Peter Eckersall

Biography: Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Executive Officer of the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the department of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Japanese performance, dramaturgy and theatre and politics. he is author of two monographs on the 1960s in Japan including, Performativity and Event: Body, City Memory (Palgrave, 2013). His recent publications include: New Media Dramaturgy: Performance and New-materialism, co-authored with Helena Grehan and Ed Scheer, (Palgrave 2017) and The Dumb Type Reader, coedited with Edward Scheer and Shintarô Fujii (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017).

Paper Title: Politics and approaches to time: reflections on Japan’s 1960s from the age of freeter time.

Abstract:

1960s Japan was a locus of radical performativity spanning and connecting the arts and radical politics through a commitment to action and the enactment of new subjectivities (Eckersall 2013). The consideration of time and the temporality of action was an important aspect of this: a search for an urgent and authentic spontaneity with the avant-garde blending of transhistorical time (Goodman) and the practice of inter-subjective and anarchic life-force in multiple time-spaces (Kuroda 2010). This paradoxical relation to time is a part of the sixties experience globally. As Hardt and Negri write on their reflections of 1968: ‘The revolution needs time’ (2017: 5). But when viewed from the dystopian present, this statement begs the question: how much time is enough and how has the connection between temporarily and politics changed in the performing arts in Japan, or for that matter globally? How does performance represent, imagine and interrupt time, then and now? As a matter of fact, beginning in the 1980s, the term freeter has been used to describe a generation of docile temporary workers and is now associated with Precarity and the endless everyday boredom of neo-liberal existence in Japan. In contrast to the many examples of rupture and discontinuity in the 1960s, this is a timeframe that is both regulated and also without the momentum of moving forward.

Responding to the conference themes of trajectories of performance in relation to cultural and political transaction and considerations of political frameworks this paper will aim to consider three examples of politics and time as they are discussed in the Japanese performance over the last fifty years. Beginning with a discussion of Shinjuku in 1968-69 where performance spilled into the everyday, I briefly focus on the ‘Shinjuku Park West Exit Incident’ wherein Kara Jûrô and his Situation Theatre Troupe (Jokyo Gekijô) held an ‘illegal’ tent performance before being arrested. As the paper will briefly summarize, Kara’s work is exemplary of a 1960s approach to politics and time.

Contrasting this with performance in an age of freeter time I will consider the often elliptical and postmodern work of Okada Toshiki, a playwright-director and founder of the group chelfitsch. As I will examine, Okada’s dissection of the lives of the freeter generation in his plays poses strongly contrasting sensibilities of time and politics to those of the 1960s. Finally, I consider the recent trend to reenact supposed canonical (and by now mythic) 1960s performances, in this case, Kawaguchi Takao’s ‘About Kazuo Ohno’ (2014-). The performance of Ohno’s butoh’s with its assumed legacy of 1960s temporal spontaneity and anarchy is for some audiences an impossible task, yet it provokes a new awareness of the 1960s and its relationship to now. Kawaguchi never trained as a butoh ka. Yet he immerses himself in the filmic record of Ohno’s oeuvre inhabiting the past gesturally and uncannily while also showing the embodied linage of radical history. The performer is inside and outside the performance event in a very 1960s way, yet we are also watching a long and estranged view of history.

In closing, this paper will consider how these three examples reflect and represent of the idea of a radical temporality, then and now.

References cited:

Peter Eckersall, Performativity and Event: Body, City Memory. Palgrave, 2013.

David Goodman The return of the gods: Japanese drama and culture in the 1960s. M.E. Sharpe, 1988.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly. Oxford UP, 2017.

Raiji Kuroda, Ningen no Ana-kizumu: 1960 zendai: Nihon geijutsu ni akeru pafoomansu no chikate sui myaku. (Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan), Gram Books, 2010.

