three lines, ending with a cadence. The next new rhythmic section
is in ainoko fushi style; this light bouncy style is maintained for 19 lines, then a cadence
closes the section. Another shamisen phrase announces a further section of six lines inthe same ainoko style before the final cadence finishes the whole michiyuki section.

Textual analysis
The text conveys a strong sense of directionality and movement, and a keen awarenessof geography. Not a mere listing, many of the place names are invested with historical,
geographical, and religious or pilgrimage associations, such as Shinobu Sanzan, a religious
pilgrimage destination; Kurozuka and Kanzedera, the site of the legend of a fearful
demon disguised as an old woman retold in noh and kabuki plays; the castle of thewealthy lord Niwasama in Nihonmatsu. These allusions are to the common knowledge oflisteners as well as the narrator. (Nanafuku told me that performers in the pastelaborated much more on this kind of information)

The passage is also replete with examples of gratuitous punning on the sound of place
names, adding nothing to the narrative besides wordplay: the cold north wind blows at
Fukushima because fuku also means to blow (Kitakaze samuku Fukushima no); Kōriyama
is cool even in summer because kōri also means ice (Natsu mo suzushiki Kōriyama); thetown of Kagamiishi lights up the heart because kagami means mirror (Kokoro wo terasu
Kagamiishi); the checkpoint barrier at Shirakawa (white river) invites a pun with shiranai(don’t know), expressing the typical relief at getting through the checkpoint barrier(Atasha nan ni mo Shirakawa no, Sekisho o buji ni sugimashitara); the place name of
Kuroiso means black shore, but this is inland, so it is prefaced with the phrase, no waves
here (Nami wa tatanedo Kuroiso ya).

239

There are some examples of verbs of motion: o ato ni shite (leaving behind);sugimashitara and sugimashite (having passed through); tsuitaru (arrived), much fewer
than in the sekkyō example.

Very marked is the strong regular rhythm of words and music that impels the journeyalong. Just as in the sekkyō example above, the name of the character making thejourney is never mentioned. It is as though the narrator is the observer, that it would be
the same journey whoever made it, like a tourist brochure. It would have been necessary
to break the journey to take lodging at least a couple of times, but nothing like that is
mentioned. It is impersonal; the dynamically moving landscape is the object ofdescription.

Conclusion
Although we know nothing about the musical delivery of sekkyo, I have demonstrated
naniwa-bushi’s use of formulaic musical material in delivering its narrative, indicating theorality of its musical aspect. In the absence of any musical notation, this orallytransmitted material can be applied freely by the performer and there isinterchangeability between different fushi types and between fushi and spoken delivery.

I have pointed to textual similarities in the michiyuki of naniwa-bushi and sekkyō
narratives. Although texts do exist and play a limited role in naniwa-bushi, thecomparison supports the view that it retains considerable residual orality and that theperformers inherit the mantle of the traditional itinerant singers of tales even in themodern era. Even thirty years ago or less, they were regularly touring all over Japan,
performing in small makeshift theatres on entertainment circuits supported by local
bosses. For centuries before this, itinerant performers were positioned as outsiders, evensocial outcasts. This status is reflected in michiyuki narratives, depicting not only thejourneys of the characters, but also the working lives of the performers, constantly on
the road.
240

Naniwa-bushi is a “modern” genre, but its retention of the formulaic michiyuki, an
unmistakable aspect of oral narrative, marks it as being in the tradition of the itinerant
singers of tales.

Keywords: Japanese performing arts; oral narrative; naniwa-bushi; sekkyō; poetic
journey; michiyuki.

