The word
"dazzle" has two definitions. The first means to amaze,
to astound, to impress as with great skill or ingenuity. The second
means to blind, to cause a failing of clear vision through intensity
of light.
Lightology does both. It awes you with its theatrical spectacle,
its madcap choreography, experimental video and oddball orchestra, but
thematically it remains a flashy blur, failing to communicate a clear
idea out of its purported theme of light. This is by no means a crime
- the show remains thoroughly entertaining, a marvel for the eyes and
the ears, if rather ineffectual for the soul. One might even say the
philosophy of the text seems eclipsed by the strength of the performance
itself.
Indeed, while director Naoyuki Asahina asserts that this piece exists
simply to explore ideas about light, much of the work investigates the
very nature of performance art, as if explaining the concept to beginners
- not surprisingly, perhaps, since Tokidoki-Jido was a pioneer in this
field in Japan since the 80s. This may have been his impetus for assembling
50 local volunteers as a background chorus for this show - untrained
and untested, to be initiated into the practice of performance art.
One has to admire his daring and his democratic impulse to grant these
amateurs the stage. One must also commend the volunteers themselves
- spirited and zany, ambushing us from within our ranks moments after
we'd entered the empty studio; singing, dancing, and juggling, letting
the centre of spectacle keep shifting throughout the crowd. Naoyuki
even allowed them a degree of independent control in a later sequence,
as the chorus stood in an ever-widening line, each erupting with random
sound (from the lyrics of Numa Numa to gibberish) when called
upon by a central conductor, who was at first a professional but was
then replaced by one of their own.
But there's a whole different flavour to the show when the artists
themselves arrive on stage, clad in hip Tokyo street wear but transformed
into pure performance machines. One is blown away by the talent of the
organising mind that imagined their absurdist sequences, and by the
necessary rigour of the actors involved. They serenade you on Jew's
harps and dance at you in the darkness with white rubber strings between
their joints, becoming black light human polygons. They sprint with
drumsticks, rhythmically beating them against moving drums, mounted
backpacks, or each other's bodies, never falling out of the precisely
shifting rhythm.
True, there were some poorly judged segments, such as the only episode
featuring character drama, as four sisters were interrupted from their
rhythmic soup-drinking by a goofy fountain pen salesman and their masked,
incestuous father. A subtitled video of the scene was simultaneously
played on the screen behind the players, perhaps merely as a prompting
device to enable the English to play concurrently with the Japanese
dialogue. The result was three strands of the same dialogue (two in
Japanese and one in English) and two sets of identical action - a moment
of redundant sensory overload. Yet on the whole the movements of Lightology
were brilliantly executed, to the extent that it became very difficult
to reconcile this disciplined world with the chaos of the volunteer
chorus. The amateur performances, sadly, appeared to dilute the high
quality of the work as a whole.
A faint thread of a message, discernible to the thoughtful, seems to
lie amidst the disparate sequences, describing a personal search for
the meaning of life in a chaotic and violent world. The players generate
a macabre comedy of violence, through life-size projections of the actors
gushing blood and stick-figures plummeting to death off buildings. Also,
a delicious mood of subtle subversion persists, with strange epileptic
dances behind screens, and the warped, jarring sound of wobbling metal
whenever an actor ran headfirst into a hanging strip of sheet metal,
an uncanny musical motif.
Yet all this was less of an emotional buildup than a simple quickening
of action: any sense of existential despair that might have been accumulating
was displaced by the cuteness or comedy of many of the acts, and in
particular the happy triviality of the chorus's recitation into microphones
of "the happiest moments of their lives", largely consisting of birthdays
and vacations, followed by a loud communal "Whooooo!" of approval.
The grand anagnorisis of the play was ultimately rather nihilistic,
featuring performers mimicking the suicidal stick figures on screen
by leaping from the roof of the set into their fellow cast members'
arms. Is enlightenment to be found only by embracing death itself? It's
difficult to read, and even the jumping Japanese actors are half-hidden
by the chorus, performing a rather competent mass dance in a ring to
the beautiful original pop song One Hundred Years (Hyakunen).
Despite the limited amount of non-English text in this show, one always
feels that something's been lost in translation - a perspective, perhaps,
on the nature of light and life and darkness, or a fundamental set of
expectations about theatre.
As an introduction to performance theatre, Lightology actually
fares rather well - it features both the interactive, hands-on aspect
of the genre through its volunteers and also professionals enacting
rigidly scripted choreography; both forms charming to an audience in
different ways. One only wishes that Tokidoki-Jido had emphasised in
some way the potential of performance art to communicate as well as
to entertain. As it is, the show shines, but doesn't illuminate. |
"A marvel for the eyes and the ears, if rather ineffectual for
the soul"
Credits
Director: Naoyuki Asahina
Artist: Toyomi Usami
Composers: Naoyuki Asahina, Kazumi Ito, Jiro Imai, Kosuke Suzuki
Audiovisuals: Kayoko Sunakawa, Shingo Aono
Lighting: Shigeo Saito, Atsumi Koen
Sound: Reiko Tokuhisa
Director’s Assitant: Tomoko Ishikawa
Stage Manager: Toshiro Ogaki
Production Manager: Tomoko Miyagawa
Cast: Naoyuki Asahina, Ari Owada, Kayoko Sunakawa, Kosuke Suzuki, Kazuko
Hidaka, Naomi Watanabe, Matono Ouchi, Kazuki Kunihiro, Reki Shibata,
Kohei Takahashi, Fumito Terakado, Masako Fujita, and 50 Singapore volunteer
performers
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