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106 3 De-familiarizing Japan at La MaMa E.T.C. [I]n New York, where every square inch feels urban, downtown is a refuge from— a repudiation of—the conventionality of Midtown, and mid-everything. Downtown is a concept, and perhaps an archaic one.1 “The brilliant theatrical and dramatic upsurge in Japan in the late 1960s truly merits the appellation ‘renaissance,’” Yasunari Takahashi has written . “It brought about a revolutionary change in the concept of theatrical representation, if not in the actual structure of society.”2 In 1970, just three years after founding the Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe in Tokyo, Shuji Terayama, one of the primary figures of that upsurge, made his American directorial debut in New York at La MaMa E.T.C. As Steven Clark has pointed out, Tenjo Sajiki was “one of the first Japanese theater companies to perform a significant number of plays abroad and it was the only one which was a full participant in the international experimental theater movement of the 1960s and 1970s.”3 Similarly, Takayuki Tatsumi has called Terayama the “enfant terrible of postwar Japanese decadent literature . . . a playwright whom we must recognize for having revolutionized the Japanese sensibility of the urban in the 1970s.”4 Productions at La MaMa by Terayama and his former Tenjo Sajiki disciple and colleague Yutaka Higashi initiated important new cultural connections with Japan. The “uptown,” timeless-culture image of Japan that took shape during the cold-war 1950s and 1960s was significantly challenged in the summer and fall of 1970 by two events at La MaMa. One was The Golden Bat (Gōruden batto), an exuberant Japanese-language rock musical performed by the Tokyo Kid Brothers under Higashi, the troupe’s founder, director, and principal writer. The other, described by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei as a “wildly comic” play “permeated with . . . ambiguities and inversions : crime and innocence, illusion and reality, truth and lies, female and male, sex and love, education and life experience,”5 was La Marie-Vison, De-familiarizing Japan at La MaMa E.T.C. 107 an English-language version of Kegawa no Marī written and directed by Terayama. The Golden Bat and La Marie-Vison gave New York audiences a breakthrough glimpse of Japan’s experimental theater scene. In hosting the presentations, La MaMa brought Japanese theater downtown, thus helping usher Japan and its performing arts into new debates about cultural production and encounter, while at the same time solidifying the position of La MaMa as a leading voice in those debates. This chapter examines how the exoticized image of Japan was defamiliarized through just over a decade of performing arts events that began with Higashi and Terayama at La MaMa in 1970 and culminated in the first appearance in the United States of butoh dance pioneer Kazuo Ono, which took place at La MaMa in 1981. The de-familiarization process was twofold, evident in the expanding number of performing arts organizations and other cultural institutions eager to present Japan to the American public and in the growing number and range of material and artists from Japan being introduced. By making new Japanese work an integral part of its program in experimental theater, La MaMa was the first institution to incorporate Japan fully within New York’s competitive performing arts environment. La MaMa also became a model for other institutions in providing audience access to a de-familiarized Japan through the performing arts. In the 1970s and 1980s, work from Japan that had never been seen before in the United States—the rock musicals, innovative theater, and butoh and other heretofore little-known forms of dance featured at La MaMa—began attracting widespread interest and critical attention. New Networks of Cultural Production in Japan The late 1960s theatrical and dramatic upsurge to which Yasunari Takahashi referred had grown out of and in turn stimulated the development of powerful new networks of cultural production in Japan. “[L]ittle theater [early avant-garde theater] and modern dance were from their inception closely related,”6 Akihiko Senda has observed, noting that Juro Kara, founder of the Situation Theatre (Jokyo Gekijo) in the early 1960s, studied under Tatsumi Hijikata, who developed butoh with Ono. In 1972 Akaji Maro, a prominent actor in Kara’s Situation Theatre, established Dai Rakudakan, a troupe that made its US debut in 1982 as “the first company to introduce Japan’s Butoh dance-theater on a large scale to the United States.”7 To cite an example unrelated to dance, Higashi...

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