Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 44

The shape of the “future” – Grand Guignol Mirai postscript


All photos: Scenes from the August 2014 performance of Grand Guignol Mirai. Photos ©Takashi Homma, courtesy Grand Guignol Mirai 2014 executive committee.

This installment of Notes on Art and Current Events is not a review. Instead, I will be writing about my first ever dramatic piece, Grand Guignol Mirai, and its performance in Yokohama. This is an irregular occurrence, but it comes as a result of a request from the editors, in addition to which, due to various constraints, we were only able to stage four performances in Yokohama. Considering that the advance tickets sold out almost immediately, it is a good bet that there are many people who, despite being interested, were unable to see it. As of now there are no plans for any repeat performances. For these reasons, there is probably some value in writing about it here.

Let me make clear first of all that “Grand Guignol Mirai” is both the title of this theatrical production and the name of the unit, comprising myself and Norimizu Ameya, responsible for leading it. The circumstances surrounding this are set out in the press release issued before the performances, so I will refrain from repeating them here. Those who have not already done so are encouraged to read the piece entitled “Grand Guignol Mirai ni yosete,” (To Grand Guignol Mirai, in Japanese only) included in the press release.

With that out of the way, I would now like to give an account of the slightly peculiar nature of this performance. First, although the project eventually assumed the form of a theatrical performance, in fact it is based on a work of criticism in the form of a drama in two acts and 32 scenes that I wrote for the purposes of considering afresh the artist Norimizu Ameya. Accordingly, while the roles in Grand Guignol Mirai are officially divided with me responsible for the “script” and Ameya responsible for the “direction,” essentially the stance in which I am a critic and Ameya is an artist remains intact. In other words, the show noticeably retains many aspects that cannot be described simply as a collaboration between the two of us. This is because critic and artist are essentially in an incompatible, asymmetrical relationship (create/evaluate). In fact, although I have also been closely involved in a subtle way with the artist himself concerning his work several times previously, I have always ended up criticizing it.

This time, however, I thought I would step over that line, and with this in mind I myself borrowed the format of a story/artwork in penning the dramatic piece Grand Guignol Mirai. Having done so, I confronted Ameya with the question of how he himself would stage this work of criticism (= drama), which I had preempted him in writing, hoping to upset the fixed relationship between critic and writer and transform the very shape of criticism into something more multilayered.

To be honest, I am not interested in the expressive form of drama itself. Above all I simply wrote it out of necessity. So much so that it was only after it was pointed out by Ameya, who looked over the draft, that I learned the difference between an “act” and a “scene,” and between a “soiree” and a “matinee” (so low, in fact, is the level of interest I have in theatre). As well, it was only after Ameya read it that I realized that, while I had initially intended to write a script, the concrete directions that should appear here and there in a script as a matter of course were missing, and that what I was writing was in fact a far more abstract “artwork” in the form of a “dramatic piece” (among other things, there were no concrete stage directions, and with respect to the places where it was written “Do something” in response to all the previous text, Ameya’s advice was, “It’s completely unthinkable”). In other words, though I had started writing it with the intention of criticizing Ameya, it was only after he read it that I realized “what I was writing.” In other words, I was the one who was criticized.

As well, when we entered the phase of actual rehearsals, even though I was present initially with the intension of observing only, each time I was questioned by Ameya about the details of the drama I answered after thinking it over, so that on many occasions it was actually I who did the directing by indicating that I wanted things done a certain way. In other words, at this point the roles of artist and critic had mutually permeated each other and the division between the two begun to break down on the site. Notwithstanding the fact that this was my original aim, it was a completely new experience for me. Where I had intended to criticize I had been criticized, and where I had intended to observe the direction, before I realized it I was directing. If, even in spite of this, the line between critic and artist remained intact, it was only to the extent that I “undoubtedly retained an awareness” that I was a critic. If I had lost even this, I probably would have lost sight of why I was there at that moment doing what I was doing. Such were the peculiar circumstances surrounding the realization of this theatrical production.

The idea for Grand Guignol Mirai grew out of the desire to “recall” once again the worst aviation accident (involving a single aircraft) in history, which struck Japan Airlines Flight 123 (currently a retired flight number) in 1985. On August 12, the aircraft strayed off its normal flight path and spent around 32 minutes flying over the Kanto-Koshinetsu region from above Sagami Bay to near Mount Fuji before finally crashing, resulting in 520 casualties. While en route from Haneda to Osaka, soon after taking off, the aircraft became uncontrollable due to the loss of most of its tail section and of hydraulic pressure for various reasons (according to Japan’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission, damage arising from the faulty repair of the aircraft’s rear bulkhead by Boeing technicians, and explosive decompression causing pressurized air to rush out of the cabin). Subsequently, it was propelled forward at a furious speed by the surviving jet engines alone, and with the pilots unable to steer it or control its ascent and descent, it flew erratically, moving in phugoids (up and down) and Dutch rolls (left and right) at a height of nearly 10,000 meters. The three members of the cockpit crew eventually managed to lower the landing gear by hand in an effort to reduce the airplane’s altitude, but this caused it to descend rapidly with the fuselage still at an angle. Fearing the airplane would stall at low altitude, they fully opened the throttle again, but they were too late in adjusting the lift by controlling the flaps, and the airplane crashed and caught fire on an unnamed ridge (later named Osutaka Ridge) in the village of Ueno in Gunma prefecture. The fuselage shattered into pieces and was strewn along with the passengers over mountainous terrain as night fell. It was an appalling catastrophe.