References

Hirosue Tamotsu. Hyōhaku no monogatari: sekkyō “Oguri Hangan”, Heibonsha, 1988
Hyōdō Hiromi, “Koe” no Kokumin Kokka Nihon, Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 2000
Ishii, Nobuko. ‘Sekkyō-bushi’. Monumenta Nipponica 44, no. 3, 283–307, 1989
Iwasaki Takeo, Sanshōdayū-kō: Chūsei no sekkyōgatari, Heibonsha Sensho 23, Tokyo:
Heibonsha1994
Kitagawa Junko, “Kantō-bushi no rōkyoku ni okeru shamisen”, Osaka Kyōiku Daigaku Kiyō
60:1, 1-18, 2011
Kunimoto Takeharu, Rōkyoku shamisen: Sawamura Toyoko no sekai (DVD), Takeharudō
XQBT-2009, 2010
Kunimoto Takeharu, Matte imashita, meichōshi, ARS Shuppan, 2012
Muroki Yatarō, “Sekkyō-bushi no katari to kōzō”, Sekkyō-bushi: Sanshōdayū, Oguri
Hangan and other, Tōyō Bunko, Heibonsha, volume 243, 1973
Muroki Yatarō (ed.), Sekkyō-shū, Shinchōsha 1977 (Shinchō Nihon Koten Bungaku Shūsei,volume 8)
Philippi, D.L. Kojiki. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968

241

Pigeot, Jacqueline, "Enumeration in the Otogi zōshi and its meaning", The JapanFoundation Newsletter Vol. XVIII/NO.3 (Jan. 1991) 1-7
Pigeot, Jacqueline, Michiyuki bun: Poétique de l'itineraire dans la litterature du Japon
ancien. Paris 1982
Plutschow, H. E., Chaos and Cosmos: Ritual in Early and Medieval Japanese Literature.
Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, Cologne: E.J.Brill, 1990
Schoenbein, Martina, Die Michiyuki-Passagen in den Sewa-Joruri des Dramatikers
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724): Struckture, literarische Stilmittel und Rezeption.
Wiesgaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 1994
Tokita Alison, Michiyuki to Nihon Bunka: Geinō o chūshin ni, Nichibunken Fōramu 112,
Hōkokusho, 1999
Tokita, Alison, Japanese Singers of Tales: Ten Centuries of Performed Narrative. Farnham,
Surrey: Ashgate, 2015
Torii Akio, Hyōhaku no chūsei: sekkyō-bushi no seishinshi, Perikansha 1994
Tsunoda Ichirō, “Michiyuki” Nihon Koten Bungaku Daijiten, Iwanami Shoten, 1983-85
Tyler, Royall (trans.), The Tale of the Heike. London: Viking, 2012242

World Factory : Staging Migrant Labour on a Migrant StageWEI Zheyu

Inspired by Augusto Boal’s theory of theatre of the oppressed, the Chinese theatre
troupe Grass Stage (Caotaiban) attempts to address existing social issues and set up
debate forums through creating public spheres, often in non-theatre spaces, throughperformance. This paper analyses the dramaturgical and socio-cultural significance ofWorld Factory (shijie gongchang), a touring performance by Grass Stage in 2014,
featuring the living condition of migrant workers in contemporary China. Combing
physical theatre, documentary screening and spectator-performer interaction, World

Factory confronts the audiences with the terrifying fact that the magnificent
advancement of China's industrialisation and urbanisation is achieved at the great
expense of migrant labourers, and tries to turn the audiences from various social classes
into ‘spect-actors’ through the discussion in the post-show talk. Further, the practice of
touring the performance and documenting the tour creates a new dimension in which
the experience of migration in modern society is perceived and discussed by both theperformers and the spectators. Moreover, insisting on a non-profit and non-professional
theatre-making tactics, Grass Stage posits an alternative way for theatre to penetrate theparadoxical ‘socialist-capitalist’ reality in China by evading censorship from both socialpolitical and commercial mechanisms. The staging and touring of World Factory invades
and alienates the non-theatre performing spaces, disrupts the norm of theatre-going andbridges the gap between the stratified social groups by constructing entrance to theneglected reality of today's China and a communication platform that encourages
commentary and reflection. This practice, I argue, shows theatre's ability to adapt to
unfriendly environment dominated by global capitalism, grow in the ruptures whereideology and reality disconnect, and challenge all forms of hegemonies which it confronts.

