Performance enacting mobility and shifting borders – the global countryside?

ABSTRACT

This essay considers how performances by Takayama Akira (founder of Port B) are made to explore experiences of mobility and migration among people who traverse geographical and geopolitical spaces in Japan and elsewhere. In making works that uncover hidden sites that are connected to diasporic and migratory passage, Takayama invites reflections on questions of borders, zones, regions, and the passages between them. Our paper will discuss how Takayama’s work is a form of place-making. His tour performances and mobile ideas of theatre create complexities around the meaning of place in terms of re-spatialized institutional strata and civic designations. We aim to explore how civic institutions and designations such as “rural” and “city” are being broken and/or made liminal. Our paper will outline how this spatial dramaturgy has ramifications for the “global countryside” (Woods) as something both institutionalized and yet to be.

KEYWORDS:

• Takayama Akira
• tour performance
• place-making

Essay

The contemporary movement by artists toward the countryside is real, and in some ways fits within a classic modernist paradigm. In the west, seminal figures like William Morris laid out utopic aesthetic alternatives to industrial urbanism in works like News from Nowhere (Morris 1891), and in Japan, early twentieth century groups like the Shirakaba-ha (White Birch Society) similarly sought a critical distance from urban life by creating artistic farming communes in the Japanese countryside (see for example Nishigaki 1990). The return-to-the-earth global movements of the 1960’s paralleled these earlier actions; many of these movements were influenced by rereading Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 meditation on living in harmony with nature On Walden Pond (Thoreau 2014), and this together with a renewed interest in counterculture politics led to egalitarian experiments in communal living. In 1960s Japan, these ideas sometimes took the form of artistic happenings in rural settings and open air music festivals, and there are some documented cases in which urban student radicals became rice farmers (see for example Eckersall 2013; Nornes 2006).

So, the binary of urban verus rural life is itself one of the most basic organizing logics of modern life, globally, and the place of art seems to fit within and even promote this logic; the values of “art” in a generic sense still seem to be positioned as outside the capitalist values of most urban environments. It might seem, then, that the trends we’ve been seeing over the last decade or two, of the arts seeming to secede from urban consumerist life, is in fact just one more iteration of this same logic of modern life. The hope, in this view, is that the arts might create a more meaningful and somehow more “real” relation to everyday life, and the countryside might literally and physically be a place outside capitalist urban modernity where that could happen.

This goal was at least in part an inspiration for the angura theatre director Suzuki Tadashi to move his theatre troupe from urban Tokyo to the mountains of the Toyama countryside in 1976—thus, establishing a trend for rural theatre festivals (see Figure 1). Changing the name of his company from the Waseda Little Theatre (Waseda Shōgekijō) to the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), the new base in the remote village of Toga in Toyama Prefecture was a way for his theatre to reconnect with a life force and vitality found in nature (Suzuki 2009b). Suzuki was not only a pioneering figure in developing artistic practice as a source of rural regeneration, but his central inspiration was also that the harsh lives of the villagers – whom he perceived were surviving against immeasurable odds of capitalist modernity – would set an example for his theatre to rediscover its own vitality and sense of purpose (Suzuki 2009a). The “somehow more real” for him lay in having his theatre reconnect with the primordial forces of Japanese nature and premodern aspects of village life. Suzuki saw Toga as new kind of public space for theatre that he wanted to infuse in an expanded notion of theatre.

Figure 1. SCOT studios at Toga Mura. Photo: Peter Eckersall.

Indeed, it is perhaps worth hanging onto the idea that somehow, the figure of the countryside – and the role of the arts – is to serve as a kind of counter to urban modernity; a means of questioning and perhaps changing the more problematic structures of life we have. But it’s also worth questioning whether the very opposition of urban and rural is really still so clear, and whether the urban-vs.-rural binary is really so strong an organizing force of the everyday. If that binary is starting to fade, what does it mean to invoke Woods’ concept of the “global countryside,” especially in the context of the arts (Woods 2016, 485–507)? There is no longer a bucolic escape (if there ever was), and even if the hope is for art to foster quotidian expressions of the countryside, this is never fully removed from the structural collapse of the rural itself (including changes in demography, economy, political patronage, and so on). In other words, the notion of a rural space as invoked in the classic artistic return to an authentic other space of country only compounds the reality of rural crisis.

