Only seventy-five tickets are available to each of the twelve encore performances of Basil Twist’s Dogugaeshi at Japan Society; six shows are already sold out, so you better hurry if you want to see the special twentieth anniversary revival of the award-winning phenomenon.
Originally presented at Japan Society in 2004 in honor of the 150th anniversary of the US-Japan Treaty of Kanagawa, the sixty-minute work is part of the cultural institution’s fall 2024 series “Ningyo! A Parade of Puppetry.” Dogugaeshi (“doh-goo-guy-ih-shee”) follows the tradition of a stage mechanic developed in Japan’s Awa region using multiple painted fusuma screens and tableaux. “When I heard from several sources of a legendary eighty-eight-screen dogugaeshi, I knew that I had to do this piece with at least eighty-eight screens to bridge this all but vanished art form into the twenty-first century,” Twist, a third-generation puppeteer from San Francisco, explained in a statement.
Performed by four puppeteers including Twist, Dogugaeshi features video projections by Peter Flaherty, lighting by Andrew Hill, and sound by Greg Duffin; the score, composed by shamisen master Yumiko Tanaka, will be played live by Tanaka at the evening shows and by Yoko Reikano Kimura at the matinees. In the narrative, a white fox guides the audience through a tale of Japan’s past and present.
In the above 2014 Japan Society promotional video, Twist says that he sees Dogugaeshi, which has traveled around the globe, as a “sort of meditation into into into into into into this Japanese world. . . . The piece was created for this stage and so it really looks the best on this stage.”
“Ningyo! A Parade of Puppetry” continues October 3–5 with National Bunraku Theater, November 7–9 with “Shinnai Meets Puppetry: One Night in Winter & The Peony Lantern,” and December 12 and 13 with “The Benshi Tradition and the Silver Screen: A Japanese Puppetry Spin-off,” in which star movie talker Ichiro Kataoka and shamisen player Sumie Kaneko accompany screenings of two silent films, Daisuke Ito’s 1927 A Diary of Chuji’s Travels the first night and Shozo Makino’s 1910-17 Chushingura the second evening.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Everyone becomes obsessed with the title character in Gen Nagao’s strange and unusual The Box Man
JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
July 10-21, $10-$25
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
“I never would have expected to be praised for my tentative steps as an actor at Japan Cuts, a film festival in New York!” eighty-two-year-old Chinese-born Japanese actor Tatsuya Fuji said about winning the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s fest at Japan Society. “The last time I visited New York was nearly half a century ago. Back then, Nagisa Oshima’s film, In the Realm of the Senses, was invited to the New York Film Festival, but unfortunately, it couldn’t be screened due to censorship. And now, in 2024, the film I participated in, Great Absence, is being screened in New York, and they’ve even given me an award! I am overwhelmed with emotion!”
It would be a shame for movie lovers to be absent at the seventeenth annual festival, which runs July 10-21 and celebrates new Japanese film with more than thirty features, documentaries, animation, shorts, and a few classics. The opening-night selection is Masanori Tominaga’s Between the White Key and the Black Key, which takes place over the course of one night in the life of jazz pianist Hiroshi Minami. The centerpiece is Shadow of Fire, which concludes Shinya Tsukamoto’s war trilogy that began with Fires on the Plain and Killing and stars Cut Above honoree Mirai Moriyama. The festival comes to an end with the international premiere of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic, a revised version of the 2016 original.
In between there are family-friendly works, romance stories, manga-based cartoons, searches for the meaning of existence, and a samurai tale from Takeshi Kitano. As is my preference every July, I’ve checked out two of the most unorthodox films, a pair that are unexpectedly similar in their use of black-and-white, dialogue, sex, violence, music, small casts, and investigations of loneliness.