243

Behind the Chinese Economy Miracle:
the World Factory, Its Innumerable Workers and Some Sad Facts
The massive boost of Chinese economy over the last decades has drawn the world’s
attention and brought challenges to world power structure in the post-Cold War era.
With an average annual increasing rate of approximately 9% over the last thirty-five years,
thanks to its economic reform policy since the 1980s, today Chinese ‘socialist market
economy’ has become the world’s second largest economy by nominal GDP (grossdomestic product), and the world’s largest economy by PPP (purchasing power parity),
according to the International Monetary Fund’s estimate in 2015.1

Manufacturing sector made the greatest contribution to this fast growth, and in 2010,
China became the world’s largest manufacturing nation, overtaking the United States
who has held the position for over one hundred years2. ‘Made in China’ has become asymbol of China, though this label of products has controversial connotations (cheap,
abundant, but deficient in originality or creativity—and sometimes of low quality).
What supports this incredible economic growth is the numerous Chinese migrant
workers. As the data of National Bureau of Statistics of China shows, there are 168.21
million migrant workers in the whole nation who moved from rural areas to cities andwork there3. Due to the undeveloped condition of the rural area4, the cost of migrantlabour is considerably low. And the state and local government’s emphasis onindustrialisation and urbanisation widens the development gap between the rural and1

See the data from the official website of International Monetary Fund
(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/02/weodata/weorept.aspx?sy=1995&ey=2015&scsm=1&
ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&c=924%2C111&s=PPPGDP&grp=0&a=&pr.x=35&pr.y=7).
2

Statistics from United Nations, quoted in http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/2013/03/14/china-widenslead-as-worlds-largest-manufacturer.
3

See“2014 Nian Quanguo Nongmingong Jiance Diaocha Baogao” [Report of Migrant Labourers of theCountry: Year 2014] (http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/201504/t20150429_797821.html).
4

The ratio of the incomes of urban and rural residents have been standing high for decades and reached its
peak in 2009 at 3.33:1, according to a report from National Bureau of Statistics of China(http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjzs/tjsj/tjcb/dysj/201505/t20150528_1111158.html).

244

urban areas, thus luring (or forcing) a great number of peasants to leave their homelands
and move to cities for jobs with better salaries. Taking advantage of the low cost andlarge quantity of migrant labour, the made-in-China products are very competitive in the
global market and manufacturing industry contributed a great deal in the soaring
increase of Chinese economy.

However, the living condition and mental health of the numerous migrant workers arevery worrying. These migrant workers are rather young—with an overall average age of
38.3 in 2015 and without proper education or professional training—only 26% of them
have received education of high school or higher and one third of them received
professional training5. At the same time, the working condition is comparably poor: over
80% of the migrant workers work more than 44 hours a week, while only 38% of theworkers have signed legal contracts with their employers and only one fifth of them haveinsurance for injury, medical care, social welfare and unemployment and so on6. Many of
the workers are exposed to danger of injury without proper protection or insurance, they
have to work overtime with no satisfactory payment, and there are many cases in which
the employers fall into arrears with the workers’ salaries. While more than 90% of the
migrant workers are living (far) away from their families7, they may have to face all thechallenges and deal with all the pressure that they are put under.

This results in a troubling situation for the migrant workers, and has sadly ended in aseries of tragedies. On 23 January, 2010, Ma Xiangqian, a nineteen-year-old migrant
worker in Foxconn City industrial park in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, plunged to his
death in a suicide jump off his dormitory building. While people were still wondering thecause of his death, on 11 March, another young worker jumped off his five-floor

5

See “2014 Nian Quanguo Nongmingong Jiance Diaocha Baogao”.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid.

