Performance Review: The absurd snapshot of family politics

Review of Midori Kurata / akakilike: Family Portrait (Kazoku no shashin, 家族の写真)

I was in Brussels early last week for the annual Kunstenfestivaldesarts. I have been following the festival programme since early 2010s, and it consistently presented new voices in contemporary theatre that have gone onto bigger stages. The festival almost always also includes one or two Japanese performances. Last year, they co-produced new works by Japanese directors - Satoko Ichihara’s Madama Chrysanthemum and Akira Takayama’s Delivery. However, this year the festival directors have somewhat gone down the easy route in terms of Japanese programming and invited two older pieces; a 16-year old show Fortress of Smiles by Kurō Tanino (Niwa Gekidan Penino) from 2007 already presented in Paris two years ago where I saw it. This show was also streamed numerous times during the pandemic. I was therefore more interested in Family Portrait (家族の写真) by director-choreographer Midori Kurata’s Kyoto-based company akakilike, which originally premiered in 2016. Interestingly, the company has not presented their works at any of the usual festivals in Japan, such as Kyoto Experiment, though they did show it at Rohm Theatre amongst other more prominent venues in Japan. Perhaps this is an early sign of internationalisation of contemporary Japanese theatre makers (other than Toshiki Okada) without the need of support of festival platforms in Japan.

I saw Family Portrait on the first day of my two-day jaunt at Kunsten at Les Brigittines, a former chapel converted into a performing arts centre. Kurata’s dance theatre production is a collaboration with the Osaka-based writer Jun Tsutsui. The performance centres around a family dancing to classical ballet (The Nutcracker) on or around the table while a photographer is constantly circling around the space taking photographs. Narratively, it is about life insurance policy being sold to this family. The idea came about when Kurata’s partner came home raving about the life insurance policy. It begins with a swimmer with headphones walking down the stairs from the auditorium to the stage singing and dancing to some J-pop music. This immediately sets the satirical tone for Jun Tsutsui’s absurd text written in Kansai dialect. Just as the songs can be catchy that they stick in our minds, so does the repetitiveness of the same phrase by the Father of the family in the title stick with us through the performance. By the end of the performance, I couldn’t get out of my head the phrase or slight variations of 「お父さんが死んだら、考えることがあるか」。”If the father dies… have you thought about that?”. Tsutsui performs the Father himself in sketch-like performance akin to manzai, typical stand-up comedy genre in the Kansai region. However, it takes a while for this text to be heard due to the space it was performed in. The former chapel is a big space, not so much stage-wise, but height-wise, and knowing some of the work of the independent Japanese theatre companies, I was worried how it will stack against such a venue even before the performance started. Unfortunately, my worries were confirmed. The company struggled with the use of space, especially with the projection of the voices for first 15-20 minutes of this one-hour performance. This was not even the first performance at the festival, but a third one. It’s really a shame that the festival production team didn’t choose the venue more carefully. They really ought to have taken  better care of the artists who are coming from the other side of the world and have never been to a venue or seen a show there.

On and around the family table, Midori Kurata/akakilike: Family Portrait © Yulia Sko

The performers did a great job overcoming this obstacle later. Once the music has fully invaded the space, everything falls into a frenzy of playful movement, music and speech, punctuated by freezes that mimic camera snapshots. Kurata’s decision to  use untrained performers such as Kai Maetani, a well-known photographer in the independent Japanese theatre scene, is particularly suited to the performance. In a country where theatre makers are arguably not as valued as in the subsidised theatres in Europe, most have daytime jobs to enable their stage work. The fluidity of roles within theatre-making is thus not unusual.

The juxtaposition of vanishing images and fragments of narrative is very effective, similar to Angura (Ōta Shōgo in particular). Dancers, including Kurata, climb, crawl underneath the table, and jump around the space. They combine awkward postures and movements with classical ballet to form beautiful, yet raw sequences reminiscent of Toshiki Okada’s work. Their child-like bodies are what Tadashi Uchino called junk bodies which create disparity between the narrative and the performers body (Uchino, 2009). Overall, the performance aesthetic successfully marries Okada-style noisy bodies, classical ballet and angura-style depicting the (occasional) absurdity of life and death. This idea of journey from life to death combined with Tsutsui’s banal text and dancers is also an inevitable influence of Ōta Shōgo’s theatre visions, especially when we know that Kurata studied at Kyoto University of Arts and Design when he was the chair of the department there. This is most evident in the performers’ facial expressions when they are seated together around the table to take a photograph facing the audience. Most of the dancers also wear GAP-branded T-shirts (in Japan for some performances they wore Ralph Lauren ones) which could be interpreted as a criticism of the modern-day consumerist society. Just as we are sold life insurance policies that reduce our humanity to monetary value, so we are sold branded, often low-quality clothes that increase the consumerism. Somewhat problematically, the Father is the only speaker. Perhaps, the introduction of a female speaker could have given a more nuanced perspective. Despite this, the production could be viewed as a critique of family politics and the image of a father as the sole breadwinner; a grand narrative that is difficult to escape from whether it’s in Japan or elsewhere.

I attended the production on 14 May 2023 and bought the ticket.

I thank the company akakilike for providing me with the images to use on my blog.

© Yulia Sko

Performance credits:

Presentation: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Les Brigittines
Direction and choreography: Midori Kurata | Assistant director: Naoyuki Hirasawa | Lighting: Rie Uomori | Sound: Toru Koda | Performers: Tatsunori Imamura, Midori Kurata, Riko Sakonuma, Kentaro Sato, Jun Tsutsui, Misako Terada, Kai Maetani | Text: Jun Tsutsui | Surtitle translation: Saeko Nagashima | Surtitle French translation: Aya Soejima and Philippe Achermann | Stage manager: Yohei Sogo | Production manager: Yoshimi Toyoyama
Production: akakilike
With the support of: The Saison Foundation
Acknowledgements: la Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris

Reference
Uchino, T. (2009). Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance From Brecht To The New Millennium. London: Seagull Books.