Takayama Akira and heterotopic spaces

The real, rural countryside still plays a role – and rural arts and performance festivals have grown to encompass mass tourism and international programming not to mention political interference and censorship – but rather than simply focus on that, we’d like to playfully start with Takayama Akira’s use of heterotopic spaces. Takayama is director and founder of Port B, a performance company based in Tokyo that takes inspiration from postdramatic theatre techniques and what the performance scholar Carol Martin calls the “theatre of the real” (Martin 2013). He borrows the term “heterotopia” from Michel Foucault, who introduced the idea in his 1986 text Of Other Spaces. Foucault himself was notoriously vague about it, but in simple terms, a heterotopia is a real place (not a utopia), that serves as a real place of difference to the order of life we have; it may help to complete the given order of things, but it’s also a place that mixes in real difference, and so is a place of real potentiality and change. Heterotopias are “places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites […] [real sites that] are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 24; emphasis ours). Heterotopic spaces have a real but different relation to time. They break with what Foucault calls “traditional time” and exist as slices of time, full of inversions. Similarly, Foucault mentions the existence of festivals as a way of making time more fleeting and transitory.¹

Ironically, by these terms the modernist conception of the rural countryside has always been utopic. It has tended to turn the countryside into an aestheticized space, in which art might somehow ground real experience – but in fact it’s really just a fantasy, produced by the urban. The countryside, in other words, remains just an urban imaginary (and, even if you do go to the country, it’s not actually a space of the real).

There are of course still plenty of examples of utopic arts movements in Japan’s contemporary countryside. In one area of Chiba alone, for example, these might include the global Japanese architectural firm Atelier Bow Wow creating a studio for themselves in an old akiya home (see Figure 2), or the Muji company’s use of federal funds to create a “country store” (see Figure 3) as well as a rice field with overlooking viewing platform, which allows urbanites to purchase their “own rice plots” or have sake made from their bit of rural rice paddy (see Figure 4). In these examples, the countryside as a utopic space of aestheticized lifestyle persists. Importantly, these persist as utopias more than they do as real, effective heterotopias.

Figure 2. Atelier bow wow’s akiya home in the Chiba countryside. Photos: Thomas Looser.

Figure 3. Muji’s “country store”. Photos: Thomas Looser.

Figure 4. Muji’s rental rice field, with viewing/yoga platform. Photos: Thomas Looser.

This describes neither Takayama’s vision of an artistic practice of heterotopia, nor what one might think of as a “global countryside” in his work. Takayama is deeply interested in place and place-making, and in starting out with a kind of artistic performative environment that places us outside the given urban norm – in other words his work is a model for performance as heterotopic place making.² And his real goal is to reorganize the institutional structures of the everyday, at fundamental levels, from the idea of a home to the structure of a “university.” He explicitly hopes to integrate his artistic practices, and his artistic “outside,” into the everyday – and he hopes that his artistic performances will in fact lose their quality as an artistic outside and become part of the regular functioning of a contemporary (urban) everyday. Rather than a literal rural world, Takayama’s art space is closer to what Michael Woods (2016) called a “hypothetical space,” that is apparently outside the current order of things but is in fact a space of potentiality that emerges from within. Takayama refers to the notion of heterotopia in several of his key works, beginning with Tokyo Heterotopia (Kitazawa 2013), a “theatrical investigation into urban otherness in Tokyo” in which audiences experienced hidden spaces in the city via a walking tour while holding old-fashioned transistor radios (Kitazawa 2013).

As people approached a particular site, they could tune into a narrowband broadcast frequency and listen to everyday lives of people, many of whom are immigrants and/or members of Tokyo’s largely invisible precariat (see Figure 5). The communities in Tokyo Heterotopia came from impoverished small towns or small farms, and they continue to move between these different spaces – their lives and work blur the distinction between urban and rural.

