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“Database Animals” and the Avant-garde: Materializing Transnational, Transient Subjectivities in Posthumanity

UCHINO, Tadashi

IntroductionRichard Schechner’s “Five Avant-garde . . . or None,” an

unpublished article, is an updated version in 2006 of an essay hewrote in 1992, as part of the introduction to The Future of Ritual(1993). In that work Schechner finds it “significant” that “howlittle updating the essay needed, indicating that theatre is notchanging much” (1)i. He nevertheless goes on to categorize theavant-garde into five types; the historical, the current, theforward-looking, the tradition-seeking and the intercultural andsays:

These categories clearly overlap. The current avant-gardeincludes work that is future-looking, tradition-seeking, andintercultural. It is often difficult to distinguish thetradition-seeking from the intercultural. But despite therudeness and roughness of the division, cutting the pie intosegments is useful because it reminds us of how complex andmultiple the avant-garde has become. We can see how far thecurrent avant-garde is from the historical avant-garde. Werecognize that the current avant-garde is neither innovative norin advance of. We note that the avant-garde is a style or agenre – or a clutch of genres, and not a “movement.” (22)

Then finally:

In fact, “avant-garde” really doesn't mean anything today –except as a catchword to sell tickets. It should be used only todescribe the historical avant-garde, a period of innovationextending roughly from the end of the 19th century to around themid-1970s. (22-23)

In the same vein, David Goodman in his “Angura: Japan’s

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Nostalgic Avant-garde,” (2006), after closely examining the anguratheatre of Japan during the 1960sii, says in conclusion:

It is hard to imagine from our present vantage point the bipolartheatrical world that existed in Japan prior to the 1960s withmodern theatre opposed to premodern forms. Today, everything ispermitted, and the variations and hybrid experiments seemendless. Given the elasticity and catholicity of the currentscene, which appears able to tolerate almost anything, it isdifficult to imagine how a new iconoclasm could get muchtraction. Experimentation is everywhere, but angura may wellhave been the Japanese theater’s final avant-garde. (263)

It is quite tempting to agree with both of them, thinking “theavant-garde is yesterday,” as Schechner declares at the end of hisarticle (28), whether in the Euro-American contexts or in Goodman’s“Japanese theater.” We can hardly deny that “the current avant-garde is neither innovative nor in advance of” and that “the avant-garde is a style or a genre – or a clutch of genres, and not a‘movement.’” And if we replace the word “the avant-garde” with“angura,” the sentence surely explains Japan’s current theaterscene, in which angura practitioners such as Kara Juro and SuzukiTadashi are still keeping up with the same old “style,iii” and socalled neo-angura practitioners suddenly appeared and quicklydisappeared in the early part of the 2000’s, without getting “muchtraction.iv” Angura certainly became a style; or rather, it seemsangura and/or angura-ness has become one of many items in aperformance history database that anyone has a right to access atany time, after what Goodman calls Japanese theater’s“thoroughgoing ‘angurazation,’” (262) which meant a popularizationand democratization of theatre practices in Japan, where“everything” has come to be “permitted.”

I brought up the word database quite intentionally, keepingin mind Azuma Hiroki’s famous formulating of Japan’s otaku ontologyand subjectivity as “database animals” in his Otaku: Japan’s DatabaseAnimals, first published in 2001 in Japanese, and translated into

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English in 2009v. In the book, Azuma theorizes the 1990s otakuculture by closely looking at their behavior patterns as consumersand by comparing them to a generalized version of theories ofpostmodernity. Otaku, according to Azuma’s definition, are those“who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, videogames, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, animefigurines, and so on.” (3) After the decline of the grand narrativein postmodernity, what he calls a “database model” is vital tounderstand and explain otaku culture, as the translators of theEnglish version concisely summarizes:

The book proposes a model of the “database animal” as a new typeof consumer in the postmodern information era, arguing that,rather than reading the stories “human” mode of consumption thatlongs for the existence of and searches for deeper meaning, thecravings of “animalized” otaku are satiated by classifying thecharacters from such stories according to their traits andanonymously creating databases that catalog, store and displaythe results. In turn, the database provides a space where userscan search for the traits they desire and find new charactersand stories that might appeal to them. (xvii)

