Finding new-old vocabulary to discuss contemporary performance

As I reflected upon last weekend’s opening shows at Kyoto Experiment the entire week, the notion of gaze in theatre kept coming back to me. How does the spectator gaze at the performing body? How does the performer look back at the spectator? Kyoto Experiment is now in its 13^th edition having been founded by Yusuke Hashimoto who left the festival to a trio of new directors Yoko Kawasaki, Juliet Reiko Knapp and Yuya Tsukahara just as the pandemic started. This year’s edition is the first festival under their direction with international artists showing works in person. Every year the Festival has a particular key concept, a framework within which the works are being presented. This year’s theme uses the Japanese onomatopoeic word ‘teku teku’, meaning walking at a steady pace at a long distance and adds the English word ‘new’ to the word. The juxtaposition of the two languages is quite clever. As directors explained in their artistic statement and in the interviews in the Japanese media, the idea does not cover all of the programming in the festival, but is more of a way to ask questions, to re-think about how we walk and connect with one another (walking/back and forth) and transcend the current situation in the world.

© Ayaka Ono & Akira Nakazawa / Spacenotblank

The first production that I saw at the opening weekend was spacenotblank’s Views (Saisei sū), a Japanese performing arts collective founded in 2012 by Ayaka Ono and Akira Nakazawa. In this project they collaborated with the Kishida Kunio award-winning playwright Shuntaro Matsubara. I queue to enter and slowly descend to the basement studio space of ROHM Theatre Kyoto (North Hall), passing the poster-covered red-wall lobby and the several pieces of video recording equipment scattered around the entry to the auditorium. The stage is bare except a raised stage with a screen showing two chairs facing us in what looks like a kitchen but could equally be a bathroom. The film credits start rolling up and we are watching a filming of a play unfolding in real time in the dressing room and the lobby of the theatre. Occasionally, one could hear voices coming out of these spaces because the doors are left open. For over an hour, we are bombarded with scraps of a narrative, but there isn’t much to cling on as our eyes are clued to screen. The production capitalises on that. Gazing at screen for an hour without any sense in the darkness of the theatre can be tiring. The first part of the show could be best described as a film that plays with the presence/absence of performers, but also somewhat negates the spectators requiring them to concentrate deeply (confusion of terms intended here). Not everyone can endure this. The second half of the show saw the performers probing into the theatre-film space and testing this idea in a little more detail. This ranged from an audience interaction, asking us about the films we like, to an action-film like chase game in which the lead male performer on screen is trying to find two female protagonists hiding in the auditorium. Overall, in the first part I felt as if I was a sort of a tourist, a passer-by, a walker (to take on the Festival’s notion of teku-teku) in this insider play unfolding far, yet so near. The second half was reminiscent of some of the Shūji Terayama’s media mix pieces such as Laura. Terayama’s works often completely obliterate the meaning through these methods of using screen and real performance. This is perhaps also the case of spacenotblank’s show. This is neither theatre nor film. It exists in a liminal space where performers and spectators meet their gazes hesitantly posing difficult questions about what a shared space is.

The second show that I saw wasn’t Japanese. In fact, it was another genre-bending piece, by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger called Tanz. It starts as a seemingly innocent ballet class to turn into a two-hour chaos. It is pointless discussing the content of the show, you’ll probably look it up online anyway now that I have mentioned it. For me, the show confirmed this feminist (Austrian?) contemporary tradition of questioning the commodification of female body by inscribing oneself into the performance or a play. Elfriede Jelinek’s plays and directorial approaches to her plays come to mind. In Tanz, Holzinger herself is somewhat on the sides gazing at the female bodies as a choreographer in similar way that Jelinek watches over the performers/characters in her plays. Thus, the gazing happens on multiple levels during the performance itself, not just between the audience and the performers.

There were only two questions left hanging in the air, at least for me. The first one, and perhaps the most obvious one, was how the Japanese audiences will view this foreign performance. The second question was how this show interacts with spacenotblank’s show. On the first question, I am happy to report that I was taken aback by the (un)ease with which the Japanese audiences engaged with this rather difficult to watch show. The people sitting next to and in front of me weren’t young either. I mentioned earlier in my posts that Japanese audiences are usually very reserved. This wasn’t the case here. Even when the scenes unfolding probably presented a shock to their eyeballs, they remained one hundred percent with the female performers who quite literally give their all on stage and enjoy being comfortable with their bodies. The middle part of Tanz sees Holzinger stopping the whole spectacle and asking the audience members for money donations in a gamified way. There was no problem finding an audience member to play along with (offering ¥10000, about £65). In a different way to attending the spacenotblank’s Views, I again felt as a tourist, a passer-by, and a walker (an informed one?) witnessing an interaction between domestic and foreign gaze. For it was clear in that moment of total halt, that she, too, along with the other performers gazed at the Japanese audience in awe. By the end, when everything is descending in a total chaos and mess on stage abound, it seemed that audiences were at the edge of a seat ready to clap for longer than I have seen over the last two months in Japan (and this was now my 25^th show!). But let’s not kid ourselves that these shocks are Western products. The history of Japanese performance is full of similar examples. It’s equally important to note that the audiences of Kyoto Experiment have had many years to prepare. It’s what the festivals thinking about the programme both intellectually and with care for audiences do. It must have not been an easy for Kyoto Experiment to programme this given that controversy is usually frowned upon in Japan (see for example this article on Aichi Triennale 2019 article) These are important things to consider.

 In between two shows (both were happening at ROHM Theatre Kyoto), I had some time to visit Tsutaya bookshop as part of the same complex. There was a section of selected books by the Kyoto Experiment directors and one of the books, Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle (The Society of Spectacle) was on display.  I first came across his work when I worked with French director Armand Gatti in early 2000s, so my brain travelled back in time. Debord discusses how everything in our lives has been turned into representation. Our existence centres around ‘having’ which is just an appearance. In other words, relationships are no longer important, they are treated as commodities mediated by images. Debord called for the overuse of these images and representational language to disrupt this situation.  Having seen both shows the choices for the Festival’s opening weekend became much clearer to me. While Views made us primarily think of the audience as a commodity due to being almost left on their own in the space, Tanz plays with multiple gazes negotiated through seemingly shocking imagery. The two performances therefore talk to each other by layering the multiple readings of Debord’s notion of spectacle making us self-conscious of the situation of performance.

On a final note, the sensations experienced last weekend were eye-opening in the same way when I watched some of the productions in my teens and early 20s at the Eurokaz festival which took place in Croatia between 1987 and 2013. I am now finding myself having to dig up some of these memories to try to make sense of present experience, to re-think it in a Japanese context. Such difficult performances also demand from us theatre scholars and critics to think anew just as much as audiences. Finding new-old vocabulary to discuss these new relationships in this wide (performance) world could create some exciting moments for future  exchanges.

Both performances discussed here were on 1 October 2022.

I would like to thank Kyoto Experiment team for providing me with the images.