A man (Daiki Hiba) and woman (Misa Wada) fear danger ahead in Gen Nagao’s Motion Picture: Choke
MOTION PICTURE: CHOKE (『映画 (窒息)』/ EIGA CHISSOKU) (Gen Nagao, 2023)
Friday, July 12, 9:00 japansociety.org
Nary a word is spoken in Gen Nagao’s black-and-white Motion Picture: Choke, which is set in a dystopian past/future that is either pre- or postverbal as it explores the inflexibility of the human condition in an unidentifiable time or place. The film begins in total darkness with Kiyoyuki Yoshikawa’s pulsating score, evoking the music of Bernard Herrmann in Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, followed by a frightening figure in black crawling up a woman’s body. The terrified woman (Misa Wada) awakes from the dream, panting, but then goes about her daily chores. Dressed in ragged, primitive clothing reminiscent of what Raquel Welch wore in One Million Years B.C., she scavenges for food, washes herself in a stream, collects water, and weaves by candlelight.
Living in an abandoned three-level concrete building with no outside walls or doors, she seems to enjoy her life. Every so often, a sweet-natured elderly peddler (Minori Terada) stops by to barter by playing a game. Everything is pleasant until a white-robed man (Takashi Nishina) and his two underlings (Yuri Tajima and Hiroshi Niki) brutally attack the woman, leaving her devastated and angry. She constructs a trap for protection that captures a shirtless young man (Daiki Hiba), who she ties to a wall like Jesus on a cross. They ultimately start a charming partnership, learning together how to survive this empty world, but when the evil bandits return, male toxicity rises up as a battle for power ensues — with the woman determined to not play the victim again.
In only his second full-length film, following 2019’s Someday in Love, Nagao is in complete command as he explores multiple genres; perhaps Motion Picture is part of the title to remind the viewer that this is about the cinematic experience as much as it is a history of how women have been treated by men since the beginning of time. Wada (Cape’s Brothers and Sisters,Kiku to Guillotine) is captivating as the woman, who is not about to get taken advantage of twice. She has an understanding of life that the men will never have, especially when she seeks revenge.
The lack of dialogue is no mere gimmick; instead, it harkens to how humans communicate with one another in the most basic of ways in any era, without language, like animals. The film is gorgeously photographed by Sota Takahashi, with stark lighting by Kohei Kajimoto; Yoshikawa’s music shifts genres as well, from ominous and threatening to innocent and playful.
From its opening moments to its startling, accusatory finale, Choke is precisely the kind of film that makes Japan Cuts one of the best festivals of the year.
A nurse (Koichi Sato) contemplates her future in Gakuryu Ishii’s strange and unusual The Box Man
THE BOX MAN (『箱 男 / HAKO OTOKO) (Gakuryu Ishii, 2024)
Saturday, July 13, 5:30 japansociety.org
“Those who obsess over the box man become the box man,” a man in a shabby box whispers early in Gakuryu Ishii’s creepy, bizarre adaptation of Kōbō Abe 1973 novel, The Box Man.
I can now firmly declare that I am obsessed with the box man. But aren’t we all?
The film takes place just as the prosperity of Japan’s Shōwa period is ending in 1973. The first few minutes are in black-and-white, featuring Abe’s street photography, before we meet the box man, aka Myself (Masatoshi Nagase), who declares in voice-over:
“I see right through everything. A fabricated box you put your faith in. It is you people who live inside it. I have abandoned all that is fake, to obtain the real thing. What is more, I can see. You people as you truly are. The hidden shape of this world. Together with this box, the world shall be completely reborn. I am the box man. I gaze at you unilaterally.”
As it turns to color, he continues, “I become identifiable. You may see me, but you pay no attention. You feign ignorance. And yet, just as I once did, if you become overly aware of the box man . . .”
The box man lives in a cardboard box that reaches down to his knees; it is from the Argon company, makers of medical supplies. There’s a rectangular slit on one side so he can see in front of him; the horizontal space resembles a letterboxed film, except in this case it works both ways, from the inside and the outside. He watches us as we watch him.
