Dumb
About Japan
Contextualizing Dumb Type's Memorandum
published
in Mesh No.17, Melbourne, 2004
It must be boring for Japanese artists to be asked why they
foreground technology every time they touch something electronic.
It’s probably as boring as hearing archaic European
binaries applied to Japanese culture by westerners wishing
to scrutinise the supposed mystery of Japan – old
but new, past but present, etc.
Not surprisingly, a reflux has occurred in much recent contemporary
Japanese art where artists – some ironically, some
surreptitiously – project back to western audiences
a hyper-iconic manifestation of these blunt binaries. This
critical realm will require investigation as it is likely
to produce new formations on delocalised art practices and
viral ambassadorial influxes across the western globe (not
dissimilar to the established spread of manga and anime).
Apart from the breadth, depth and success of their work
over the last 15 years, Kyoto theatre group Dumb Type are
a vital example of how the East/West connection is both
problematised and divined within contemporary arts spheres.
On the surface, Dumb Type are an Asian sublimation of the
deconstructed Eurocentric grandeur which throbs at the core
of epic productions by Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, et
al. Yet the high-art staging of operatic spectacle which
was heightened as postmodern effect within the Brooklyn
Academy productions is transmuted within Dumb Type’s
presentations.
Memorandum (1999 – presented at Melbourne Arts Festival,
2003) is possibly the best example of this as it is a proscenium
theatre work in contrast to Dumb Type’s earlier and
manifold expanded theatrical production. Memorandum textually
is figured around the interfacing of memory and memos: it
is not ‘past but present’, but rather an eventful
simultaneity that fuses the temporal distinctions between
that which is before and that which befalls. High-spectacle
definitely reigns in Memorandum but it does so less on a
planar axis of scale and frame, and more through the non-linear
verticality of audiovision, where sound, image and event
are conjoined for experiential impact.
Memorandum ‘transmutes’ 80s postmodern theatrical
spectacles by de-narrating and effectively silencing the
arch stylisations over which the postmodern fawns. As a
kawaii (‘cutie-pie’) voice murmurs “mmmm
... maybe ... it's about Goldilocks and the Three Bears
… maybe” during the opening of Memorandum, signification
and meaning are rendered flat and floating like transparent
sheets: this is not a narrative with classical depth, but
rather a liquefied palimpsest of disembodied sensations
and connections. The whole of Memorandum indeed is a ‘maybe’
story, but one which idly ponders if in fact it is itself
about Goldilocks or not. True to Japanese pseudo-assertive
protocol (where the ‘maybe’ or “ano …”
is deliberately left hanging in the discursive air), Memorandum
is less about statement and more about understatement. Silences,
resonances and reflections embody deeper tonality in clear
line with Dumb Type’s agenda of ‘dumb media’.
Yet the importance of this theatrical textuality is to sidestep
the bad binary of prose-versus-poetry, rather than merely
celebrate acts of sensual visualisation to which contemporary
European theatre still perceives as avant-garde. Memorandum
is undoubtedly poetic, but it does not present poetry as
an escape from prose.
Memorandum has been misread in many lauded instances as
a Japanese version of European ‘image-theatre’
(which itself is influenced poorly by traditional Japanese
theatrical forms like bun raku, kabuki and noh). That’s
like saying James Brown is influenced by Britney Spears.
Memorandum is in fact a very traditional Japanese theatre
work – which is both its power and beauty. The staging
in many moments is a perspectival recreation of the 17th
Century folding screens across which landscape paintings
unfold. Dumb Type reinvent these as translucent screens
which merge between video-projections and spot lit-apparitions
of live performers, creating a peculiar sense of dimensional
depth and focal shift typical of Japanese folding screens.
‘Upon’ this visual plane is laid a soundtrack
(by Ryoji Ikeda) that applies a sonic version of Sergei
Eisenstein’s montage principles, which then becomes
less a comment on synchronism as per Eisenstein’s
notions, but more a comment on asycnhronicity within the
Japanese tradition of musical structure.
As with much Japanese cultural manifestations, the mode
of ‘reading’ required is one attuned to the
interrelationship of parts - not as some Frankensteinian
assemblage, but as a mode of ‘inbetweening’
where totality is always apparent. Within a global perspective
then, works like Dumb Type’s Memorandum are a potent
realization of the rhetoric of ‘total theatre’
wherein there is neither old nor new, past nor present.
For there possibly is neither East nor West anymore. This
is the memo received from Dumb Type.