Figure 5. Tokyo Heterotopia. Photos: Port B.

In her essay on Tokyo Heterotopia, the scholar Iwaki Kyoko notes the twin influences of Terayama Shūji and Walter Benjamin on Takayama’s work (Iwaki 2017, 211). Terayama’s citywide performances in the 1960s and 1970s proposed a dramaturgy of human immersion with the city. And Takayama has made works in direct relation to Benjamin’s writing, such as One Way Street (2006) – a tour performance of the Edo-era atmosphere of Jizō-dōri in Sugamo ward in Tokyo, and a synecdoche of Benjamin’s Arcades Project.³ According to Iwaki, Benjamin and Terayama, despite their differences, “sought to rupture everyday routine by adopting new insights, through which a new politico-historical constellation would emerge” (Iwaki 2017, 211). Takayama said that what “both thinkers thought of as a revolutionary moment emerged from acknowledging the slight shifts in everyday life, through which outmoded modalities suddenly attained new meanings” (Iwaki 2017, 211). It is this sense of there being slight shifts in space and time – the outmoded analog radio technology, for example, and the juxtaposition of things as a constellation that comes together and falls apart in the same moment – that is heterotopic. Takayama said in an interview that “by collecting and connecting these hidden events [in Tokyo Heterotopia], I tried to form a constellation, bringing into relief an alternative history” (cited in Iwaki 2017, 212). Similarly, while Takayama is evidently interested in something like Japan’s “global countryside,” he seems to be only interested in that countryside to the extent that it is really directly connected to a wider history of things that are themselves already of the urban everyday.

Happy Island: The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous

A good example of this approach is Takayama’s video installation Happy Island: The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous (premier 2015), that was made in response to the 2011 Fukushima disaster (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous on the Last Day (Takayama poster except). Photo: Port B.

The work’s title references an image from a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible showing a banquet of righteous personages, who are depicted as animals wearing crowns, and eating and drinking. The image shows the early modern fear of possession and depicts a world in which the border between human and non-human was porous. These days, we mainly know about this image through a commentary on it by Giorgio Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal (Agamben 2014), which explores how distinctions between humans and animals are formed in a crucible of logocentrism. Agamben calls the figures in the picture “eschatological animals” (Agamben 2014, 1), apocalyptic and passing into death. Both the image and a short excerpt from Agamben’s text were reproduced for the installation and they effectively set the scene for Takayama’s work to upend the everyday social order and provoke thought about relations between the human and the Anthropocene, and how rural Fukushima and the disaster itself are inevitably connected to technological-capitalist-urban modernity (see Kohso 2020). Nuancing this perspective, the critic William Andrews perceptively notes that the full title of the original image is The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous on the Last Day. The final words are not used by Takayama, a fact that Andrews sees as a sign of hope. He writes that the work is “sans its final four words, and thus its apocalyptic tone. There is a possibility of a future” (Andrews 2015).

Another point to consider is that Takayama adds to the title of the image the phrase “Happy Island” in English, a literal translation of Fukushima. The work was installed as a triptych of video screens and projections spread across three rooms of the gallery. While it is not a literal reenactment of the tableau in the banquet scene, the three linked performative responses are certainly not hopeless in their tone, and in fact each show contrasting yet heterotopic dynamics.

Part one, also called “A banquet,” has five high-definition video screens arranged in a room that are showing images of a herd of cows grazing (see Figures 7 and 8). The cows are owned by a farmer named Yoshizawa Masami, whose land and the animals he keeps lay inside the 20-kilometer radiation infected perimeter that was established after the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima powerplant. What we are seeing on the screens is Yoshizawa’s farm, that he renamed “Farm of Hope” (Kibō no Bokujō) and he continued to tend to his cows after the disaster, even though he could no longer sell them at the market. In his words, his farm became an act of protest: “a living testimony to the human folly here in Fukushima” (Yoshizawa in Fackler 2014). His cows are shown living out their daily existence and they are unaware of their slow-death by radiation poisoning. The landscape is exceptionally verdant and looks like prime farming land, but, of course, we know that it too is contaminated.

