The Theater of the Disaster: What Can We Say about Pure BANANA girls class and Fukushima?

Hyun-Suk Seo

The disaster does not put me into question, but annuls the question, makes it disappear--as if with the question, "I" too disappeared in the disaster which never appears. The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event; it does not happen, not only because there is no "I" to undergo the experience, but because there cannot possibly be any experience of it. - Maurice Blanchot

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Cross-Border Intellect: At a New Journey's Start


Naoto Moriyama (Japan)
The F/T Emerging Artists Program greatly expanded in 2011, opening its gates for the first time to the rest of Asia and receiving some eighty applications. The final Program consisted of four international and seven domestic groups; the first thing to be recognized at the launch of any discussion is that it was likely the part of the Festival this year with the highest risk and also a real cultural investment.

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Pure BANANA girls class & Bird Park's Hyper-Adjustment and Super-Aggregation:
The Peculiarities of Eighties-Born Japanese Artists

Kyoko Iwaki(Japan)
I should start this essay with the simplest question: Why do people go to the theatre? I myself as a performing art journalist have a bluntly self-evident reason: it's my job. However, why have I continued doing this for over ten years? Not only in my home country Japan but around the world? There should be some plausible reason other than just for the sake of paying the bills. This year's F/T Emerging Artists Program elucidated, to certain extent, the answer to this question.

During my one-week visit to Japan I took in performances by five groups of Japanese theatre practitioners born in the Eighties: KUNIO, Bird Park, Pure BANANA girls class, lolo and Pijin Neji. And as ten days prior to flying from London to Tokyo I had just completed my book on Japanese theatre artists born in the Seventies, involuntarily, I found myself comparing the two generations of practitioners and subsequently made aware of the salient characteristics of the so-called "eighties babies".

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F/T Connects More with Asia: A view from a Non-Japanese Speaking Audience

Pawit Mahasarinand (Thailand)
From 1994 to 2006, my experience of Tokyo and Japan was limited to the Narita Airport where I connected my flights between Bangkok and the US - my transit was so frequent that I even started a romantic relationship with a Thai woman passenger at a departure gate there. I was frequently informed back then that not only was it difficult to travel on your own unless you understand Japanese but the Japanese yen was also strong that I feared my Thai baht saving accounts would be much affected had I set foot outside the airport - and I am never a fan of guided tours.

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