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  • Tokyo TimA Report from Dokkyo University, January 2003
  • Tim Miller (bio)

Hello.Konnichiwa.My name is Tim.Watashi no namae ha Timu desu.I come from America.Watashi ha Amerika kara kimashita.I love Japan.Nihon ga daisuki desu.Do you come to this bar often?Kono bar ewa yoku kimasuka? [End Page 143] Let's take off our clothes.Fuku wo nugimashou.

I walked naked through the audience in a university theatre in Japan, trying to scope out whose lap I would plotz my sweaty butt down on for a section of my performance. I knew I was in trouble when I saw a young Japanese woman hiding her eyes to avoid my nude, Western, gaijin body! She was not just covering her face with a few fingers, but rather burying her head as far as possible in her armpit under a tangle of elbows and forearms.

I was performing Body Blows, the show based on my new book, in Tokyo at the Dokkyo University International Forum on Performance Studies. This remarkable conference was organized by Professor Takahashi Yuichiro, a leader in Japanese inquiries into performance theory and practice. I was fortunate to be invited to perform my work at the forum along with performer Denise Uyehara, my colleague from L.A., and Japanese installation artist Shimada Yoshiko. The conference was subtitled "Resistance, Mutation, and Cultural Hybridities" and all three of those things were definitely happening as I gamboled without clothes through the aisles while the Dokkyo student's gaze crept further and further inside her armpit.

Now, admittedly, I have made young ladies—as well as young men—all over the English-speaking world shrink into their seats, eyes gazing heavenward, when they encountered my queer narratives onstage and even queerer body in and among their orchestra seats. Sure, dismantling the unfamiliarity, the ick-factor, and the general invisibility of lesbian and gay embodied experience is one of my main jobs as a performer wherever I travel and perform, but there was something quite unique about approaching my first audience in

Though I have performed before in many countries, cultures, and languages—and even allowing that this was an international conference sponsored by the English Department at Dokkyo University—I felt particularly challenged. My inner self-doubt monologue was fast and furious: How will this Japanese audience make sense of my homocentric worldview? Why should they give a shit about the travails of an American gay performance artist? In my text-heavy U.S. performance, how are they even going to understand a word of what I say!

We can coolly theorize about the pitfalls of cross-cultural dialogue, but the specificity of live performance is a much more gnarly, real-time communication challenge. It's like trying to communicate that you need a slide projector dissolve unit to a technician in Palermo who only speaks Italian. On the upside, there is a kind of freedom that comes to the performer when the audience doesn't necessarily understand every word he is saying onstage. (As if we can even assume that English-speaking audiences understand!) In some ways, the language problem in Tokyo set my performance free. It gave me an opportunity to understand the piece in a totally different way, to literally make sense of it anew.


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Tim Miller performing a piece based on his book, Body Blows, at the 2003 Dokkyo University International Forum on Performance Studies titled "Resistance, Mutation, and Cultural Hybridities." (Photo by Dona Ann McAdams)

I have had this experience before when performing in Sicily or Belgium or Austria, but I felt a fresh [End Page 144] set of performance possibilities come forward in Japan. Of course, as I performed the piece, I indulged in that universal human tendency to negotiate language borders by beefing up my idiosyncratic sign language, that postmodern semaphore of gestural commentary added to my already high-energy, kinetic performance style. But I knew I wanted to come up with some fun, wild, but simple translation devices to make my nonstop English work for this mostly Japanese audience. In Japan, this need I had to translate not so much the...

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