He moves stealthily through the streets, avoiding unnecessary contact, until he’s being tracked by a photographer with a rifle and threatened by a slingshot-wielding ex-military madman. But soon he finds himself in a small, private hospital run by an older gentleman called the General (Ayana Shiramoto), his assistant, a doctor (Tadanobu Asano), and their nurse (Koichi Sato), where an odd power dynamic unfolds involving self-identity, sex, control over one’s body and mind, who gets to tell their story, and reality itself.
Ishii’s film has been thirty years in the making, when he received Abe’s blessing to go forward with it. The book has previously been adapted into two short films, but this is the first full-length version, with screenwriters Kiyotaka Inagaki and Ishii (Crazy Thunder Road,Punksamurai Slash Down) making significant changes while staying true to Abe’s original vision.
Hideho Urata’s photography gives the film an immersive quality, as if we are all in our own box, which is sort of true whether we’re experiencing it at home on a TV or streaming device or in a theater. When the doctor is questioned by a detective (Yûko Nakamura) in a police interview room, another cop peers through a long slit in a wall, making him another kind of box man. Michiaki Katsumoto’s wide-ranging score guides us through 1940s detective noir, 1960s jangly pop, 1970s thriller, and a hilarious psychedelic scene with an enema.
The Box Man doesn’t always make sense; some plot twists are hard to decipher, and it is too long at two hours, but you won’t be able to look away for even a second. You’ll also wonder what life inside a box could be like, if you’re not already in one, psychologically or physically.
Like Motion Picture: Choke,The Box Man deals with loneliness, sex, violence, love, faith, misogyny, homelessness, and a dark future in which humanity builds cages for themselves and others, as well as how we tell stories — and who gets to tell them. At one point, the box man sees words appear on a wall, expressing, “Within this labyrinth, I shall seek an exit.” But getting out is not going to be easy, for any of us.
The Box Man is screening July 13 at 5:30 at Japan Society, with Ishii on hand for a Q&A. He will also participate in a Q&A following the July 14 showing of his 1995 rite-of-passage drama, August in the Water.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Yoko is making its US premiere at in Japan Society / IFC Center series
FAMILY PORTRAIT: JAPANESE FAMILY IN FLUX
Japan Society, 333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 15 – March 22 www.ifccenter.com japansociety.org
In February 2021, as part of the ACA Cinema Project, Japan Society and Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs teamed up for “21st Century Japan: Films from 2001-2020,” a three-week virtual festival of Japanese films from the previous twenty years, followed in December by “Flash Forward: Debut Works and Recent Films by Notable Japanese Directors,” a three-week hybrid series pairing directors’ most recent works with their debuts. Since then, they have also presented “Emerging Japanese Films” and “The Female Gaze: Women Filmmakers from Japan Cuts and Beyond.”
The festival is now back with “Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux,” ten films that explore familial bonds. The selections range from Yasujirō Ozu’s 1967 Tokyo Twilight and Kohei Oguri’s 1981 Muddy River to the New York premiere of Ryota Nakano’s 2019 A Long Goodbye and the US premieres of Teruaki Shoji’s Hoyaman and Keiko Tsuruoka’s Tsugaru Lacquer Girl. Nakano will take part in a Q&A and reception following the February 23 New York premiere of Her Love Boils Bathwater, and he will be on hand for a discussion after the February 24 showing of his latest work, The Asadas, which was inspired by real-life photographer Masashi Asada.
All screenings take place at Japan Society except for the February 22 US premiere of Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s Yoko, which will be shown at IFC Center; the film stars Pistol Takehara, Jun Fubuki, Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi, and TV, film, and music favorite Joe Odagiri.
“‘Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux’ is a richly thematic series celebrating the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Japanese family,” Japan Society director of film Peter Tatara said in a statement. “Showcasing films from across the past sixty-five years, audiences will find an ever-evolving image of what family means in Japan, and the universally human sorrow and joys at its core.”
