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After angura?: recent works by Kawamura Takeshi

ECKERSALL, PETER (UNSW and Performance Paradigm, 2006)

Japan’s radical theatre movement angura emerged from a cultural space in the 1960s enlivened by acts of protest and experimentation. As discussed in previous essays, angura is characterised by transhistorical dramaturgy, transforming theatrical forms and changed relationships between the stage and the audience. One of the other notable features of angura was the rise of the writer-director, an often charismatic, sometimes autocratic, ‘genius-figure.’ Such writer-directors formed ensembles where their works were developed through distinctive and singular creative processes. These ‘auteurs,’ to borrow an expression from French new wave cinema, came to shape the 1960s theatre in Japan. They included Terayama Shûji, Satô Makoto, Suzuki Tadashi, Ôta Shogo and Kara Jûrô. Working in the era of rebellion and street protest, these young directors were impatient to revolutionise theatrical form. New physical training regimes and hybrid approaches to dramaturgy, aesthetics and design, coupled with idiosyncratic political-cultural outlooks are the fruits of the angura system, the outcomes of a singular auteur-like vision.