What should be noted is that Azuma uses the word “animal” and/or“animalized” not as a general image, but as a result of consciouscritical choice, linking his database model to the Westernphilosophical tradition, as his notion of animality is derived fromAlexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Readings of Hegel. In its secondedition, Kojève famously added an important footnote after twentyyears of the initial lecture, in which he writes, according toAzuma:

. . . after the end of Hegelian history only two modes ofexistence remained for human beings. One was the pursuit of theAmerican way of life, or what he called the “return toanimality,” and the other was Japanese snobbery. (67)

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Note what is meant by “Japanese snobbery” here, as Kojève takes upJapanese ritual suicide as an example. According to Azuma;

[Japanese snobbery] . . . differs from the human way of life inthe “historical” age. For the nature of snobs and theiroppositional stance (for instance, the opposition to instinct atthe time of ritual suicide) would no longer move history in anysense. No matter how many sacrificial corpses are piled up,ritual suicide, which is purely and courteously executed,certainly would not be a motivating force of revolution. (68)

Cleverly and tactfully identifying the otaku culture as the mixtureof “American way of life” and “Japanese snobbery,” Azumasuccessfully proposes an intercultural model for not only thinkingabout otaku subjectivity, but, more importantly, for exploring thepossibility of extending his model for a generalized theory ofpostmodern subjectivity, as the translators understand:

… by discussing otaku culture as a symptom of postmodernsociety, Azuma reveals how the otaku phenomenon both is and isnot a Japanese phenomenon. That is to say, it has some nativeorigins in the unique history of postwar Japan, but it is also aproduct of the late stage of global capitalism that results fromlarge world-historical conditions. Rather than sealing off thespace in which otaku culture must be considered exotic oruniquely Japanese, as previous studies have done. . . Azuma’snuanced understanding reveals the otaku phenomenon to have fargreater and more profound importance beyond the borders of afringe subculture in Japan. . . . For Azuma, the reading andconsuming habits of otaku present one clear case ofpostmodernity’s impact on humanity – we are all becominganimalized. (xviii-xix)

The questions to be asked, in this essay, therefore, are thefollowing: if we are all animalized and the (at least Hegelian)history has come to an end, how can we (re)start the notion of the

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avant-garde? Should we simply discard the notion and be contentwith using different adjectives such as “experimental,”“innovative” and “new” instead, in relativistic terms, toarticulate emerging kinds of performance culture at hand, declaringas Schechner does, that “the avant-garde is yesterday”?

Yanaihara Mikuni’s The Bluebird in New YorkIn late September 2007, there was an event on Japan’s contemporarytheatre at the Graduate Center, CUNY (the City University of NewYork). It was Spotlight Japan, as a part of “Prelude 07: at theforefront of contemporary NYC theatre and performance.vi” I wasappointed as a chief curator for the event, and carefullyconsidering the historical background and theoretical and aestheticconcerns of the festival, I chose four playwrights and their mostrecent work for the occasion; Miyazawa Akio’s The Entrance to the NewTown, Matsuda Masataka’s Auto Dafe, Okada Toshiki’s Enjoy!, andYanaihara Mikuni’s The Blue Bird.vii As for Miyazawa, because of theschedule conflict, his text reading session was to be held inNovember rather than in September. The other three works were to bestage-read on September 29th during Prelude Festival. Josh Fox andInternational WOW company, known for their collaboration withHitsujiya Shirotama’s Yubiwa Hotel, was chosen for Matsuda’s workand Okada’s work was to be performed by The Play Company, known forits English version off-Broadway production of Sakate Yoji’s TheAttic. The main reason why I am speaking about this event, however,is that there was a very enlightening and provocative production ofYanaihara’s work by Daniel Safer and his Witness Relocation.

To choose The Blue Bird as one of Japan’s representativecontemporary plays on my part was simply outrageous and maybenonsense for those who know its contextual status; that is, even inthe Japanese context, Yanaihara—who is one of the members of thedance-mix media group Nibroll— is thought to be a choreographer notthe playwright, though she herself claimed that the performanceversion of The Blue Bird as theatre work not dance at the time of itsfirst production. Later that year in 2007, the play text was to benominated as a candidate for prestigious Kishida Playwrights Award,