Below are select reviews from the series.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking is a special film that honors such Japanese directors as Naruse, Ozu, and Imamura
STILL WALKING (ARUITEMO ARUITEMO) (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008)
Japan Society
Thursday, February 15, 7:00 japansociety.org
Flawlessly written, directed, and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters,After Life), Still Walking follows a day in the life of the Yokoyama family, which gathers together once a year to remember Junpei, the eldest son who died tragically. The story is told through the eyes of the middle child, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a forty-year-old painting restorer who has recently married Yukari (Yui Natsukawa), a widow with a young son (Shohei Tanaka). Ryota dreads returning home because his father, Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), and mother, Toshiko (Kirin Kiki), are disappointed in the choices he’s made, both personally and professionally, and never let him escape from Junpei’s ever-widening shadow. Also at the reunion is Ryota’s chatty sister, Chinami (You), who, with her husband and children, is planning on moving in with her parents in order to take care of them in their old age (and save money as well).
Over the course of twenty-four hours, the history of the dysfunctional family and the deep emotions hidden just below the surface slowly simmer but never boil, resulting in a gentle, bittersweet narrative that is often very funny and always subtly powerful. The film is beautifully shot by Yutaka Yamazaki, who keeps the camera static during long interior takes — it moves only once inside the house — using doorways, short halls, and windows to frame scenes with a slightly claustrophobic feel, evoking how trapped the characters are by the world the parents have created. The scenes in which Kyohei walks with his cane ever so slowly up and down the endless outside steps are simple but unforgettable. Influenced by such Japanese directors as Mikio Naruse, Yasujiro Ozu, and Shohei Imamura, Kore-eda was inspired to make the film shortly after the death of his parents; although it is fiction, roughly half of Toshiko’s dialogue is taken directly from his own mother. Still Walking is a special film, a visual and psychological marvel that should not be missed.
Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) has trouble facing his sudden unemployment in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata
TOKYO SONATA (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)
Japan Society
Sunday, February 18, 7:00 japansociety.org
Winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes, Tokyo Sonata serves as a parable for modern-day Japan. Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is a simple family man, with a wife, Megumi (Kyōko Koizumi), two sons, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and Kenji (Kai Inowaki), and an honest job as an administration director for a major company. When Ryuhei is suddenly let go — he is being replaced by much cheaper Chinese labor — he is so ashamed, he doesn’t tell his family. Instead, he puts on his suit every day and, briefcase in hand, walks out the door, but instead of going to work, he first waits on line at the unemployment agency, then at an outdoor food kitchen for a free lunch with the homeless — and other businessmen in the same boat as he is. Taking out his anger on his family, Ryuhei refuses to allow Kenji to take piano lessons and protests strongly against Takashi’s desire to join the American military. But then, on one crazy night — which includes a shopping mall, a haphazard thief (Koji Yakusho), a convertible, and some unexpected violence — it all comes to a head, leading to a brilliant finale that makes you forget all of the uneven missteps in the middle of the film, which is warmly photographed by Akiko Ashizawa and about a half hour too long anyway.
Kagawa (Sukiyaki Western Django,Tokyo!) is outstanding as the sad-sack husband and father, matched note for note by the wonderful pop star Koizumi (Hanging Garden,Adrift in Tokyo), who searches for strength as everything around her is falling apart. And it’s always great to see Yakusho, the star of such films as Kurosawa’s Cure, Shohei Imamura’s The Eel, Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, seen here as a wild-haired, wild-eyed wannabe burglar.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35 japansociety.org
To go, or not to go? That is the multilayered question asked in Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race’s absurdist, scatological HAMLET | TOILET, continuing at Japan Society through January 13 as part of the Under the Radar festival.
As you enter Japan Society, you are greeted by a different kind of step and repeat; instead of posing in front of a show logo, you can snap a selfie with a glitteringly white Japanese Toto washlet on a red platform, a fancy toilet with such special features as a heated seat and a bidet. It sets the mood for what is to follow, ninety minutes of controlled chaos involving more flatulence than the beans scene in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles.
