Artists
About Artist
Akira TakayamaPort B
Director
Born in 1969. In 2002, he founded Port B, a loose unit collaborating with artists and others working outside the conventional theatre medium.
In F/T09 Spring he staged "Clouds. Home" (based on a text by Elfriede Jelinek) and "Sunshine 63". For F/T10 he set up "evacuation" points around the urban space which connected audiences with the realities of the city through the internet in his prophetic "The Complete Manual of Evacuation - Tokyo". At F/T11 he created "Referendum Project", a truck installation with DVD interviews with 440 middle school students, and which toured 14 locations in Tokyo and Fukushima, presenting an archive for the future of the voices of post-disaster Japan. During F/T12 he successfully staged Jelinek's "Epilog?" (the follow-up to "Kein Licht.") as a mobile radio tour of Shimbashi in central Tokyo.
His F/T09 Autumn work "Compartment City Tokyo" was invited to the Wiener Festwochen in May and June 2011. It was installed in a park in central Vienna and included footage of interviews with 240 people, and employed a joint Japanese-Austrian creative team and "cast", receiving great acclaim in many German-language reviews. He also presented his "Referendum Project" (F/T11) and "Kein Licht II" (F/T12) at the 2013 Wiener Festwochen.
He has drawn attention domestically and from overseas festivals for his methodology in using the memories, landscapes and media of urban spaces and contemporary society, presenting them as an experiment in the possibilities of modern theatre.