Akira Takayama
Akira Takayama (Japanese高山 明Akira Takayama, born 1969 ) is a Japanese theater director.
Career
After abandoning his literary studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, Takayama 1994 went to Europe. In Germany he worked as assistant to the theater maker Wolfram Mehring. After his return to Japan Takayama founded in 2002, the group "Port B" (ポルト·ビー), with whom he has since developed a number of performances. Takayama's work is regularly part of the theater festival Tokyo. His project " Compartment City - Tokyo" (个 室 都市 东京, Koshitsu toshi Tokyo), the Takayama in spring 2009 for the festival, was invited to the Vienna Festival in 2011. There learned as " Compartment City - Vienna" (個室 都市 ウィーン, Koshitsu toshi UIN) shown " self-awareness Installation" great media interest - not least because of the temporal proximity to the triple disaster of March 11.
Together with the dramaturge and founder of the Festival / Tokyo, Chiaki Soma, Akira Takayama was in March 2012 in Berlin and Dusseldorf as a guest to talk about his work as an artist after 11 March 2011.
Theater concept
Takayama worked with his group B port projects that inquire into the nature and possibilities of theater and explore the boundaries of contemporary theater and redefine for each project. Characteristic of Takayama are often conceived as a tour on-site performances and work with the Internet ( in particular the communication platform Twitter), media clichés and quotations of the urban space, from whose rearranging his projects arise.
Often the city itself, conceived as an interactive installation, by the moves of the participating audience. The participants of the project Sunshine 62 (サンシャイン62, 2008), for example, were prompted to address during a nearly three-hour tour around the famous skyscraper in the district Ikebukuro Sunshine 60 with forgotten places and events of the post-war Japanese history. The title Sunshine 62 refers to the 62 years that had passed to the origination date of the project since the end of World War II.
Compartment City - Tokyo
" Compartment City - Tokyo" combined a tour with the opportunity to rent a room for a certain period in a video booth, which had been erected on the square in front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space. 500 yen were paid per hour, apparently on the basis of private cabins that you can rent in Internet cafes and serve more often as well as nighttime homeless refuge. Takayama showed in the cabins in Ikebukuro video recordings of interviews that had been conducted on the forecourt with happened to pass by people, including homeless people, tourists, passers-by. Similarly, interviews were conducted from Tokyo and Vienna shown at the Vienna Festival. In this work showed very clearly how Takayama by means of a radically expanded theater concept exhibits hidden and often repressed realities.
Referendum Project
Takayama's current production " Referendum Project" (国民 投票 ポルジェクト, kokumin tōhyō Purojekuto, 2011) plays within a theatrical frame of reference a fictitious referendum is to nuclear power. For his " Referendum Project" Takayama toured with a truck, which was equipped with a video installation by Japan, and drove ten stations in Tokyo and three in the prefecture of Fukushima. Were shown videos of middle school students from Tokyo and Fukushima, who had been asked to assess the current state of Japanese society. On the homepage of the project. the individual stations are listed and stored information about each location of the truck, a Travelogue and completed questionnaires of the participants.
By that makes the voices audible, which are not usually heard proclaimed the " Referendum Project" the utopian vision of a theater that functions as a place of communication. Takayama also wants those who are not entitled to vote would be in a real referendum - minors, children, foreigners - allow participation in its artistic dialogue. As a consequence, Takayama does not aim at a result in terms of a decision for or against an option, but on gathering a variety of opinions and voices, and helping those via the Internet to its own public. Herein, Takayama's project differs from the referendum on the commissioning of the nuclear power plant in the Austrian Zwentendorf in 1978, which inspired him to this work.
It is so far the most political of the project director - after all, not an actual referendum is in Japan until now been carried out. Although Takayama conclusion due to the low willingness of the audience to participate, been rather disillusioned, the project should be continued in other cities.