“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts …”

Considering they’ve unveiled past site-specific collections in an office furniture display room, a luxury day spa, a stretch hummer, a shipping dock and a rural dairy farm, one never knows exactly what an invitation to a Theatre Products event will lead to.

For their last collection ‘Boutique’, friends were invited to Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store where we were directed to the theatre on the sixth floor, which happens to be the oldest surviving theatre space in Tokyo and the site where the city’s first fashion show was held.

We were then assigned a team and taken on tours of the legendary building with the resident department store tour guides who told us the history of the site (while Tokyo has been completely annihilated several times with earthquakes, wars, floods and fires, Mitsukoshi has miraculously remained since the seventeenth century) and the architecture (including the thousands of prehistoric fossils embedded in the walls), and led us to a performance at the huge old pipe organ.

Arriving back at the theatre on the sixth floor, we were asked to come on to the stage where we faced out, looking at the empty seats, our invisible audience. Then the designers talked everyone through the collection, piece by piece. Besides several Australiana motifs like a kitschy-cute koala print, a running theme of the collection is the Mitsukoshi department store itself:

The designers Akira Takeuchi and Tayuka Nakanishi started collaborating on costume design for theatre in 2000. Wanting to form a label that would treat fashion as theatre, they joined with Kao Kanamori (whose background is in performance) in 2002 and started Theatre Products.

Their aim is to consider clothes not as fixed, pre-existing objects, but as things that are formed only contextually, through the process of being worn. According to them, fashion exists not in physical commodities but in the interactions of bodies, spaces and experiences. To articulate the idea of fashion as live and participatory, their projects have often played with the idea of interactivity – like their installation/shop at Rice Gallery where they built a carnival tent out of pieces of clothing, requiring customers to tear items away from the architectural structure, rendering their act of consumption a performance. The project was launched with a concert by the 17-member horn and percussion band Chanchikitornade, with images of clothing factories projected on the walls.

They have often collaborated with contemporary performing artists and ensembles, including ‘Japan’s smallest magician’ Mame Yamada, and KATHY, the faceless dancers who came to Sydney for Big In Japan last December. They also worked several times with the legendary art director Nagi Noda, creating the 100 identical dresses for this wild clip for J-pop star Yuki.

Top image courtesy Theatre Products, other photos by Amelia Groom.

The set of the latest Ishinha production Roji-shiki is comprised of a multitude of cubic frames containing skeletal forms and fragments or shoes, bicycle wheels and other everyday objects. These are arranged and rearranged by the performers to take us through ever evolving worlds, each as atmospheric and surreal as the last.

Like the module stage set, the whitewashed dancers are individual parts of a greater whole who are systematically arranged and choreographed with the overall effect of being mere cogs in the most strange and magnificent machine imaginable. The unique chanting and refined movement come from a zen-like focus, with mathematical precision and repetition used to create a whole new system of rhythm.

Coinciding with the new production, the Museum of Osaka University is holding an exhibition and symposium on the art of Ishina, including recreations from Roji-shiki. The exhibition runs until December 12.

Roji-shiki was the opening production of Festival/Tokyo, a performing arts program that continues until the end of December. For more information check the website.

Photos 2-4 by Jun Ishikawa

It is a festival factory line here in Tokyo. Design Festa, the Tokyo International Film Festival and Japan Fashion Week are all happening this month (with reports on all of them coming from yours truly), and a unique performing arts programme called Festival/Tokyo is about to kick off, with 20-odd cutting edge productions taking place over the next two months.

The festival opens with the world premiere of Rojishiki by Yukichi Matsumoto’s innovative company Ishinha, which has possibly the best flyer for a theatre production ever (above) and promises to be a feast of seamless choreography, Balinese rhythmic chanting, symmetry and whitewashed bodies.

Since forming in the early ‘70s the company has become renowned for their site-specific outdoor roaming performances, often set in the Muroji Temple in Nara or the isolated islands of Okayama. Rojishiki is taking place in an old junior high school which will be temporarily set up like an alley (’roji’) complete with food stalls. As the ensemble has been busy making appearances around the world (including the Adelaide and Perth Festivals in Australia) this will mark their first performance in Tokyo for many years.

Other highlights in the program include the Butoh company Sankai Juku’s Unetsu which uses water, sand, light and movement, as well as several documentary/tour performances including Rimini Protokoll’s Cargo Tokyo (which takes place in the back of a moving truck with some truck drivers sharing stories about their lives) and Compartment City by Port B  (which takes the audience around Nishiguchi Park in Ikebukuro to investigate, through talks and video instillations, the uniquely Japanese phenomena of private refuges within public spaces, such as the omnipresent ‘manga café’).

Woo! Here are some images from a few of Ishinha’s past productions …