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Lucia Bensasson

Biography: Lucia Bensasson is an actress from 1967, under the direction of Ariane Mnouchkine from 1968 to 1983 at the Théâtre du Soleil. She has played in Paris, in the Province and abroad under the direction of among others Bernard Sobel, Michelle Marquais, Bruno Boëglin, Jean-Louis Thamin, Declan Donnellan .... She participates in many film and television shootings and directs many workshops and workshops in France and abroad, especially on masked play. In 1989, she founded with Claire Duhamel, ARTA, Research Association of Traditions of the Actor, studio research and experimentation on the art of the actor confronting the practice of theater with the great world traditions (China, Japan, India, ...) through workshops led by foreign masters.

Paper Title: 1968 and Collective Creation at the Théâtre du Soleil

Abstract: This presentation considers the work and history of the celebrated French theatre company Théâtre du Soleil, founded by Ariane Mnouchkine and colleagues directly in response to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Lucia Bensasson joined the company as an actor in 1968, and will reflect (partly from a unique personal perspective) on Théâtre du Soleil’s work in Paris and more widely, its continuous engagement with social and political issues, and the development of both its theatrical approach and cultural position over the last half-century. The presentation will explore principles of the company’s approach to ‘collective creation’. It will consider specific productions; the training and development processes that accompanied them; and the status of Théâtre du Soleil today. The presentation allows for wider reflection upon the changing nature of radical theatre over this period, and the role of theatre as a conduit for socio-political concerns.

DOWNLOAD the Keynote Address in English  .

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Warwick Arts Centre and China Plate present

Trying It On
Written and performed by David Edgar

As part of the conference, on the evening of Friday 8th June, delegates will have the opportunity to see David Edgar's latest show, Trying it On. There will be a post-show discussion with David Edgar, chaired by Prof. Janelle Reinelt, towards the close of the conference on Saturday 9th June.

About the Show: It's 1968. David is 20. The Vietnam war rages. The world-wide student revolt is at its height. Martin Luther King is assassinated. Enoch Powell delivers his "rivers of blood" speech. These events will define David's politics and give focus to his playwriting.

50 years on, the 70-year-old is confronted by the 20-year-old. Do they still share the same beliefs? Is it the world that's changed, or him? Why did his generation vote Brexit? Has he sold in or sold out?

David Edgar's plays have been presented by the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company (most recently A Christmas Carol) and the Rep (from Mary Barnes to Arthur & George). After 50 years of writing, Trying It On (directed by Christopher Haydon) marks David's debut as a performer.

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How It All Began

Premiere Reading

A staged reading of excerpts of the personal testimony of Michael "Bommi" Baumann, a man who, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, was a member of the June 2nd Movement, one of the most spectacular urban guerrilla organizations in West Berlin.

With Frank Hentschker and Peter Eckersall, GC Cuny

40 minutes

Of this book, Baumann said: "Others should understand why people take the road of armed struggle, how they come to it, how the seeds are planted, and what the emotions behind it are, what kind of considerations and psychic preconditions are needed to overcome the fear involved."

But Baumann, ultimately, had to make a choice. He renounced violence when he left the June 2nd Movement in 1972.
Security police seized the original German edition, Wie Alles Anfing, when it appeared in 1975. The resulting trial and publicity raised an international outcry and the book ended up being republished in German and translated into six languages.

In an age when public protests—against corporate greed, against free trade agreements, and for social justice—are becoming more frequent and more violent, How It All Began provides a fascinating glimpse into the thinking behind urban struggle, and the consequences of action.

As Baumann himself said, "Violence is a perfectly adequate means, I never had any hangups about it."
The first English version of How It All Began was published by Arsenal in 1977 and updated in 1981. Long out of print, it has been re-issued, making it available to readers once again.

Bommi Baumann was a leading member of the June 2nd Movement, one of the most active urban guerrilla groups in West Berlin. From a low-income, unstable family background, Baumann left the movement and the urban guerrilla struggle in 1972 and went underground to write this book. He was arrested in London in 1981 and there has been no word from him since.