Akira Takayama

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Akira Takayama (2017)

Akira Takayama ( Japanese 高山 明 Takayama Akira ; * 1969 ) is a Japanese theater director.

Career

After dropping out of his literary studies at Waseda University in Tokyo , Takayama went to Europe in 1994. In Germany he worked as assistant to the theater maker Wolfram Mehring . After returning to Japan, Takayama founded the group "Port B" ( ポ ル ト ・ ビ ー ) in 2002 , with which he has since worked on a number of performances. Takayama's work is a regular feature of the Tokyo Theater Festival. His project “Compartment City - Tokyo” ( 個 室 都市 東京 , koshitsu toshi tōkyō ), which Takayama realized for the festival in spring 2009, was invited to the 2011 Vienna Festival. There, the “self-awareness installation” shown as “Compartment City - Vienna” ( 個 室 都市 ウ ィ ー ン , koshitsu toshi uīn ) received great media interest - not least because of the proximity to the triple disaster of March 11th.

Together with the dramaturge and founder of the Festival / Tokyo, Chiaki Soma , Akira Takayama was a guest in Berlin and Düsseldorf in March 2012 to talk about his work as an artist after March 11, 2011.

Theater concept

Akira Takayama at McDonald's Radio University in March 2017

Takayama and his group Port B work on projects that ask about the nature and possibilities of theater and explore the limits of contemporary theater and redefine them for each project. Takayama is characterized by on-site performances, often designed as a tour, as well as working with the Internet (especially the communication platform Twitter), media set pieces and quotes from the urban space, from the rearrangement of which his projects arise.

The city itself is often understood as an interactive installation through which the participating viewer moves. The participants in the Sunshine 62 project ( サ ン シ ャ イ ン 62 , 2008), for example, were invited to take a nearly three-hour tour around the famous Sunshine 60 skyscraper in the Ikebukuro district and deal with forgotten places and events in post-war Japanese history. The title Sunshine 62 refers to the 62 years that had passed since the end of the Second World War when the project was created.

Compartment City - Tokyo

“Compartment City - Tokyo” combined a tour with the option of renting a video booth for a certain period of time that had been set up on the forecourt of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space. 500 yen per hour had to be paid, evidently based on private cabins that can be rented in internet cafés and which are increasingly being used by the homeless as a night refuge. In the cabins in Ikebukuro, Takayama showed video recordings of interviews that had been carried out on the forecourt with people who happened to pass by, including homeless people, tourists and passers-by. Similarly, interviews from Tokyo and Vienna were shown at the Wiener Festwochen. This work shows particularly clearly how Takayama uses a radically expanded concept of theater to exhibit hidden and often repressed realities.

Referendum Project

Takayama's production “Referendum Project” ( 国民 投票 ポ ル ジ ェ ク ト , kokumin tōhyō purojekuto , 2011) plays through a fictitious referendum on nuclear power within a theatrical frame of reference. For his “Referendum Project”, Takayama toured Japan in a truck equipped with a video installation, and headed for ten stations in Tokyo and three in Fukushima Prefecture. Videos were shown of middle school students from Tokyo and Fukushima who had been asked about their assessment of the current state of Japanese society. On the project homepage. the individual stations are listed and information on the location of the truck, a travelogue and completed questionnaires from the participants are stored.

By making the voices of those who would otherwise not be heard audible, the “Referendum Project” proclaims the seemingly utopian vision of a theater that functions as a place of communication. Takayama also wants to enable those who would not be entitled to vote in a real referendum - minors, children, foreigners - to participate in his artistic dialogue. As a consequence, Takayama does not aim for a result in the sense of a decision for or against an option, but rather to collect a variety of opinions and voices and to help them to become public on their own via the Internet. This is where Takayama's project differs from the referendum on the commissioning of the nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf, Austria in 1978, which inspired him to do this work.

It is probably the director's most political project to date - after all, no actual referendum has been held in Japan to date. Even if Takayama's conclusion was rather sobering due to the public's reluctance to participate, the project is to be continued in other cities.

McDonald's Radio University

McDonald's Radio University at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm

Takayama's current project "McDonald's Radio University" (MRU) takes up the concept of a mobile university by the British architect Cedric Price . MRU is the first project in the European Thinkbelt project series with a focus on migration and displacement . Refugee teachers from Afghanistan , Syria , Pakistan , Ghana , Burkina Faso , Eritrea and Iran give lectures on various subjects in branches of the McDonald’s fast food chain . The listeners receive the lectures on radios on the VHF radio band . The project started at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main in March 2017. The project series European Thinkbelt is to be continued along the Balkan route as far as Athens .

Web links

Commons : Akira Takayama  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Compartment City - Vienna . Esel.at, accessed on June 29, 2020.
  2. ^ Sunshine 62 ( Memento of February 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). Port B archive. Accessed April 13, 2012.
  3. ^ Compartment City - Vienna . Esel.at, accessed on June 29, 2020.
  4. ^ Referendum Project . Homepage of Akira Takayama's Referendum Project. Accessed April 13, 2012.
  5. ↑ Lisette Gebhardt: Steps from Hell . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 12, 2012. Retrieved March 15, 2012.
  6. ↑ EUROPEAN THINKBELT 2016-2018 - Mousonturm. (No longer available online.) In: mousonturm.de. Künstlerhaus Mousonturm , archived from the original on February 27, 2017 ; accessed on February 26, 2017 .
  7. ^ Newspaper supplement McDonald's Radio University. (PDF; 4.8 MB) (No longer available online.) Künstlerhaus Mousonturm , archived from the original on March 3, 2017 ; Retrieved March 3, 2017 .
  8. ↑ How to join MRU live lectures. (PDF; 1.8 MB) Retrieved March 3, 2017 (English, German).
  9. ↑ Tamara Marszalkowski: Between Big Mac and Balkan Route - McDonald's Radio University in Mousonturm. Journal Frankfurt , March 2, 2017, accessed on March 3, 2017 .
  10. ^ McDonald's Radio University. In: mru.global. Retrieved March 29, 2017 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Takayama, Akira
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 高山 明 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese theater director
DATE OF BIRTH 1969