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to many people’s surprise at that, but at the time of PreludeFestival, the text was usually considered as something very amateurin the sense that reading it would make any dramatic senseviii. Infact, the play lacks a visible, logical structure, and there is noprogression of the plot; there is only a situation, so to speak,that people seem to work for a science lab in the woods and some ofthem go into deeper into the woods to find what they call a “wildcat,” domesticated yet on the verge of extinction. Other than that,though characters seem to communicate with each other, notraditional sense of dramaturgy is there, and without anypsychological interiority given to them, characters are more likespeaking machines, or at the textual level, a rather absolutelinguistic construct, an abstract being, who are given Yanaihara’squite personalized ideas and words to speak. My description mayremind us of Richard Foreman’s textual practice, and in a sense, itis so.ix But Yanaihara is not a self-conscious modernist likeForeman, and her text has, according to her sensibility, a certaindegree of cohesiveness as most dialogue consists of daily Japanesecolloquial language. The text, therefore, is semantically readable,but dramaturgically not performable. What is interesting is that,as the original production testifies, the text is meant to losesense when the lines are spoken with incredible speed byactors/dancers of Yanaihara’s Nibroll Company. The text thenbecomes somewhat meaningful, contradictory as this may sound, whenspoken on stage, as if those discontinuous scenes and fragmenteddialogues were physically sustained by performers’ physicalpresence and their movements, and that is exactly why I chose thetext. It assumes not Yanaihara’s literary knowledge, but herperformance knowledge, acquired through her long-standingcollaborative work with her dancers and performers.

For the New York presentation, Dan Safer, the director andchoreographer, had his performers memorize the lines and came upwith a 30-minute-long, well-choreographed dance theatre performance-- it was not a complete rendition of the text but a partial one.The resulting performance was something I had not expected. It isdifficult to put what I sensed and felt into words, but if I am

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allowed to use a clichéd expression, “the performance somewhatworked.” I am not saying the performance showed a possibility ofradically new form of intercultural theatre nor an unexpecteddegree of aesthetic strength. Rather, I was simply intrigued by thefact that Yanaihara’s ad hoc, wild words were felt to be almostmiraculously materialized through/by performers’ noisy, notnecessarily well-disciplined, physicality.

“Small Yet Infinite Number of Open Spaces”In the above, I do not necessarily mean the performance was

exceptionally important because I encountered something well beyondmy expectation. Nor do I mean I felt sorry that I did not know PinaBausch-esque dance theatre had found its way into the Americansoil. I sincerely felt that my performative sensitivity and my wayof thinking about and theorizing the performance were drasticallychallenged. I came to remember Richard Schechner’s words when Iinterviewed him in 2005;

Since the 1960s, the idea that a public self-expression is agood thing in itself has become widely shared by young people.When the age of Internet arrived, the idea seems to have beendisseminated into various small open spaces. You can see it inelectric bulletin board and blog sites. In these spaces, acertain kind of freedom is guaranteed, but the freedom here onlymeans, I think, we have a freedom to reflect and decide onsmall, personal matters but everything else is decided bysomebody else, somewhere else. Whether we bomb Iraq or not hasalready been decided, how our annual national budget would bespent has already been decided, and what kind of occupation andjob there can be has also been pre-determined. As if in themiddle ages, you might say. That sort of thing. In anenvironment where “almost everything has already been decided,”there are still small yet infinite number of open spaces andthere, young people are resonating, reverberating with eachother. They are doing so because they desire freedom, thoughthey are not necessarily aware of the fact that the big

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decisions have already been made.

According to Schechner, “young people are resonating, reverberatingwith each other” because “they desire freedom.” When I saw Safer’sversion of The Blue Bird, I sensed the expression of this idea: notvia Internet but in using their own material bodies. If Yanaihara’stext can be considered to have as its base her performanceknowledge acquired through her choreographic, collaborative workwith her Nibroll’s “young people” and their material bodies, is ittoo much or too naïve to say the text somehow resonated,reverberated with young New Yorkers’ sensibility and bodies, whilethey have nothing whatsoever in common in any realistic terms? Itis not, however, an intercultural kind of phenomena, which hasdominated the international performance market for a long time, buta transnational one, in which “the national” is assumed as given,but somehow, something oozes out of the “national” boundaries, tothe extent that those boundaries becomes opaque, almost invisible,though not necessarily subverted.

If my observation seems not too much a matter wishful-thinking, it may become possible to say that this is because of theglobality (the state of globalization), a name for a set ofrelational forces, not as a theoretical concept, but as somethingthat has a real, physical, incessant and continuing influence on usall. If so, the issue is not necessarily economic structure and/orrelations but more about media, as media can be thought responsiblefor constituting—with a kind of affinity and/or intimacy among andbetween different “us”—our sensitivity in general or our ways ofperception in cognitive terms. If we push ourselves further tofollow this line of thinking, the issue of the body would emergeagain, as a rather different set of problems.

