ABSTRACT
Tokyo throbs with life, half techno-futurist, half old empire folded into intricate pagodas and origami birds. Nature appears in thousands of miniature theatres removed from the vast circuit board of city streets, in Zen gardens and bonsai trees and city parks. Unlike the geometric gardens of Versailles, Tokyo offers asymmetry and organic wandering distilled by clearing away negative space. This is a city where performance expands perception, from the slow, controlled steps of the Noh or Kamigata-mai dancer to frantic parades of brightly coloured robots and the vivid, meditative visual worlds of the performance group Dumb Type. The city performs far outside and between its theatres. In 1975, Senda Akihiko travelled through Tokyo with the eye of a theatre critic. He had to wonder because he was following a map created by Terayama Shuji, the artist responsible for creating many ‘city dramas’ wherein spectators visited dozens of sites without knowing whether they were curated, created, altered, or incidental.