Figure 7. Part one of The Messianic Banquet. Photo: Port B.

Figure 8. Part one of The Messianic Banquet. Photo: Port B.

Yoshizawa became well-known in Japan when in 2014 he and another farmer named Matsumura Naoto traveled to Tokyo and tried to unload one of their bulls in front of the Ministry for Agriculture building. The bull along with other of their cattle had developed white spots on its hide. This was a possible result of radiation sickness, which the Ministry for Agriculture representative promptly denied. “Discarded towns, discarded evacuees. The cattle and people are still living. We cannot remain silent,” Yoshizawa said (in Fackler 2014).

In a second room of the exhibition, a small screen shows the hands of a young piano player from Fukushima playing Bach’s pastoral idyllic piece Sheep May Safely Graze. The performance is shot in a single take from above and is depersonalized and yet saccharine. The romantic image of the countryside that is expressed in Bach’s music is undercut when we know that the hands of the player are from the disaster zone, beguiling and a little shocking.

The final part of the installation is a single large-scale projection. A camera mounted on a cow’s back shows Yoshizawa wearing a Japanese monkey mask, leading the cow through the uninhabited streets of the town of Namie (see Figure 9). It is one of those images that were shown repeatedly after the disaster, of towns that were immediately evacuated, leaving everything in place but completely empty of people. The audience can wander between the scenes, although there is a dramaturgical sense that we first see the images of the cows, then the musical interlude, and finally Yoshizawa’s performative protest. The rural animals, farm life, radiation and plaintive music folding back into the messianic imaginary. It is also a vision of apocalypse that many of us saw repeated in our towns and cities in the COVID-19 lockdowns. In all of this, the countryside of Fukushima at once serves as a place from which one might step out of the everyday order of urban Japan, but only in such a way as to show that this really is at the heart of urban Japanese life; it is a “rural” position of critique, as much it is within the logic of urbanized everyday Japanese life.

Figure 9. Part three of The Messianic Banquet. Screen grab: Port B.

Foucault wrote that “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 26). As heterotopias, they enact compulsions or oppressions, such as the exclusion zone or radiation sickness. But they also create complexities and prompt activism, such as when the farmers bring their animals to the city and confront urban spaces with a porosity of radiation and animality. Takayama’s installation was presented somewhat incongruously at the Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum gallery, the Hermès flagship store in Tokyo, leading Andrews to quip in his blogpost that the work “presents chilling reminders of Fukushima to Ginza shoppers” (Andrews 2015). This is another heterotopic moment, one that crashes the empty faux aristocratic Hermès fashions – that are much loved by wealthy Japanese as a representation of conservative style – with Takayama’s installation of uncanny nature. It is also a fact that Takayama normally presents his work in transit zones and proletarian spaces that can be found in the “old town” parts of Tokyo, such as Sugamo and Ikebukuro. That is not to say that the Hermès store, or Ginza itself for that matter, are not manifestations of heterotopia. These elaborate expensive spaces that make up the carefully designed real estate of Ginza are displays rather than a shopping street (shōtengai). They are inversions of the street world that manifest the fantasy of conspicuous consumption and cosmopolitanism while also being a central theme in Japan’s history of urbanization and modernity.

Closing comments

The structure of the “global countryside” we have now thus doesn’t really allow for a simple rural-urban binary anymore, if it ever did. Here too we seem to be in agreement with Woods (2016), and his emphasis on networked circulation and connective flows of life, including the countryside as much as the city. To rethink the idea of the rural in this way, one could construct an alternative intellectual genealogy that might go back at least to the anthropologist James Clifford, and his idea of traveling cultures (Clifford 1992). Following Clifford (loosely), where the modernist urban-versus-rural binary essentially assumed a perspective that looked at life in terms of dwelling practices – in other words, it assumed a kind of permanent placed-ness for each group of people – Clifford insisted that we should re-focus our attention to look at the ongoing movement and travel not just of people, but of cultures and life in general. In simple terms, he suggested the privileged modern topos should be a hotel rather than a house. More than ever, this perspective on human everyday life doesn’t allow for a clear distinction between urban and rural, or between cities (as worlds of connection and movement) versus countrysides (as worlds of stasis and fixed places).

