A series of dramas exploring Fukushima today

Known for extracting and reconstructing multiple perspectives on a city that has experienced unprecedented trauma, marebito theater companyʼs previous work at F/T includes “Voiceprints City — Letters to Father”, about Masataka Matsudaʼs hometown of Nagasaki, and “Hiroshima-Hapcheon: Doubled Cities in Exhibition”, which deals with Korean victims of the atomic bombing. As with “Record of a Journey to Antigone, and Its Performance” (F/T12), this new work explores the theme of Fukushima, developed from a project that examined Nagasaki for three years. Several writers research a city, after which their scripts are staged very minimally to uncover the specific history and nature of that place. Five years on from the Fukushima disaster, the project now presents a multi-layered, four-day attempt to reflect the present reality of the region.

This theatre work examines the question of how it is possible to “perform”, as theatre, the events and incidents in a present-day city once visited by catastrophe. Starting in 2013, marebito theater company explored this theme by staging “Performing Nagasaki” over the course of three years. This new work continues with this methodology while also attempting to further transform the form of the staging.

In the same way as the Nagasaki version, the writers visited Fukushima and wrote a series of fragmentary scripts based on their impressions of the landscape and local lifestyle gained by physically experiencing the place. These were developed during rehearsal and for the final staging the actors perform them all together in a theatre space.

The major task then surely becomes taking our prompt from this to examine the various incidents that arose during the creative process as well as a new theme of Fukushima, and deliver the power of theatre that opens us up to diversity we should embrace. Diversity engenders questions from the physical presence of the performers and that space and time. Diversity is not the representation of citizens whose agency and appearance is fixed by the existing values of society, but the assembly of numerous faceless individuals and the inarticulate surrounding space-time. Theatre is created out of the combination of “seeing” and “speaking”. I would like the aim of our work to be transforming the theatre space into diversity itself (in other words, it becomes diversity) by the infinite connection of these two acts.

The staging of “Performing Fukushima” takes place four times over four days: November 17th, November 18th, November 19th, and November 20th. The theatre work comprises a staging of the various scripts by the team of writers, though the structure of the performance is different for each performance. Accordingly, the performance is not simply an omnibus-style staging of several short plays that can be detached from each other. As it unfolds over these four days, “Performing Fukushima” becomes a single work of theatre. The experience of seeing one of the performances offers glimpses of the overall work while also allowing audiences to place themselves in and enter the space and time of the work as a whole that is themed around the city of Fukushima. This is because the time of a city never repeats; it is always flowing and changing minute by minute. The “Fukushima” that we perform must also express this space-time that is in flux. In the city of Fukushima, if it is 5 o’clock in the evening it is not the same as it was yesterday, nor as how it will be tomorrow. The evening that was missed yesterday cannot be substituted with the evening of today, since that evening will never appear again. Be that as it may, incidents are taking place in Fukushima in that same way as they are around the world. That does repeat. In the sense that incidents completely different to all previous ones recur we can say that there is repetition. An incident is a singular situation that cannot be expressed in one word: the “Fukushima” that we are attempting to express is the accumulation of these incidents and the place (space-time) where they are repeated. Representing this through theatre is to cause incidents that never happened to take place in a theatre space.