245

dormitory and committed suicide. Then on 17 March, 29 March, 6 April, 7 April… in as
short as four months, there were thirteen workers who committed suicide in Shenzhen
Foxconn City industrial park, leaving ten deaths and three injured 8 . What is mostworrying about the shocking news is that these tragedies happened at Foxconn—theworld’s number one original equipment manufacturer who produces products for Appleand Dell and claim to have the most efficient production and management worldwide.
Then what kind of living and working condition of migrant workers shall we expect fromthe other less-developed companies? According to a report of joint-research by 20
universities from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) in 2010, there were evidence
that Foxconn workers are:1) Forced to work overtime;2) Not paid properly according to the Labour Law;
3) Exposed to danger of injury or contamination in the working environment;
4) Not paid properly for the compensation in case of injury.
Meanwhile there are many intern student workers who were working in Foxconn but
neither received proper payment nor protection of contracts or insurance9. Apparently
this terrible condition is extremely difficult for workers to cope with and the series oftragedies that have happened are the proof that a lot improvement has to be done—not
only for the sake of the workers who sacrificed a great deal to build the economy, butalso for the sustainable development of the society.

Grass Stage: Interrogating the Contemporary Society Through SpectActorship
The massive change of people’s daily life, the imbalance of development between
regions and the suffering of the unprivileged class in today’s China have drawn attention
from intellectuals. Practitioners in theatre have been trying to address social issues in
8

Since then there have even been a number of more suicide cases among the Foxconn workers.

9

See “Liang’an Sandi” Gaoxiao Fushikang Diaoyan Zongbaogao [The Mainland-Hong Kong-Taiwan Collegesand Universities Foxconn Investigation Report], 2010 (unpublished).

246

various ways and situations. And among these endeavours, Grass Stage, a theatre troupe
from Shanghai, is a characteristic example of how theatre attempts to trespass theboundary of the stratification of the society, challenge the established notion of theatregoing and bring spectators into discussions over public issues.

Named after caotaiban—what people call the theatre troupes which travels in rural areaand perform traditional operas, Grass Stage tries to bridge the gap between elites andgrassroots, craftsmanship and amateur, theatre and people, and performance and daily
life. Grass Stage is founded by writer and director Zhao Chuan, when he and some of his
friends finished a workshop performance at Asia Madang Festival in Gwacheon, Korea.
This performance called Game 38° Latitude10, which was an attempt to depict a postconflict traumatic life in fragmentary narrative and physical theatre, marks the start of
the theatre troupe in pursuit of bringing politics and daily life in theatre together.
Director Zhao clarifies the source of influence for his practice in a 2005 essay, quoting
Brazilian theatre avant-garde practitioner Augusto Boal:

Boal agrees with Brecht that the world has to be changed and we should let the
spectator think in the theatre. But Boal pushes forward this idea. He says, ‘[t]hespectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in
his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre isaction!’11

Boal’s pursuit of changing the world through theatre inspires Zhao and sets an exampleof radical political theatre on a popularist platform for him.

1038° North Latitude, sanba xian in Chinese refers to the military boarder between the North and South
Korea, according to the cease fire agreement signed by North and South Korea, China and the UN alliancein 1953.
11
Zhao Chuan, “Biwen juchang [Interrogating Theatre]”, Dushu [Reading] 4, 2006: 65. Boal’s words here arequoted from Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A., Maria-Odilia Leal McBride andEmily Fryer (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 135.