Dare I say it was almost as if the route to the performance of Grand Guignol Mirai was affected by the loss of its tail section and hydraulic pressure, just like Flight 123. For a start, with the exception of Ameya, not one of the cast was a professional, with two seven-year-olds and one eight-year-old, all in the first, second or third grades at elementary school, and two junior and senior high school students filling the main roles, and the other roles filled by mere musicians and photographers, the mix almost resembling that of the passengers who happened to be on board Flight 123 that day. Also, I was only too aware of the fact that almost all of the theatrical performances that are the topic of conversation in society at large are actually only just viable because they receive public funding of come kind. We did not receive such funding, our only sources of revenue being box-office receipts and money gathered through crowdfunding. For our main rehearsal space, we rented gallery space between exhibitions at Yamamoto Gendai, which doubled as our office, and before and after rehearsals we went into the mountains of Chichibu and gathered timber that had floated down rivers, and rocks, to use as part of the set. We overcame other problems as if we were part of a single family, with cast members from out of town staying at my house or Ameya’s over the course of a month. Even so, we owed a lot to a previous statement by Ameya that above all drama (or more accurately theatre) should not be “supported” but rather it should be “entertainment,” and it was one of our aims to point out through our own actions and criticize the invisible foundations upon which the existing drama system rests. However, actually achieving this was not easy. Many times I thought if we continued on our present path we would “crash.” Thinking back on it now, it’s almost a miracle we managed to put on four performances.

At the conclusion of the performances, the entire text of Grand Guignol Mirai was published in the October issue of the literary magazine Shincho in the form of a drama, so some of you will probably have read it. Those who did will quickly have realized it lacks anything that could be described as a plot. When I climbed Osutaka Ridge with the cast members before the performances to pay my respects to the deceased and stood on the steep slope where, even 29 years after the accident, one can still find fragments of the airplane if one digs in the ground, I felt the coming and going of various thoughts and emotions that passed through my own mind one after the other as I gazed at the rocks beside the crash site where a large “X” is written (an indicator used during the rescue) and exposed my body to the atmosphere in the mountains 1556 meters above sea level. Choosing my words with the greatest of care, I transformed these formless feelings into a total of 23 consecutive “scenes” (as opposed to settings) and added to the end a poem titled Jien which itself comprises nothing but completely meaningless “hiragana.” These are more or less the circumstances under which the drama Grand Guignol Mirai was written.

Thus rather than unfolding in accordance with a narrative, this drama consists solely of a powerful iteration summoned by myself standing on the crash site. It opens with a climax, which continues until there is a short break after which another climax begins, which also continues until the end, when it is broken off. I think perhaps it would be appropriate to call such a continuation of scenes consisting of nothing but high tension devoid of dramaturgy a “plateau state” (because there are nothing but climaxes, the climaxes lose their meaning and, with this strong feeling of tension maintained, become level). In an atmosphere of constant tension and instability that pushes everyone to the limits of their physical strength, with those performing ruminating on the mental state of the crew, while those watching, or perhaps “witnessing” would be a better word, ruminate on the feeling of high tension among the passengers of Flight 123, in such an atmosphere of anxiety and fear, is it really possible for everyone to somehow manage to arrive at their own “mirai (future) “? – this was the theme of Grand Guignol Mirai. Even if there is an “entrance” there is no “exit.” Yet despite this, the future arrives at everyone’s side relentlessly.

Living in a post-March 11 world is probably similar in many ways to riding in a jumbo jet that has lost its tail yet continues to fly through the vast sky with no control over where it is going. Whether we like it or not, in a sense we are already half-dead. To vividly summon this “memory” in the context of an everyday that is as good as fake, as if it is in the process of being restored while still hazy – for a critic to break free from being a critic and an artist to break free from being an artist and for the two to collaborate to achieve this – I cannot help thinking that this was the “shape of the future” (~ Norimizu Ameya’s The Shape of Me) that the cruel drama that was Grand Guignol Mirai was seeking to evoke in everyone.

Grand Guignol Mirai was performed at Yokohama Creative City Center on August 29, 30 and 31, 2014.

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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