Terayamaland Mapping the Limits of Theater: Terayama Shūji s Challenge to the Boundary Between Fiction and Reality Project Team: Ruby Bolaria, Jia Gu, Deonte Harris, Kelly McCormick Seminar: Tokyo Risk: Postwar Protest and Contemporary Action Urban Humanities Initiative, Fall 2013 University of California, Los Angeles www.urbanhumanities.edu
Terayama, Shuji. Manifesto. The Drama Review (TDR), Vol. 19, No. 4, New Performance and Manivesto. Dec., 1975 p. 4-87
Theatre without actors and theatre where everyone is an actor, theatre without theatre buildings and theatre where everything is a theatre building, theatre without audience members and theatre where everyone is transformed into an audience member, theatre in city streets, theatre invading private homes, postal theatre, theatre in secret chambers without exits, telephone theatre: These are the trails left by ten years of varied experiments performed by Tenjō Sajiki Theatre Laboratory: I wanted to know: What is an audience? I wanted to know: What is an actor? 1. Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Mika Yoshitake, Miryam Sas, Yuri Mitsuda, Masatoshi Nakajima, and Nancy Lim. Tokyo, 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012.pp.124-25 I wanted to know: What is a theatre? I wanted to know: What is a script? The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea: My Theatre by Terayama Shūji, trans Carol Sorgenfrei Throughout his career, Terayama Shūji (1935-1983), poet, writer, photographer, playwright, director, and dramatist, made use of different media to erase the difference between the real and unreal. His city dramas were sets of plays set up across Tokyo involving a high degree of improvisation and forced audiences and actors alike into uncomfortable and often publicly disturbing situations. Terayama was interested in new relationships between street and stage, reality and fiction, and also challenged the linearity of storytelling and text. By choreographing his actors through brief instruction and leaving the play or action open ended, he gave a nod toward the happenstance nature of urban life and all participants to shake the calm foundations upon which urban life was founded. Working from Terayama s interest in using the text and space of the city as a map to to create new realms of drama, our project seeks to construct an interactive map of Terayama s plays as they shifted from one theme to another. The works that we have selected from his vast oeuvre show a distinct engagement with the ordinary space of life in Tokyo as he sought to question and pressure the boundaries between audience and actor, stage and
street. Throughout his lifetime Terayama shifts across mediums and combines methodologies from different media, particularly in sending the theater to the streets seeking to transform reality into art, dissolving the borders between fiction and reality. Terayama wrote anti-establishment poetry in the imperial court s genre; agitated for sexual revolution; paired velvet platform sandals with suits; put together a theater troupe out of runaways, street musicians, and transvestites; and directed films that invoke Flaming Creatures or some of Andy Warhol s projects. He collaborated in book publishing, theater production, and filmmaking with major countercultural artists like the photographer Moriyama Daidō and the graphic designers Yokoo Tadanori, Awazu Kiyoshi, and Uno Akira, (Steven C. Ridgely, Japanese Counterculture, viii). His oeuvre extends across a vast range of media, and yet rather than see him as a clever dilettante as Steven C. Ridgely warns, we should investigate the political perspectives that he explored throughout his work. Though it is impossible to approach the theater, radio drama, film and agitational performances that Terayama and Tenjo Sajiki, the theatre troupe he founded, created and performed in one discussion, space or book, we look for a way to make connections between the different ideas that he conceptualized. By approaching his work as inherently connected through its adamant denial of an explicit statement of politics and to instead empower the breakdown of society and space, we seek to locate Terayama at the center of counter culture. Placing his work as the location of a various types of dissent, we argue in agreement with historian Steven C. Ridgely, that the vagabond pose never getting tied down, staying in motion, rejecting expertise and specialization, and refusing to keep a job past the time it works for you is central to understanding Terayama Shūji and is the reason treating just one facet of his work (poetry, theater, or film) tend to miss the larger point, (viii). In search of a means to expand the boundaries of media and mirror Terayama s quest to make works that challenged any such boundaries, we look for a way to combine multiple works into one viewing space
by representing them as a visual narrative that moves from the theatre that Terayama sought to break from from, to the streets he sought to deconstruct, and finally back to the theatre. At the same time, we urge the viewer to have a hesitance toward thinking of Terayama s work in a way that homogenizes it as one cohesive body, or thinks of it solely in the terms of a harmless challenge to established boundaries. As Ridgely writes, It is tempting to read this self-fictionalization and generation of false history as a border crossing or a blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality. But what Terayama was doing was more radical than that; he was demonstrating that these categories have flexible boundaries, ones we can manipulate. Recognizing that we will never get closer to reality than what we experience as reality (in phenomenological terms), and that fiction and reality as discursive constructs are in a co-determined relationship, Terayama realized that the boundary of reality could be shifted by pushing and pulling on its perceived border within the realm of fiction. It is quite likely that he was much more concerned with reality than with fiction but realized that it would be more effective to expand the reach of reality by drawing back the border of fiction than to simply push reality further in the fiction s territory (Ridgely 2010:XVIII). Keeping these suggestions in mind and situating Terayama s anti-establishment stance in connection to the contemporary global counterculture movement, we have selected texts from his book The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea: My Theatre that elucidate his conceptions of the format of the theatre, audience, maps, and protest. The Digital Project can be found at https://www.scrollkit.com/s/p7nsfjv
This is a project for the Urban Humanities Initiative. The Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of California Los Angeles is an innovative cross-disciplinary curriculum which brings together scholars in design, digital humanities, literature, urban studies, history, architecture, and art in order to better understand the evolving global metropolis. For the year 2013-14, the theme of risk and resilience were explored in the focus cities of Los Angeles and Tokyo. www.urbanhumanities.ucla.edu