247

Zhao also made references to ‘people’s theatre’, the political theatre practices in Asia
such as the educational theatre in the Philippines, works of practitioners like Chung Chiao
in Taiwan, East Asian People’s Theatre Network, etc. 12 . By reviewing the leftist
approaches of theatre and analysing the gap between their ideas and the reality intoday’s China, Zhao proposes his ‘crude and direct’ 13 approach to access the reality
through theatre:

Imagine a theatre […] Firstly, it obviously does not originate from a formalist
need to reform art, but rather aims at contemplating a kind of understandingof the relationship between theatre and man. Social life is what concerns suchtheatre, the way of concerning is not done by representation, but by
infiltration and interference on a more realistic level, just like questioning, oreven interrogating. […] This kind of theatre, by certain ways, approaches thetruth about itself, the personal and the communal reality, and the way ofinterrogating is by theatre (drama).14

In his practice Zhao adopts Boal’s concept of turning spectator into ‘spect-actor’ by‘invad[ing] the stage’15, by bringing amateur performers into the process of creation oftheatre pieces—most of the actors and actresses come from different social backgrounds
and the theatre troupe operates in a non-profit and non-professional way—as well as
deliberate making reference to how theatre is perceived by the spectators: in Little

Society (Volume I & II, 2009-2010) a pre-show announcement is made as such: ‘feel free
to take photos … during the performance please feel free to use any kind of mobile device and

12

See Zhuang Jiayun, “Minjian Juchang de Caotai Jingshen [The Grass-Stage Spirit of the Non-Governmental
Theatre]”, Nanfengchuang, http://www.nfcmag.com/article/4169.html, July 22, 2013.

13

Zhao Chuan, “Biwen juchang [Interrogating Theatre]”, Reading (Dushu) 4, 2006: 70.

14

Ibid.

15

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A., Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer(London: Pluto Press, 2008), xx.

248

talk quietly or loudly with the outside world. In our social theatre, we encourage close contact
with social life.’ The announcement draws self-reference to the immobility andpassiveness of spectatorship, and alienates the spectator from the consumerist
behaviour of watching theatre.

By actively engaging with the relationship between theatre and life, Grass Stage attempts
to follow Brecht’s advocacy to bring the spectator out of the illusion of bourgeois theatre
and bring the agency back to them in order to act. The post-show talk is particularly
essential and even as important as—if not more important than—the performance itself,
according to Zhao16. The discussion, which he calls ‘post-show theatre’, has become an
indispensable part of the performance routine and creates a platform for exchanging
ideas among the spectators and the theatre makers. Such kind of platform is extremely
valuable to today’s China, due to the fact that there are very few and limited public spacefor Chinese people to address social issues and they rarely express their ideas towards
public issues in public. Therefore the performance opens up the opportunity forconversation over social issues in the public sphere which is created by theatre, andaround topics brought up by theatre.

Grass Stage also tours around several cities in China, and performs in various spaces,
many of which are not conventional theatre spaces. Since Grass Stage does only nonprofit theatre and the cost of production is covered mainly by donations from theaudiences, the troupe usually uses free performing space provided by its local curator,
collaborator or host. This results in new meanings contextualised by the changing andsometimes unpredictable performance spaces; especially when Grass Stage attempts toaddress the problem of migrant labour in China, the making and touring of the piececreate so many layers of meaning, which makes the piece an exceptional example ofapproaching the reality through direct radical engagement of theatre.

16

Interview with the author, July 9, 2014.

249

World Factory : Migrant Labour on a Migrant Stage
World Factory, which premiered in Xi’an in June 2014, is a collaborative work by anumber of performers based on a long-term research project initiated by the director
Zhao Chuan. Invited by English Arts Council, Zhao visited Manchester in 2009. The city,where the world’s first industrial district was built, left a strong impression on Zhao andled him to contemplate on the development of industrialisation of China and the fate ofChinese working class. Working together with members of Grass Stage with various social
backgrounds (having occupations such as company employees, freelance writer andartists, designers, etc.), Zhao in World Factory tries to offer a pastiche of personal
response of the performers to the big issue of industrialisation, urbanisation and migrantlabour in China. The play also screens clips of documentary done by Zhao and his
collaborators, showing interviews of factory workers, company employers and economic
experts as well as literature, picture and video documents from the archives, and it begs
the questions of how bad in China the lower class is suffering while the upper class isenjoying the fruit of industrialisation and urbanisation, and how China should learn fromits predecessors—highly industrialised countries such as the UK—to redress theinequality in social (and especially economic) development.