Globalisation is bad for your bodyIn reviewing Nibroll’s Coffee in 2002, I wrote the following:

… Nibroll’s performance in which they expose what little bodythey have in space flooded with excessive amount of visual and

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aural information is necessarily foreclosed and self-contained;we cannot find any tiny bit of historical awareness nor acritical consciousness (reflexivity). But, through all thoseperforming bodies and performed body relations, seeminglyconstituted, following the choreographer’s meticulous andthorough observation of bodies and body relations in our dailylife, a sense of violence, not necessarily in concrete terms,emerges and disappears, one instant after another. The sense ofviolence never accumulates within us and is to be forgotten thenext moment. By and through this emergence and erasure ofenigmatically fast sense of discomfort/displeasure (or is itpleasure/comfort?), the sense of noise, the performance wasgiving me a meaning, or rather I was translating what I sensedinto the following message: “Globalization is bad for yourbody!” . . . (Uchino: 2002)

When we say “Globalization is bad for your body,” what we shouldpay more attention is not the already rather clichéd idea of theFoucauldian transition in the system of government and power fromthe disciplinary to the administrative, nor our ontological statusof “bare life-ness” as in elaborated by Georgio Agamben’s writings;it is simply an obvious fact that we are living in the age of theInternet. At least in Japan, within performing arts practice andaccompanying journalistic discursive space, with a few importantexceptions, the Internet, or the virtual, is more than oftennarrativized and/or imagined as antagonistic to what performingarts stand for. Even in Japan’s more academic, theoreticalwritings, it is often the case for those to problematize the issueby strategically contrasting the notion of “liveness,” or“immediacy” in performing arts against that of “virtuality,” or“mediarity” of the digital culture, and, in many cases, they end upgesturing towards transcending the dichotomy. I would argue evenwhen we think of the “live” performance in its generation andtransaction of meaning, we should assume as yet not fullyarticulated kind of body, that which may be termed “the body of theInternet;” we must admit that the Internet is bringing about an

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irreversible transformation and transmutation of our being,physical or virtual.

When Schechner talks about young people’s resonance andreverberation in the open space, he not only suggests thereverberation at the level of language, but at the level ofperceptive sensitivity, and at the level of body as a vehicle ofthat sensitivity; the body in realistic and biological terms andthe body forever disseminating and fragmenting itself into thevirtual; the body incessantly materializing and dematerializingitself, somewhere between the physical world and the virtual space.Should we call it a “database animal’s body,” reminding ourselvesthat “we are all becoming animalized”? If so, an incidental and/oraccidental reverberations of the performing bodies in New York canonly be another “clear case of postmodernity’s impact on humanity –we are all becoming animalized” (ibid.)

Azuma and his translators, as we saw in the introduction,were positing the notion of animality as something less than humanand humanity, noting that Kojève’s original phrasing was “return toanimality.” I would argue, however, we should update the notion ofanimality by detaching it from the humanist tradition, if we are toexplore the possibility of what Schechner calls “small yet infinitenumber of open spaces,” and of trying to see the notion ofanimality within contested theoretical sites of posthuman andposthumanityx.

In the above performance review, I wrote “we cannot find anytiny bit of historical awareness nor a critical consciousness(reflexivity).” This resonates with Schechner’s idea that “[youngpeople] are not necessarily aware of the fact that the bigdecisions have already been made.” But at the moment when we utterthe word posthuman, not the animality nor the database animal, wewould make a drastic severance, discontinuation visible, regardingsuch notions as historical awareness, criticality and reflexivity,as the severance directs us toward a decisive paradigm shift withinthe ontology of body, waiting to be fully acknowledged. The kind ofbody that “desires freedom” therefore reverberates with each otherin open spaces is then not the body of the humans, which is

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conceptualized as such, unconditionally assuming the possibility ofunmediated, immediate communication, and as far as we take this wayof thinking, the body is thus severed and alienated from thenotions of history, critique and aesthetics, all basically andhistorically conceptualized in human and humanistic terms. We allmust acknowledge, as Schechner does, that this has already happenedin one degree or the other; posthumanity is a priori, a given, notsomething that can be denied, critiqued, therefore, something thatcan become a source for imagining an alternative mode of being. Itis a kind of definite reality, the only possible mode of being,irreversible in time, and it only awaits articulation,manifestation, embodiment and, perhaps, analytical and/or literaldescription and transcription.

