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.