The performance of World Factory is highly charged with intense bursting energy: thegrotesque mockery interview about the suicide jumpers of Foxconn done by an‘interviewer’ and a ‘psychiatrist’ wearing clown half-masks, the smog pollution embodied
by performers holding and waving a massive white curtain, the ‘left-behind’ child 17
marching aimlessly on the stage chanting propagandist political slogan all contribute to
the dramatic tension which challenges the illusion of ‘harmonious society’ 18 of the17

Since many peasant workers move to the city to work, their old parents and young children are left
behind in the country with nobody taking care of them, which has become a major issue for the rural area
in China nowadays.

18

A slogan and a state strategic goal for future development proposed by Communist Party of China since2004, to advocate a society enjoying more united spirit, more equality and more diversity. See“Zhonggongzhongyang Guanyu Goujian Shehuizhuyi Hexieshehui de Ruogan Zhongda Wenti de Jueding250

developing China. Topics of grave social problems are directly posed in front of thespectators and confront them in a demanding atmosphere. And the topics, many ofwhich come from the personal experience of the performers’ own life and thus have amore sincere perspective, bring the theatre and the spectator closer.
The scenography of the piece makes a stark contrast to the Chinese main-stream theatre.
The cheap hand-made props such as political slogan posters and blue paper figuressignifying the dispensable labourers, the symbolic physical embodiment of mechanised
repeated work in the assembly line, and the movement of the non-professionally-trained
performers in general offer an alternative style of representation in theatre. The
aesthetics of World Factory, by showing the performers’ movement which has not beenrefined to performing patterns, alienates the spectator from theatre entertainment. And
the video projection, juxtaposing images of British workers in the 18th century andChinese workers (especially in a scene depicting a female ‘model worker’ Huang Baomei,
played by herself in a 1958 Chinese film), adds a dimension to contextualising the
Chinese industrialisation by drawing comparison of the status of workers between thepast and the present, between in the West and in China.

Moreover, the radically changing content and performing space of World Factory makes
it not only unique in every time when it’s performed, but also self-reflective which
provides an interesting point of view of migrant labour and industrialisation. Since themembers of Grass Stage work often part-time for the piece, they are not always able to
be in every touring performance, while touring, or lalian—the term for military training ofmarch which Grass Stage adopts, is a crucial part of Grass Stage’s agenda. As a result,some of Grass Stage’s works are constructed via a means which Zhao calls ‘blocks’—each
performer has his or her own role and plot to be pieced together with others’ tocomplete the whole work, while any one of the performers is replaceable or dispensable
if he or she can not make it to a certain performance. The theatre’s involuntary mimic of[Decision by the Central CCP Committee to Build the Socialist Harmonious Society]”, 2006,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/poltics/2006-10/18/content_5218639.

251manufacturing assembly line echoes with its fragmentary narrative, which reflects thecomplicated reality and sheds light upon reading the making of theatre as a cultural
practice and an industrialised process of production.

The performing spaces, which vary a great deal from conventional theatre, black box
studio, to theatre reformed from an old cinema, the corner of a cafe, and many other
non-theatre spaces, are located in all kinds of communities—such as a modern art gallery
in a central urban area, an institute of fine arts, a Central Business District, the suburban
area populated by migrant workers, etc.. Therefore the performance meets spectatorsfrom very different social classes, some of whom have even never entered a conventional
theatre to see a play. In this sense World Factory invades the margin of the community
and through performance and post-show talks creates a public sphere which bridges thegap between reality and theatre. The Shanghai performance in July 2014, which theauthor went to, was on the second floor of an exotic Western-style building in the former
foreign settlement district of Shanghai. However, spectators could only find that the
space for performance is actually a shabby corner of the building of less than one
hundred square meters, after they passed the tidy entrance of the building, the dark
passageway with exposed pipelines of water and electricity lines on the wall, and the
backdoor and edge of kitchen of a restaurant. The experience of going from the beautiful
modern city scenery, witnessing the mechanism of production of the city (water,electricity and food serving and waste disposing) and entering a non-space inside the city
and watching performance in it itself becomes a highly symbolic act which implements
the theme of World Factory, and questions how theatre is produced in a particular space,
how theatre is often disguised as an apolitical practice regardless of class and culture,and therefore how spectatorship is confined and restricted.