Along these same lines, again in the same small area of rural Chiba mentioned previously, a small group of people have created a communal living space that includes participants from MIT, from The University of Tokyo, from Shenzhen China, and elsewhere, who work with digital technology. Called the Satoyama Design Factory and Hacker Farm, it seeks to create a community based at once on agriculture, technology, and education (see Figure 10). They retain their global connections, and use them to create a global tech company, but with the explicit aim of helping to create a small community within rural Chiba (and an elementary school in particular); this configuration is part of the “global countryside” as well.

Figure 10. The Satoyama Design Factory/Hacker Farm. Photos: Thomas Looser.

Takayama’s heterotopic space is similarly premised on a world of complete and constant connection and movement, out of which new communities might emerge. And his interest is especially in migrants, in refugees, and other groups of the globally displaced – people, in other words, who really have no place at all, either within the city or within any countryside. These are people, and social positions, who themselves cannot fit into any simple binary of fixed places. In working on their behalf, Takayama is ultimately arguing for a reorientation and reconfiguration of the general logics of modernity that have produced these positions.

Art itself has always been seen as standing outside of the modern everyday, and for both art and politics the rural countryside has remained a central trope as a place that somehow might really serve as an outside to the modern world. For the past 20 years or so, it has again appeared as a place where one might somehow truly separate oneself and secede from the modern everyday; this is the logic of utopia, and really nothing very new.

Takayama is asking us to see the place and role of art differently. He is asking us to forgo utopia, and what is now really an impossible dream of the outside. He’s not giving up on the countryside, including as a place of critique and change. But he’s constantly reminding us that the countryside is really an element internal to the urban everyday; as a place of potentiality, critique and change, it’s a heterotope rather than a utopia, caught within the mix of the everyday life we have. Like the farmer Yoshizawa’s cows, or Agamben’s messianic/apocalyptic animals (Agamben 2014), Takayama is constantly reminding us that the rural and the outside only are effective insofar as they are brought within the everyday life we have. Art, too, thus does retain a critical position relative to everyday life. But it too operates only insofar as it encounters and performatively works within the everyday, rather than standing outside as in the classic modern formulation. Assuming it does so effectively, the artistic performance then shifts the everyday from within, ultimately losing its place as “art” and returning art fully to everyday life.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Eckersall

Peter Eckersall (PhD in Asian Studies, Monash) is Professor of Performance Studies at the Graduate Center CUNY. His research interests include Japanese theatre, dramaturgy and contemporary performance. He monographic publications include: Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013), New Media Dramaturgy (coauthored 2017) and Dramaturgy to Make Visible (2024). He is the cofounder and dramaturg for Not Yet Its Difficult.

Tom Looser

Tom Looser (PhD in Anthropology, U. of Chicago) is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at NYU. His areas of research include Cultural Anthropology and Japanese studies; art, architecture and urban form; new media studies and animation; and critical theory. He has served on the editorial boards of journals such as Mechademia and the new Asian Diasporic Visual Arts, and has published in a variety of venues including Boundary 2, Japan Forum, Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Journal of Pacific Asia, and Cultural Anthropology.

Notes

¹ Also relevant to consider are studies that explore urban space, politics, and history in Japan. See, for example, Yoshimi (1987); Sand (2013).

² For further details on Takayama and place making see Eckersall et al. (2009), Hagiwara (2011), Marschall (2021). For a contrasting discussion of place making and social design in the post-Fukushima era in Japan see Dimmer (2016).

³ The company is named in memory of the French-Spanish boarder town Portbou where Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis, and several of the company’s works are closely informed by his writings.