- Convenor:
-
Kyoko Iwaki
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Performing Arts
Short Abstract
The panel examines how contemporary Japanese theatre challenges hegemonic narratives by centering marginalized memories. Through porous and pluriversal dramaturgies, their works foreground disavowed histories and reimagine theatre as a site for alternative futures.
Long Abstract
When speaking of Japanese contemporary theatre, the voices of those positioned as “others”—whether along ethnic, racial, gender, able, or political lines—have rarely been put on centre stage. Whether it is the communities of Zainichi Koreans, Chinese immigrants, gender minorities, or disabled peoples, although they constitute indispensable narratives of modern Japanese society, most of them are relegated to marginal roles or reduced to contextual background. This marginalization is inseparable from the fact that the majority of contemporary Japanese theatre has been created by, for, and within the framework of ethnically Japanese heteronormative able subjects. Ever since the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution of 1890, the juridical and affective contours of national belonging have been structured around what Jennifer Robertson terms “the principle of jus sanguinus (rights of blood)” (2002, 192), producing a misleading conflation of ethnicity, citizenship, and cultural legitimacy. This logic has not only sustained a monolithic imaginary of the nation-state for and by heteronormative Japanese but has also underwritten the epistemic boundaries of the national stage, delimiting who may appear, speak, and be rendered visible within theatrical discourse.
However, especially among the younger generations of artists, this hidebound thought is gradually shifting. Their practices mobilize transnational, multi-ethnic, queer, disabled, and pluriversal dramaturgies that disrupt linear historiography and intervene critically in the hegemonic narratives that are still stubbornly sustained from the Shōwa era. By focusing on the works of four contemporary performance makers—namely, Tsutsui Jun (dracom), Hagiwara Yūta (Kamome Machine), Koizumi Meirō, and Aoki Ryōko, this panel discuss the unresolved and deliberately muted memories of the past; and the lives of those who were considered as not “grievable” will be brought to the fore (Butler 2004). These artists develop dramaturgies that intend to theorize and polemicize the historical memories of others. In so doing, they employ dramaturgies that are more fragmented and “porous” (van Kerkhoven 1993, Turner 2015)—allowing performances to breathe within politically contested milieus alongside other bodies, communities, and nations. Through innovative dramaturgies, alternative historical frameworks to hegemonic ethno-nationalist ones—sometimes marginal perspectives, sometimes embodied—are reconfigured into contemporary forms of legibility.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
The presentation examines Koizumi Meiro’s Prometheus VR trilogy as a post-Fukushima critique of capitalist progress. The VR performances destabilize mind-body hierarchies and imagine an alternative future for Japan beyond ableist, ethnocentric, and individualist paradigm of progress.
Paper long abstract
Promethean narratives of progress—whether told through a torch of fire or by nuclear power plants—have long been celebrated in postwar Japanese society as engines of capitalist prosperity and modernization. However, in his post-Fukushima work, visual and performance artist Koizumi Meirō offers a sustained critique of such technologies, exposing them instead as an onus of tragedies such as war and nuclear disasters. Central to Koizumi’s intervention Prometheus Trilogy (2019-2023), a tripartite VR-performance work, is a rejection of the epistemological hubris underpinning Western Enlightenment, particularly the conviction that the human mind—hailing reason, logic, and individual autonomy as its pinnacle—can fully control not only our bodies but also subjugate all other entities on Earth.
In Prometheus Bound (2019) and Prometheus Unbound (2012), Koizumi brings to the fore two marginal protagonists who have both been excluded from the postwar hegemonic narratives of progress: an ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) patient and Vietnamese migrant workers. The paper interrogates how through his VR dramaturgy, Koizumi enables the audience to perceive the world through the embodied perspectives of those subjects relegated to the margins of history, namely, the disabled and the migrant. Dramaturgically speaking, it explores how VR headsets intensify theatre’s function as an apparatus of “the vision machine” (Bleeker 2011, 151); while simultaneously demonstrating how Koizumi seeks to unsettle the mind-body asymmetry by deliberately highlighting the limitations of corporeality that heavily lag behind the ever-more accelerating informational velocity. By critically questioning the pro-technological and transhumanist narratives, the paper also analyses how in Prometheus the Firebringer (2023)—the third and the last part of the trilogy where the voice of a child guides the audience—Koizumi prompts the spectators to imagine humanity’s future ostensibly liberated from the “shackles” of our bodies. Through these works, the paper argues that Koizumi articulates alternative visions of Japan’s future—those that are sharply critical of capitalist narratives of progress, anthropocentric technological paradigms, and heteronormative historiographies.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on my long-term collaboration with Kamome Machine’s Nanjing Project, this paper examines the creative process as a response to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, foregrounding blurred roles between artists, researchers, and spectators through methodology of “rehearsing response-ability.”
Paper long abstract
Since 2022 Tokyo-based theatre company Kamome Machine has been working on the Nanjing Project, a performance project that deals with the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Having previously discussed the project's various phases in Tokyo, Chiayi (Taiwan) and Naha (Juraic 2023), I focus on the creative process of the latest iterations in Yokohama and Lancaster, UK. The rehearsals, or rather ‘experiments in sharing thoughts’ (Kamome Machine 2022), became a central site for negotiating response-ability within a process marked by hesitation, duration, repetition, exhaustion, shifting roles of the creative team and spectators in local and global contexts.
