Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024 / Michael Lanigan

The Delegation of the European Union to Japan has held “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” to explore the possibilities of criticism in culture and the arts during the international performing arts festival Kyoto Experiment 2024 (held 5-27 October). This initiative is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan, operated by the Goethe-Institut Tokyo, and supported by Kyoto Experiment and the Saison Foundation.

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Stand by Me

It was a meandering road to nowhere; five treadmills dispersed throughout the exhibition room in the Horikawa Oike Gallery, all joined up by wiring that wound across the reflective black floor.

The audience had been separated from the performance space by a thin silver streamer, beyond which three coffee cups sat atop a round table, surrounded by stools, one knocked on its side.

One of the treadmills was positioned below a desk hosting an assortment of analogue synthesizers, mixers and samplers. An unending array of cables and patches – red, black and green – spilled over the side of the table, knotting and twisting, contributing to a sense that we were peering under the lid of the real world, getting a good peek into its internal engine.

As the treadmills were switched on, they bleeped in unison, before the sound of swirling winds filled the gallery. Slowly, a female noh actor, Haruna Tanaka, entered the scene. She paced through the space, dressed in a black and grey robe, with her back facing the audience.

“At midday something occurred,” Tanaka sang in a vibrating monotone. “As dusk arrived, misfortune followed.”

Accompanying her were four young performers; Haruka Sakai, Sachi Nakamura, Akari Nomura and Leon Kou Yonekawa. Detached and otherworldly, they proceeded to step up onto the exercise machines.

“We have no purpose, because we are already dead,” they chanted as they walked. “We don’t drink coffee… we have no destination.”

Still, they longed for one, they said. “Because we once lived.”

The treadmills rolled in sync with a leisurely, popping and rattling drum machine produced by the producer Tentenko from her synth rig. Howling winds were replaced by minimalist muzak, and Stand by Me, the imaginatively eccentric collaboration between playwright and director Shinichi Anasako and dancer and choreographer Pijin Neji unfurled.

What would be more experimental at the Kyoto Experiment festival than to create a play, loosely inspired by the 1986 Rob Reiner directed coming-of-age drama of the same name, Anasako said at the post-show talk later. And that desire to invert this label is what propels the drama that would play out for the next ninety minutes.

But whereas Reiner’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella The Body trailed four boys searching for a dead body in 50s Oregon, Anasako and Neji follow four lost souls in an urban afterlife outside, looking to find a live body. More crucially though, the duo deconstruct Reiner’s wistful nostalgia for childhood by placing their quartet of ghosts in a zone outside time, their memories tattered and their identities fading.

Though the overarching narrative presents the viewer with a metaphysical journey that examines the borders between life and death, the moment-to-moment interactions convey a story of an atomised society and alienated youth. Anasako and Neji’s characters appear burned out and despondent.

Even the eagerness to carry out the task at the heart of the story – assisting one of the deceased, Kumi, to speak with her brother from beyond the grave – barely compels them to act with haste. Kumi seems more content to smoke a cigarette, than to act for vast swathes of the play’s duration. Ironically, later when their solution comes in the form of communicating via a noh play, she and her companions lightly chide the artform for its slow pace.

Machitani and her companions’ lingering sense of aimlessness is brought to the attention of the audience from the start through how the play represents the roads winding around this afterlife. The treadmill, originating as a punitive device in 19th century British prisons, before later being adopted as a tool of self-improvement, embodies, as Tanaka sings, their “wandering without purpose.” After all, what is a treadmill if not a means of helping someone go nowhere fast?

The peculiarities of Anasako and Neji’s afterlife signal to the theme of alienated youth, as it bears no resemblance to a heavenly space, but rather a murky hauntological interzone, a basement with echoes of the past and cancelled futures. This carries over into the live soundtrack performed by Tentenko, which is a collage of retro-futuristic electronica and hazy loops of pre-recorded acoustic instruments.

Stand by Me’s landscape is teeming with anhedonia. It is akin to a clone of their former homes, but with all the walls, floorboards and sense of identity removed, until all that is left is the plumbing, wiring and a few pieces of furniture. Geographically, the ghosts share the same space as the living. But it is bereft of any beauty in their eyes, and they themselves are largely invisible.

Even the deaths of Anasako and Neji’s characters, it is slowly revealed, slip by without any notice. The central premise of the play is that the four died on the day that a major ecological catastrophe obliterated their city. That insignificance is hinted at in Tanaka’s opening song. Their demise is a mere occurrence relative to the greater misfortune at dusk.

All of this, contrary to what the above might suggest, unfurls in an almost charming way. Stand by Me is a masterstroke in black comedy, matching its dour themes with absurdist humour, a cast of endearingly naïve optimists, whose very determination to be determined is captivating. “Even if the gods are gone, please don’t let our journey end just yet,” says Fujikawa, one of the female protagonists who, on her journey of self-discovery, learns that she had, in fact, been a goldfish.

The endpoint of their journey is not a destination, rather the ability to find meaningful connections, with each character supporting Kumi in her effort to say a proper goodbye to her brother. Here, Stand by Me begins to toy as much with the lines of fiction and reality, as the four are taught by Tanaka to speak with the living through the medium of noh.

It is an amusing twist for the play, almost a modern reimagining of the traditional theatre, to utilise its very structure as the answer to its dilemma. Even more poetic is the thought of alienated kids curing their malaise in a neoliberal society by seeking the help of a self-employed performer in a declining artform, its own disappearance evidenced in their need to be taught its fundamentals by Tanaka, all the while commenting on how slowly noh moves.

As the protagonists connect with the living, and with their own heritage, the real world seeps in more and more. The audience, seated at the very back of the room, start to realise that, if they wish to depart, or excuse themselves momentarily, they will need to walk through the unfolding fiction. Tentenko, playing a version of herself, is revealed to be a guardian of sorts, helping the dead to breathe via musical vibrations in the absence of oxygen.

Her interactions disrupt the shadowy tranquility of the drama when she notifies Sarada, the male protagonist, whom the audience discovers is a goldfish, that he is coming back to life. And as he makes that transition, back into the land of the living, the story climaxes in his exiting the room, the lobby and the gallery itself, wandering away down the street, observed by Horikawa Oike’s security guard and a passer-by.

The lights within the exhibition room flash. A drum machine generates thumps and crashes over the speaker system. The audience fixates quietly on the street beyond the front entrance, its traffic and pedestrians for several moments, before the border is established once more with an initial smattering of startled applause.

 

Michael Lanigan
Michael Lanigan is the arts and culture reporter with the Dublin Inquirer. His work focuses on Dublin’s visual and performing arts scenes and examines the impact of government policy on the city’s culture and heritage. He also currently hosts the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Lexicon Library’s artist interview series, Walk and Talk. His writing has appeared in Vice, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Tokyo Weekender, Metropolis, The Business Post, Huck and Totall