An Anti-Consumerism Proposal, and/or a Bourgeois Utopia?
As Zhuang Jiayun points out, the focus of attention of Grass Stage is using nongovernmental theatre to interrogate the unhealthy ecology of theatre in today’s China
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and the habit of consumption of the spectators, and to bridge the disrupture between
reality, history and representation and build a way of ‘simultaneous thinking’ over thereality by the performers and the spectators.19 Grass Stage aims to challenge the norm ofgoing to and watching theatre, which is very much constrained as a consumption of
production, especially as being a habit for the middle class. In an interview in 2014, Zhao
asserts that his first goal is to make sure ‘whether the things [theatre] you make can“land on the ground”, whether they can be “with the audience”’20. Zhao says,

Our [Chinese] theatre today is built based on our understanding ofWesternised theatre, and we are replicating this Westernised theatre. […] [A]sa matter of fact theatre is irrelevant to most of the people in this age that welive in. Either community performance or our touring (lalian) can only meetvery limited audiences. But it is an experiment, in which we explore howtheatre will land on our life, and how theatre can relate to these people, andwe don’t necessarily have to indiscriminately adopt the form of Westernised
theatre. [We want to explore h]ow theatre can literally exist in our life21.
And Zhao also frankly admits that the example of Grass Stage is rather ‘exceptional’22. It isreasonable to doubt if there can be more ‘Grass Stages’ in today’s China, since thetheatre troupe has been relying solely on audience donation in Shanghai, the wealthiest
city in China, whilst its marginal status has scarcely improved for the recent years. One
can admire the achievement of Grass Stage over the ten years of their hard work, but
one can also doubt that why no other troupes like Grass Stage arises. Is it possible that
Grass Stage just becomes a Bourgeoisie utopia full of anarchist illusion, and that the19

Zhuang Jiayun, “The Grass-Stage Spirit of the Non-Governmental Theatre”.

20

Zhao Chuan, interview by Xu Menglu and Liu Xinling, “Rang Shenghuo zhong You Juchang [Let There Be
Theatre in Live]”, in Xiju yu Yingshi Pinglun [Theatre, Film and Television Review] 2 (2014): 81.
21

Ibid.

22

Qtd. in Ibid..

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donators (mostly from Shanghai) are deceived by a fantasy in which by donating moneysocial problems can be dealt with?

Zhao continues to express his discontent at the consumption-oriented theatre which is
not able to address any issue in the reality:

When we tour and perform in many communities, we meet a lot of audiences,
who would never in their life purchase a ticket and go to a theatre. But your[our] theatre can actually reach them, and they definitely have the ability totalk about it. […] Now we take too much for granted that anyone has to buy aticket to watch a play, as if a theatre can no longer survive if it doesn’t selltickets. This is against our original intention. People do theatre in order that
we can gather, that we can share our experience and emotion in life with one
another, and that we can discuss another possibility other than the way of life
we live now […]23

Therefore Zhao suggests an ‘alternative’ theatre which is against consumerism. It is basedon an idealist belief that theatre can be separated from consumerism, and World Factoryacknowledges the dubious creditability of this belief: it ends with Wang Yifei, one of theperformers, reading his article ‘The End of World Factory or Labour-intensive Factory’and proposing an economy more sustainable and more caring for the labourers, while
the clown figures soon appear onstage and mock the idealist proposal. World Factory
thus leaves a question to the spectators: if the phenomenon of ‘world factory’ a
syndrome of capitalist globalisation, it is really possible to resist the trend of globalisationand evade the cost of the less developed areas and social class?

