words | FESTIVAL/TOKYO Performing Arts Festival launching from Tokyo

About

Following "Zeitgeber", his acclaimed contribution to the F/T Emerging Artists Program last year, Takuya Murakawa now joins the F/T Main Program. That previous work dealt with the relationship between a care worker and his or her ward, using the physical bodies of the actor and audience members to express the act of caring for the disabled. Through this unanswerable inquiry into disability and the arts, Murakawa also introduced dialogue on the relation between the audience and the stage. For his new investigation he will now turn to the nature of conversation and words themselves.

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Murakawa has been creating documentaries, travelling to the disaster zones and conducting interviews with residents, in the process hitting up against many question marks and a feeling of unease. No matter what conversation, he felt that not everything could be conveyed. Not only the words of the person he was talking to; Murakawa also felt a chasm even in his own language. Is this chasm something that has come about since the disaster? Or was it something that existed inside us before the events of March 11, 2011?

On the reverse side of linguistic communication lie many things shared, that which have been passed down to us. These were the things that were once completely obvious: country, city, family, friends, ourselves. However, these things that we believed to be immoveable have, in a moment, vanished right before our eyes, and the "words" that had nestled so close to each one cannot now be produced in the same way as before. If we try to use the same words for something where now the situation has utterly changed, is it possible still to have a conversation? The words that we possess today feel like they cannot express the things we are facing. Murakawa has confronted the limits of language and will search for the directions of "words" through the means of theatre.

He posits that due to the disaster, all our words have been reset. In this brave new world, what kind of language can we acquire? What kind of conversation can we commence? On stage will be gathered the performers who went to the disaster zone, and a sign language interpreter who will sign the actorsʼ words, and a summary scriber. Through each of the participantsʼ unique way of conversing Murakawa will go back to the question of what is conversation itself, what are words? From this awkward exchange of language the audience will, along with the performers, share a sensation akin to the time when humanity first discovered language.

The challenge then begins of overcoming the limits of words and attaining the dialogue for talking about the now.