In more mundane, accessible terms, when many of us spendmuch of our daily lives in front of a computer and/or smart phonescreen, it is natural to assume that, whatever is brought into thelive performance space, be it our daily experiences, bodyconsciousness, or the value system, it comes from our physical andimaginary experience of interacting and negotiating with thevirtual. It becomes necessary for us, for instance, to understandhow various modes of communication in the digital space areembodied, materialized, visualized and/or translated, consciouslyand unconsciously, in live performance practices, when we talkabout any live performance practices at all. It is of course noeasy task, as we have to be dealing with something intangible andslippery, therefore we can only be unscientific and speculative,but after experiencing unexpected transnational reverberation ofthe bodies in the performance of Yanaihara’s text in New York, Icame to realize this is one of the urgent tasks for performancestudies scholars to engage.

Chelfitch and Its Unexpected Welcome into European Festival Culture

Prior to my experience in New York in 2007, I had beenpuzzled by the news that one of Japan’s experimental theatrecollectives, Chelfitch, had a sensational debut in Europe’s

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festival culture circuit in May, 2006. It was at Kunsten Festivald’Arts in Brussels, Belgium, that their Five Days in March (2003) wasenthusiastically welcomed, and after their appearance, Chelfitchwas to get more than fifty offers to perform elsewhere, especiallyin Europe’s continental festival circuits. In Japan, Okada Toshikiand Chelfitch’s presence was annoying for some performance critics,giving rise to the generic discussion of what they do; a somewhatheated controversy on whether it is dance or theatre. I myself wasnot interested in that kind of generic discussion, itself amanifestation of modernity’s urge to categorize when faced withsomething apparently different, but was finding Okada’s workparadoxically radical, in the sense that, in his exploration of hisown style of text-writing in the Japanese colloquialism and his wayof giving a renewed sense of relationship between written languageand performer’s body, Chelfitch’s performance seemed to sink deeperinto the local and even parochial layers of the politico-socio-cultural, within an institutionalized yet attractive trope of “thenational.” In short, there was surely nothing exotic andtraditional about what they do; no visible relationship totraditional forms, including Kabuki, No and Butoh – we might add tothe list Ninagawa Yukio’s empty spectacles of the Westernclassicsxi. Or, even if we consider the recent popularization ofJapan’s subcultural genres, sometimes referred to as “Cool Japan”in both popular and high art fronts, Okada’s methodology hasnothing in common with Murakami Takashi’s conscious hybridizationof the traditional and the contemporary and the popular and thehigh, for Euro-American fine art markets.xii

Christoph Slagmuylder, an artistic director for the KunstenFestival d’Arts, explains in the published conversation betweenOkada, him and myself, after admitting that some elements wereinevitably lost in Five Days in March in Brussels because of thelanguage barrier:

… I really believe that the work of [Okada] Toshiki is in a kindof tension and contradiction between the body and spokenlanguage, an individual and society, what you have to do and

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what the others tell you to do, what you want to do and what youare actually doing. Though I do not like the word "universal," .. . I really think these questions were communicated to theaudience.… [the] presentation of the body in pure immediacy . . . was notnew, but at the same time I had never seen it like that becauseit was articulated in a very new way for me. It is a lot aboutarticulation figuratively and literally, so I think you canarticulate the reality through bodies and through words. Thisspecific articulation was something that I had never seen before.. . (6, 9)

Chelfitch’s enthusiastic welcome in continental Europe may wellhave been by those fed up with Japan’s traditional forms andMurakami’s neo pop visual art. Slagmuylder, however, finds Okada’sarticulation of “the reality through bodies and through words” new,as something he “had never seen before.” He invited Chelfitch assomething that can be appreciated in the same plane of performanceculture, not as something completely different, but as, to use thetitle of the book edited by Michael Harding and John Rouse, as “notthe other avant-garde.” The ensuing welcome Chelfitch has beenreceiving since, not only in continental Europe but some otherparts of the world, seems to prove Slagmuylder was right.

