Toshiki Okada’s Ecological Theatre

Such a process of imagination is very familiar to you, who are always involved in so many working processes with people, things, bodies, spaces, sounds, animals, friends, atmospheres, weather, plants, spaces, etc. You are incessantly caring for micro-relations.

—Bojana Kunst¹

WHAT DID THEY ALREADY KNOW?

The profoundly ecocritical performance-installation Eraser Mountain, with text and direction by Toshiki Okada/chelfitsch and scenography/sculpture by Teppei Kaneuji, played at New York’s Skirball Center on the final two days of February 2020.² As a leap year, the chelfitsch theater company, which was founded by Okada in 1997, got to play on an extra day of the year—the already slow dramaturgy of the piece got to stretch time even more. What’s more, it was a bumper week for Japanese arts and culture in NYC. Hideki Noda’s kyôgen-inspired madcap One Green Bottle opened at LaMaMa on the same night as Okada’s final performance and played to packed houses for the next 10 days.

The Japan Society’s wonderful exhibition, Boro Textiles: Sustainable Aesthetics, curated by Yukie Kamiya and Tiffany Lambert, opened on March 5. This was an exhibition of hand-me-downs and stitched-together cloth salvaged from worn-out kimono and remade into clothes worn by peasants in the agrarian Tohoku region; a place where extra layers are sorely needed to survive the dreadfully cold winters. The boro textiles had been collected by cultural anthropologist Chuzaburo Tanaka and they were shown in the exhibition alongside contemporary avant-garde fashions from Japan. Curated to show connections to poverty and isolation, the exhibition was an historical materialist take on place, scarcity, and the everyday. Viewed alongside the clothes of contemporary designers such as Issey Miyake and Yôji Yamamoto, these functionally distressed, over-patched house-coats and padded trousers appeared as avant-garde masterpieces: they evoked the atmosphere and haunting sensations of hard-working bodies and of people long gone.

Prefacing my viewing of the exhibition there was a sculptural installation by Teppei Kaneuji in the rock and water garden of the Japan Society lobby. Kaneuji’s colorful use of plastic tubes and industrial conduit (used extensively also as sculptural forms in Eraser Mountain) are here grafted onto spindly tree branches; an effective contrast to the rough-hewn fabrics, natural dyes, and stich-work of the clothes. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that both Kaneuji’s piece and the exhibition signal to nature—or an ecocritical idea of “nature”—in particular ways.

It is exceptionally rare to have such a concentration of Japanese artworks in New York City, even given that it is a city known for its frenetic pace of cultural consumption. All of these artworks hinted at distressed environments, the affective power of things and slow time. A question that follows is: what did they know of the future? Abruptly, on March 13, the entire city went into lockdown (and large parts of the world had already done this or were about to). Was there an uncanny signaling to the atmospheres of contagion in these works? The classically “empty” aesthetics (ma) and sensitive atmosphere (funiki) have become previews—in performance terms, “crisis rituals”—of the dystopian outlook of the pandemic. If, as the ecocritical philosopher Timothy Morton argues, “art is thought from the future,” can we ask: what did these works already know?³ What do they signal to in their new materialist dramaturgy?

CAN WE USE THEATRE TO PRESENT A WORLD IN WHICH PEOPLE AND OBJECTS ARE COMPLETLEY EQUAL?

If one has not seen Eraser Mountain, a description might only complicate things. This is because we need to deal with a serious attempt to make a new kind of theatre that is at the same time less certain about what it is. Taking cues from the fields of new materialism and ecocriticism, the work is an experiment in decentering human activity in the creation process and dramaturgy of theatre. Following from this, the work provokes questions about dramatic form, also, for the role of the audience and the experience of watching theatre. What are we looking at...