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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.