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- Convenor:
-
Peter Eckersall
(The Graduate Center CUNY)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Peter Eckersall
(The Graduate Center CUNY)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Performing Arts
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.4
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
'Evacuation Japan' takes inspiration from the multidisciplinary performance artist Takayama Akira (http://portb.net/en/). The panel explores how performance reimagines facets of culture, mobility, and heterotopia in East Asia.
Long Abstract:
This panel takes inspiration from the multidisciplinary performance artist TAKAYAMA Akira (http://portb.net/en/). Takayama’s performances deal with questions of mobility and hidden histories of place, events, and people. His ‘Heterotopia projects’ use walking in the city to explore people and places that are normally not visible – typically people whose lives are lived in the margins and experience precarity. His ‘Evacuation Manual’ series of performances use the places in Tokyo that are evacuation sites in case of earthquakes as inspiration for tour performances of cities in which people live, sometime as evacuees.
Drawing on these works, we have been thinking about a project broadly around the idea of ‘Evacuation Japan’ and how performance might work to reimagine facets of culture, mobility, and heterotopia in East Asia. The project is directed towards thinking in socio-culturally and artistic ways about the sense of inertia in Japan and more broadly in East Asia—and the possibilities for a different order might emerge out of this. One point of reference is Fukuda Koji’s film version of Hirata Oriza’s post-Fukushima play ‘Sayonara’ that explores the evacuation of Japan – and the question of who remains. Another is Takayama’s idea that his new (yet to be realized) project in Nagasaki might be an evacuation zone for artists and thinkers who might need to leave Hong Kong and maybe Taiwan because of persecution by mainland Chinese authorities. In Takayama’s mind, the project might signal a provocation that Nagasaki might be an evacuation zone for dissidents.
Takayama is thus working within a larger context of performance that is both expressing an emptying out of a kind of vitality in the present, and that also seeks to imagine and put into practice newly imagined relations. This includes, for example, a renewed formulation of Pan-Asianism, and an attempt to newly imagine the everyday bases for a public commons. We want to do a project on these notions, stemming from and informed by Takayama’s work and in conversation with him but also inviting contributions (scholars and artists) on these wider senses of evacuation and Japan and the world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -Peter Eckersall (The Graduate Center CUNY)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explorers what spectacles of evacuation and absence look like in performances by Okada Toshiki and Takayama Akira.
Paper long abstract:
“Japan feels empty” is a phrase that gained in currency in Japan during the Covid era. The Mainichi Shinbun reported that “around 40% of people in Japan are feeling lonely amid reduced opportunities for interaction” (Mainichi Shinbun, February 28, 2022), noting that a considerable proportion of these people were in their 20s and 30s. In general terms, alienation has increased, and a sense of vitality and community has gone, evacuated to a place who knows where. The pervading sense of hollowness and the absence of opportunity is existential and seems to cast over the future of Japan as a post covid fog.
Thinking about this situation for the arts, what are some of the aesthetic tactics and cultural perspectives that are coming forward? For example, Takayama Akira/Port B have literalized the idea of evacuation in a series of works that explore mobility, diaspora and inequality in Japan and its relations to the world. Meanwhile, Okada Toshiki explores the idea of absence and disappearance in reference to the Fukushima disaster and climate change. What are the new forms of aesthetic strangeness evident in their work and is this part of a wider trend? Is evacuation the new paradigm? This paper explorers what these spectacles of evacuation and absence look like in their work and asks how far it will go.
Sharon Hayashi (York University)
Paper short abstract:
Tour performances by Takayama Akira and the Port B collective prefigured the large scale challenges of life in Evacuation Japan, historically tracing and foreshadowing what it means to seek refuge in Japan. Can these encounters lead to imagining a new affective commons and culture of refuge?
Paper long abstract:
Tour performances by Takayama Akira and the Port B collective prefigured the large scale challenges of life in Evacuation Japan. From the augmented reality immersive stories of linguistic and culinary difference of Asian migrants and refugees (Tokyo Heterotopia) to those seeking refuge from the grind of Yamanote temporality (Complete Manual of Evacuation), these tour performances historically trace and foreshadow what it means to seek refuge in Japan.
Programmed encounters of refuge, often mediated but affective and sensorial, assemble unlikely and uneven participants (Yokohama Commons). A distilled architecture of refuge, opens up the possibility of exchange and dialogue, and the temporary suspension or overturning of hierarchies of knowledge (Tokyo School Excursion, McDonald’s Radio University, Babel:The City and Its Towers). In this era of corporate controlled online ‘public’ spheres can these encounters lead to a differential commons, a space and set of social practices that don’t attempt to unify but offer connection through shared affective encounters (Public Speech Project, JArt Call Center)? Can these temporary architectures and encounters lead to imagining a new culture of refuge in Evacuation Japan?
Thomas Looser (NYU)
Paper short abstract:
A critical look at Takayama’s performative invocation of contemporary logics of the everyday. Drawing on a few select works, this interrogates Takayama’s ‘evacuation’ from modern Japan—and the performative potential to depart not only from the modern everyday, but perhaps from theater itself.
Paper long abstract:
In many ways, Japan seems to have been actively hoping for an end to the postwar order of things for a very long time; the country’s closure to the outside during the COVID years has only added a new layer to a generalized sense of life emptied out. Takayama Akira—who at times appears to be abandoning theater—may in fact be the ideal theater director for this moment.
In very generalized terms, the almost utopic ideal of escaping (or seceding) from the given structures of the everyday is not new. The past 20 years has seen examples of this in both the practices of corporate capital and in the arts community, almost globally. Takayama might be located in this tradition, but his critical theater is at once more deeply historical, and more immediately immersed in the already-given orders of life as we know it.
At stake in Takayama’s work, this paper will argue, are some of the basic infrastructures of modernity. In part, this is simply a return to and a reworking of origins: I briefly look at his references to early Greek theater, and to the “total” theater of Wagner’s more recent modernity; reworking these spaces and practices allows Takayama to create a different vision of the institutions that create community. His still more recent tinkering with the institutions of higher education, and what might be described as geographies of thought, as in his “McDonald’s University” performances and his still-fictional university for intellectual refugees in Nagasaki, similarly seem to rethink institutions we thought we knew and to produce the hints of a different everyday. Ultimately, however, in this paper I am interested in the ways in which Takayama is in fact really employing everyday structures of social community that already seem to be part of a different logic of gathering, and of community—fundamentally different from the idea of theater or of art as we’ve known it, and different from the logics of the postwar everyday. This is where the real force (for better or worse) of his work might lie, and is the real focus of this paper.