After formulating the thesis of “young people resonating andreverberating with each other in small yet infinite number of openspaces” for understanding The Blue Bird in New York, I came to thinkChelfitch’s welcome in Europe can only be properly explained byresorting to the same thesis. The inescapable reality of globality,almost equivalent to that of networked digital society, isdefinitely “bad for your body.” The idea has increasingly beenshared and nurtured within certain geographical extensions, andOkada Toshiki, taking up an immediate everyday life in Japan as hismaterial, wrote Five Days in March, utilizing a complex narrativetechnique, and translated it as a thoroughly and meticulouslythought-out gestural performance. As a result, he was successful,at least for those in continental Europe, in articulating that

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particular reality of globality “through bodies and through words.”Thus it is natural that Okada’s next work, commissioned by threeEuropean festivals, was called Free Time (2007), in which Okada chosea localized site of “family restaurant” in Tokyo, and the workemerged as a textual and performative inscription of those youngpeople who “desire freedom,” though we do not have a space to gointo the detail of the work.

Transnational performance space as posthuman bodies resonating and reverberating with each other in the open space is not necessarily literally represented in the work, but has been emerging as performative transactions between practitioners and/or between practitioners and audience, reflecting inter- or intra-nationally or inter- or intra-culturally diversified environments for creation. In some of those instances, when it happens, we may be witnessing the moment of materializing transnational, transient subjectivities in posthumanity, however ephemeral and temporary they may be.

ConclusionAs I have depended on two small examples that I myself

experienced, what I have been writing may sound hard to invest. These two may well have been accidental, rather than a tip of an iceberg. In the following years after 2007, however, I came across some other instances of “posthuman bodies reverberating with each other” and it is important to acknowledge at least that we are living in the world where the accidental reverberation could happenanywhere, anytime.

At one end in Japan, there is an emergence of new kind of civil disobedience called Shiroto no Ran (Revolt of the Amateurs). Their existence was recently highlighted and mediatized through series of demonstrations they organized after the Fukushima nuclearsevere accident. Just like recent jasmine revolutions in Arab nations, they utilize the Internet to the full extent, and unprecedented number of people were gathered in different occasionsin different geographical locations, against re-booting of other nuclear plants in Japan. Finally realizing the fact they had not

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been “necessarily aware of the fact that the big decisions have already been made,” participants stood up, not to change the world,but simply asking the government to stop reactivating the nuclear plants.

What is interesting in the context of this essay is that their organization has always been very loose, allowing, for instance, both the extreme right and the left participate in the same demonstration, therefore, while there were some violence involving the police, most of the demonstrations were peacefully executed as if many of them were publicly partying on the street. It was as if people finally came to acknowledge “the self-expression in the public is a good thing in itself,” if we rememberSchechner’s phrase. Thus their demonstration was sometimes a simple, quiet walking (sometimes singing and dancing) of those undisciplined –we can call them posthuman, if you will – bodies of the civilians, young and old, loosely connected with each other, physically and intellectually, while no one except the police tellsthem what to do, what to say, where to go.

Or at the other end of European performance culture, there was, for instance, Lone Twin Theatre’s The Festival, performed at the Kunsten Festival in 2010. The British company is known to dedicate itself in telling an everyday life story in the simplest way possible. The Festival, the last of their The Catastrophe Trilogy, tells a love story of a man and woman, accidentally meeting at a music festival, which accompanies a whale watching event organized by an environmentalist organization. They meet and they depart; there is no dramatic conflict nor a resolution, and the story can happen to anyone of us. Intentionally incorporating a political issue of today, but locating it as a vague, even distant background, Lone Twin Theatre concentrate on telling an everyday life story, with dialogue, song, and actor’s body, not in the proscenium stage, but in the bare platform set in the middle of theatre space, with the audience surrounding it. The performance stays on the verge of becoming merely sentimental, but, somewhat miraculously, it keeps its cool, detached quality till the end. There is nothing spectacular about the work; it is mildly entertaining, and I could

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detect a strong will behind to keep the performance that way, so that it becomes possible not to forcibly draw the audience’s attention but to ask them to loosely engage with it in whatever waypossible. The performer’s body may or may not reverberate with the audience’s, and it’s OK if it doesn’t.