Hence the next task that lies before Grass Stage is, to explore what to do next once wehave acknowledged the serious social problems. The spectators are invited to participate
23

Ibid.

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in the performance in various ways. In World Factory volunteer audience members areinvited to join the game of ‘skipping’, when they are competing with each other to earnmore money according to how fast they can skip the rope (and their ‘labour’ areextremely cheap: one cent RMB per skip). A lot of the spectators join the discussion in
the post-show talk, and many of them brought about their suggestions in solving some ofthe problems World Factory refers to. In the Lanzhou performance in June 2014, one of
the audience member even came onstage and asked for a guitar, and sang a song hewrote about workers. If we treat the theatre space which Grass Stage creates as a
Habermasian public sphere which hold communal discussion for citizens to ‘express andpublicize their views’24, we have to examine if it has been effective for the participants tointerfere the reality, or simply ignored by the global capitalism and become an enclosed
utopian platform to relief from stress and anxiety but do nothing else. The key question
is: how to go beyond narcissist self-reference and repetition and make actual changes?

Although it seems too much to ask for from a single piece of theatre, the question isessential to theatre practice and research in general. Practice of Grass Stage presents us
a way to diversify the act of watching theatre and opens platforms to reflect on themacro mechanism of the social system which we live in. Therefore through theatre wecan locate where some of the social problems lie and create a public forum to discuss it,
but this only marks the start of (the preparation of) the reform or revolution, if there
would be any. As Boal writes,

the theatre is not revolutionary in itself, but it is a rehearsal for the revolution.
The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action25.

24

Habermas, Jürgen. "Public Sphere." In Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Robert
E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 105.

25

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A., Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer(London: Pluto Press, 2008), 98.

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In this sense World Factory is public discussion of great value, and hopefully, a rehearsal
for social reform for the Chinese society, which is enduring a gigantic development andwitnessing tragedies like the suicide jumpers in Foxconn. This experience of creating
public forum and actively engaging with reality is of profound significance not merely fortheatre, but for everyone who cares about the fate of the society.

References
Boal, Augusto. 2008. Theatre of the Oppressed, translated by Charles A., Maria-Odilia
Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. London: Pluto Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1997. “Public Sphere.” In Contemporary Political Philosophy: An
Anthology, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mainland-Hong Kong-Taiwan Colleges and Universities Foxconn Research Team. 2010.
“Liang’ansandi” Gaoxiao Fushikang Diaoyan Zongbaogao [The Mainland-Hong KongTaiwan Colleges and Universities Foxconn Investigation Report],
http://mfiles.sohu.com/it/foxconn.doc. [accessed June 20 2015].
Zhao, Chuan. 2006. “Biwen juchang [Interrogating Theatre].” Reading [Dushu] 4.
Zhao, Chuan, interview by Xu Menglu and Liu Xinling. 2014. “Rang Shenghuo zhong You
Juchang [Let There Be Theatre in Live].” In Xiju yu Yingshi Pinglun [Theatre, Film andTelevision Review] 2: 81.
Zhuang, Jiayun. 2013. “Minjian Juchang de Caotai Jingshen [The Grass-Stage Spirit of the
Non-Governmental Theatre]”,Nanfengchuang,
http://www.nfcmag.com/article/4169.html. [accessed June 30 2015].

WEI Zheyu is currently a PhD student in Department of Drama in Trinity College Dublin,
co-funded by TCD and Chinese Scholarship Council. By examining the politics in the256

production and reception of theatre, his doctoral research offers a study ofcontemporary Chinese spoken drama in the context of globalisation.

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