Drawing on my involvement in the project since the beginning, I trace not just my own position of someone with direct experience of war in Croatia, but also that of company members and other collaborators without such physical experience. My role shifted from embedded researcher and interlocutor toward a more fluid, exposed, and implicated role within the process itself. This shift never stabilised into a clear dramaturgical function but remained contingent and relational. In these latest iterations, all our roles were completely blurred and demanded a significant personal engagement with the history itself.
From this embedded perspective, I question how the Nanjing Project invites us to rethink rehearsal not as preparation for performance, but as an ethical practice that already implicates spectators. What does it mean to rehearse with the knowledge that audiences are not external endpoints but recurring participants whose responses and/or silences are carried back and forth between the performance space and the rehearsal room? Situating these questions within broader debates on ‘memory of war’ in contemporary Japanese performance, I approach “rehearsing response-ability” as a methodology to rethink the past, the present and the future of Japan. How might rehearsal and spectatorship together form a space for thinking with history rather than about history?
Paper short abstract
Tsutsui Jun’s (dracom) play Yuitsusha to sono sōshitsu (2025) allegorizes the conditions behind escalations of xenophobia and cultural egocentrism in the Japanese contemporary. Tsutsui illuminates the antisocial psycho-cultural conditions behind aggressive conduct toward non-Japanese residents.
Paper long abstract
The new play Yuitsusha to sono sōshitsu (2025) by dracom theatre company leader, director, playwright, and performer, Tsutsui Jun, allegorizes what conditions lie behind the escalation of xenophobia and cultural egocentrism in Japan in the years since the Covid pandemic. Tsutsui has long chronicled the antisocial effects of what Jonathan Crary in Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022) calls the “internet complex” of the post-capitalist moment. The Ego and His Loss (Yuitsusha to sono sōshitsu) is his greatest indictment of post-capitalist alienation, and most lyrical exploration of the failure to connect.
Presented at YPAM in 2025, this latest work by the prolific Tsutsui, who has been active since the early 1990s, may be his most important. Like many of the playwright’s works it is based upon a true story: here, a murder of a Vietnamese resident living in Osaka Prefecture that took place in 2022. The play explores the fatal intersection of two lives residing in the same building: a middle-aged Japanese man living above a bento box shop, and a Vietnamese woman, who works there, below.
The narrative and moral structure of Tsutsui’s play resembles Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck: the puzzle of the murderer’s character brings into relief an allegory for human emptiness which channels the antisocial conditions behind extreme alienation. The character of the slain, the Vietnamese woman, is the other side of the allegory: a conduit of feeling and possibility which signals a chance of a more optimistic future, only to be cut short by the actions and attitudes of the murderer.
Especially concerned with the lives of the socio-economically precarious in the cities in northern Osaka Prefecture, Tsutsui’s allegorical rendering of a soon-forgotten crime presents a way forward for performance makers to explore post-capitalist conditions in the Japanese contemporary. The plight of foreign residents is central to Tsutsui’s ethic: among the most precarious in urban Japan are Vietnamese hospitality workers, and Tsutsui’s play, with its innovative dramaturgical forms of presentation of acts of hospitality and egocentrism in animated counterpoint, the result is a work of inventive contemporary theatre distinctly Tsutsui’s own.
Paper short abstract
Grounded in performance analysis and interviews, this paper examines how "Otemba: daring women" (2025) adopts Nō theatre’s more-than-human spectral aesthetics to critique the Netherlands’ colonial pasts and foreground marginalized histories.
Paper long abstract
The social marginal plays a central role in Nō theatre’s ante-literal more-than-human dramaturgical evocation of the ghost. Through recurring ghostly figuration, what was socially rejected in life is allowed to haunt the living once again on the Nō stage, revisiting reproaches, blame, and unresolved discontent linked to pre-mortem subjective social (dis)placement (Terasaki 2001, 14). Drawing both dramaturgically and aesthetically on Nō’s spectral figuration, the opera Otemba: daring women (2025) critically engages with the Netherlands’ colonial pasts by unsettling inherited representations of historically marginalized enslaved subjects and contemporary racialized migrants of colour. In doing so, the work addresses both the country’s imperial history and its enduring legacy within a socially unequal neoliberal present.
The opera’s narrative pivots around the restoration of a seventeenth-century portrait depicting Cornelia van Nijenrode, a woman of Japanese and Dutch mixed heritage, alongside her Dutch family and an enslaved woman from Batavia. Dated 1665, the painting is held at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. As the restoration unfolds, Nō performer Aoki Ryōko appears as the ghost of Cornelia, revisiting her personal history in dialogue with soprano Kirana Diah, a young art historian from Jakarta who has migrated to the Netherlands to work as a museum restorer. Through their exchange, the spectral figure from the colonial past—articulated through the slow, sliding gesturality and throaty vocality of Nō embodied by Aoki—and the contemporary migrant worker voice personal histories conventionally silenced within mainstream societal accounts, critically unsettling conventional representations of Dutch colonial enterprise.
Grounded in performance analysis and interviews with Aoki Ryōko and composer Mochizuki Misato, this paper examines the performative tension that emerges through the dramaturgical juxtaposition of Nō’s more-than-human spectral aesthetics and opera-based stage practices. Particular attention is given to the musical and vocal interplay that alternates Nō’s uncanny, otherworldly timbres with operatic melodic progression, producing an affective sense of displacement for the audience. By analysing Aoki Ryōko’s stage presence, the paper argues that Otemba: daring women activates Nō’s spectral dramaturgy as a feminist and critical apparatus that reconfigures colonial memory beyond linear historiography, offering an innovative account of contemporary experimentation with and artistic adoption of Nō more-than-human dramaturgies.