As is typified in the CUNY event, contemporary cultural producers are eager to listen to the voices from outside, especially after 9.11. in the U.S. and elsewhere; whether they are from beyond visible national borders like Japan, or from beyond invisible ethnic or class borders within the nation, or across the Strait of Dover. What comes out of it may only be a textually narrativized duplication, or a physical (re)presentation of what wealready know through visual or print media, therefore that which isalready, always preceded by the reality. It is important, however, that live performance almost always needs the body. If it is not a biological body, nor a disciplined body, but the body that moves, speaks, as if constructed or carved out of its concerns with and for voices from the outside, the possibility of reverberation with each other and/or with the audience is impregnated. While traditional performing bodies are invited into the performance space to organize a community of shared sentiments, which usually stays with the national border, those transnational bodies, not interested in generating any kind of sense of community, are necessarily fragmented and anarchic, that may or may not resonate with each other or with the audience.

All of this can only be accidental by definition, therefore it cannot be institutionalized nor organized into some traditional forms of movement, political or otherwise. That is why it happens if it does in the open space. It keeps happening, and, at least from my perspective, it is happening more frequently than before. If the notion of the avant-garde as “innovative and in advance of” (Schechner) can still be alive in this posthistorical age, these instances I have briefly touched upon in this essay can be called the avant-garde moment(s). By forcibly naming them as such, we are making a conscious and critical connection to the historical avant-garde, not as a style nor a useful item in our database, but as

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something for us to keep moving forward. The ephemeral phenomenon of materialization of transnational, transient subjectivities in posthumanity in recent performance culture, I would propose, has tobe called, therefore, not not the other avant-garde.

References:Allain, Paul2002 The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki: A Critical Study With DVD Examples.

London: Methuen, 2002.Azuma, Hiroki2009 Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by E. Abel and Shion

Kono. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Original version published in 2001, as Dobutsuka suru postmodern: otaku kara mita nihon shakai . Tokyo: Kodansha Gendai Shinsho.

Carruthers, Ian, Takahashi, Yasunari2004 The Theatre of Tadashi Suzuki. Cambridge UPChaudhuri, Una2007 “(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance.” TDR 51.1.

(T193), 8-20.Goodman, David2006 “Angura: Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-garde.” Not the Other Avant-garde:

The Transnational Foundations of the Avant-Garde Performance. James M.Harding and John Rouse (eds.) Ann Arbor, Mich.: U. ofMichigan P., 250-264.

Schechner, Richard2004 Personal interview by the author. Later translated into

Japanese and published as “Performance kenkyu no kigen to mirai: interviewing Richard Schechner” in Butai Geijutsu, 8, 12-40.

2006 “Five Avant-garde . . . or None.” Unpublished manuscript,updated version from “Introduction,” Future of Ritual: Writings onCulture and Performance . New York; Routledge, 1-24.

Slagmuylder, Christoph (Tadashi Uchino and Okada Toshiki)2008 “Keynote Session: Contemporary Performing Arts.” International

Network for Contemporary Performing Arts: TPAM-IETM Satellite Meeting Record.http://www.tpam.or.jp/pdf/ietmreport_e.pdf, 3-10.

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Suzuki, Tadashi1986 The Way of Acting: The Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki. N.Y.: TCG.Uchino, Tadashi2002 “Deai sokoneru shintai aruiwa ‘globalisation wa karada ni

warui’: Nibroll, Coffee,” Tosho Shinbun, April 6, 8.2006 “The Globality’s Children: The ‘Child’s’ Body as a Strategy

of Flatness in Performance,” TDR 50:1 (T189), 57-66.

2009 Crucible Bodies: Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium. London: Seagull Books, 2009.

i The page reference to this article is to the manuscript (Microsoft Word format) I received from Richard Schechner on Dec. 5, 2005.

ii “Angura” is the Japanized abbreviation for underground (theatre). The termrefers not only to their forms of imagination but also the place of the performance; the exponents of angura often performed at the underground spacein the urban center.

iii Kara Juro (1940- ) and Suzuki Tadashi (1939- ) are two of the most influential angura directors: in Kara’s case, he is a playwright, main actor and director for all his work. After several transitional periods, both of them are now considered to be masters in respective forms of presentation, and still produce new works in regular bases. For more about their work , see, for instance, “Introduction,” (Uchino 2009, 1-28), Suzuki (1986), Allain (2002) and Carruthers (2004).

iv The origin of the expression “neo angura” is not well documented, but Hibino Kei seems to be the first one to use the expression. The terms refersto a newer theatre practices of such companies as Gokiburi Combinat (Cockroach Industrial Complex) and others which emerged at the beginning of the 21st century and which, quite unexpectedly, had acquired a certain degree of visibility.

v Azuma Hiroki (1971- ) is considered to mark an arrival of newer forms of intellectual discourse in Japan. He is a philosopher, acquiring a Ph.D. degree on continental philosophical tradition (Jacque Derrida was his objectof study, but instead of staying in the academia, he is very active as a radical cultural producer in various journalistic worlds. He is not reluctant to appear in TV shows, and is widely known to younger generation of Japanese youths. Because of his intellectual origin, it took several years before his very influential book, that which we refer here, was translated, but his more recent books, for instance, have been translated almost immediately into Chinese and Korean. He is thus becoming a leading cultural theorist in the major part of East Asia.

vi The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY, had launched Prelude Festival in2003, and it was the fifth installment that included Spotlight Japan. As thetitle suggests, and we may understand the time it is usually held (October),the organizers choose some new works planned to be performed during the coming season in New York City, and give previews of those in various forms;reports on the ongoing processes of creation, text reading sessions, performance excerpts and panel discussions. Spotlight Japan had initially been a different project, but after some negotiations, it was to be includedin Prelude 07. Spotlight Japan was one of the continuing series Frank Hentschker, its program director, had devised for introducing non Anglo-WestEuropean contemporary performance culture, especially its dramatic works. In2006, it was the Argentine, and in 2007, Hentschker decided it would be Japan. The project is intellectually exciting in that the organizers are notnecessarily interested in simply introducing newer theatre work to New York audience – as “the other” tradition -- through text reading format, and they

think of the occasion as the first step toward realizing a full-length production in English by professional theatre companies in New York and elsewhere, by closely sharing information among New York’s performance and theatre communities. Even if the particular work does not reach the full-production, the translated text is promised at least to be published.

vii Miyazawa Akio (1956- ), Matsuda Masataka (1962- ), Okada Toshiki (1973- )and Yanaihara Mikuni (1970- ) are all, in one way or the other, unconventional playwrights, in their own right. Miyazawa, for instance, was a very popular playwright in the 1990s, but gave up producing similar kinds of popular plays all together and became radically experimental at the beginning of the 21st century. Matsuda was also an award winning playwrightuntil he established Marebito no Kai (Marebito Theatre Company) in 2003, in which he started to experiment with different forms of writing and performing. In Okada’s case, the long note is necessary to explain what he does, but it is suffice to say here that he is an entirely new kind of playwright/director, whose work refused to be categorized so easily as conventional, radical or what have you. On my part, I must confess that seeing this Five Days in March (2004) completely changed my way of thinking and writing about (any kind of) performance culture. This article is indeed an extension of that newer ways of articulating performance culture at hand.

viii Finally in 2012, Yanaihara was awarded the Kishida Playwrights Award withher Looking Forward Timon, a very free and loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens: I say “free” to the degree that there is almost no trace of the original but a very distant echo of some of the characters and themes ofthe play.

ix Many of Foreman’s texts are, if you ever tried to read them in print, almost impossible to follow. This is usually understood as his idiosyncraticway of writing a text, mixing a surrealistic method of automatism and a conscious editing (not necessarily after writing the word down). The text usually doesn’t make sense (in a rational way), thus tends to becomes a collection of fragmented monologues and dialogues, especially in his earliercareer, but its performance does. This is because Foreman never gives up theidea of physical presence of actors on stage, even though they are not expected to play a psychologically cohesive “character.”

x To explore the issue further, I find Una Chaudhuri’s introductory article (2007) very insightful and useful.

xi Ninagawa Yukio (1935- ) is perhaps the most successful director who came out of the angura tradition. He turned to commercial theatrical production inthe middle of his career, directing many Western classics, especially Shakespeare, thereby becoming the most celebrated Japanese theatre director in both the U.K. and the U.S. Interestingly enough, his work has never accepted in continental Europe (he never performed either in France or Germany). He is surely responsible for the popularization of Shakespeare in Japan, though, of course, the translation used is in contemporary Japanese language and vocabulary. It is indeed a peculiar sight, for some of us at

least, to see that, in his huge commercial production of one of Shakespeare’s plays, main characters are usually played by teen idols and/orTV celebrities.xii For my more detailed discussion of Murakami’s work, see Uchino (2006).