Murai has previously reimagined works by William Shakespeare in Romeo and Toilet and Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, wildly unpredictable tales that incorporate dance, music, strange props, and bizarre costumes. HAMLET | TOILET sits comfortably within that oeuvre. The production takes place in and around a three-stall installation, an open cube with a back wall and no doors. The three actors, Takuro Takasaki, G. K. Masayuki, and Yuki Matsuo, are dressed in unflattering white body-hugging latex suits reminiscent of the spermatozoa in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).
The essence of the Bard’s tragedy is in there, somewhere: Hamlet’s (Takasaki) uncle, Claudius (Masayuki), has killed Hamlet’s father, married his mother, and become king. Hamlet is in love with Ophelia (Masayuki), whose brother, expert fencer Laertes (Matsuo), is not a Hamlet fan. Hamlet’s besties, Horatio (Masayuki) and Marcellus (Matsuo), have encountered the ghost of their friend’s father, who tells his son that his murder must be avenged. To do so, Hamlet has to face his conscience, which is not lodged in his brain or heart but in his painful belly — the load he is carrying is an intensifying bowel movement that his multidimensional constipation will not allow him to release.
For much of the show, the actors are in the middle stall, trying to take dumps, either squatting by themselves or sitting on a cushiony human bowl formed by the other two actors. They gleefully pass gas that is projected in colorful animation by Takashi Kawasaki, accompanied by the appropriate sounds. The characters discuss aspects of making number two in ways that no play or novel that I know of ever has; no bathroom subject or feces joke is off limits, regardless of how silly or lowbrow. Nobody can find relief, not even from Ophelia’s headdress, which consists of dozens of rolls of toilet paper.
Amid deep dives into the shape, consistency, aroma, and chocolatey nature of human waste, Murai also delves into cowardice, sanity, suffering, and revenge. The dialogue is similarly mixed; Hamlet veterans will appreciate such real Shakespearean lines as “That adulterate beast won to his shameful lust . . . my queen,” “Never make known what you have seen [and heard] tonight,” “[I am going to] put an antic disposition on,” and “I should have fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!”
Purists might grimace at the more coarse language, such as “Something must be born that will trace a single line / like a magnificent line of feces / straight through all of this wonderful society,” “Please, just this once / couldn’t it be soft and gently flow like water,” “You must cleanly and completely defecate me!” and “In a world that is moved by the strict laws of almighty God / that which should not have moved has passed / That’s why my movement will not pass!” Even the subtitles themselves are in on the fun, changing the spelling and capitalization of nec-ASS-arily and BUTT (instead of but).
The three actors occasionally break out into song and dance; the music is by DJ and hip-hop producer Tsutchie from Shakkazombie, with hilarious choreography by Shinnosuke Motoyama. There’s far too much repetition, as numerous jokes spew out like the preparation for a colonoscopy, and in one scene the play makes fun of that itself as repeated statements fill up the subtitles monitor in ever-smaller type. But just when you think the production is merely a fart-fantasy concocted by Eric Cartman or Beavis and Butt-Head, Murai slips in something ridiculously clever so you won’t lose your appetite; it’s not merely Shakespeare as bathroom reading, although that’s in there too. Murai is not claiming that Shakespeare, or theater in general, is full of shit, but it might be in need of a thorough cleansing.
Which brings us back to the original question: To go, or not to go? HAMLET | TOILET is certainly not for everyone; some gags were met with laughter and applause, while others received random chuckles or guffaws — or silence. If you do get a ticket — the January 12 performance will be followed by an artist Q&A — be sure to use the facilities, which have several washlets, in addition to doors to ASSure your privacy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Get tickets to such shows as Volcano at the Under the Radar festival before time runs out (photo by Emijlia Jefrehmova)
UNDER THE RADAR 2024
Multiple venues
January 5-21 utrfest.org
There was quite an uproar in June when Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis announced the cancellation of the widely popular Under the Radar festival, which the Public had hosted since 2006. Held every January, the series featured a diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, discussions, and live music and dance, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Eustis followed that outcry with another message:
“Last week, difficult news was shared that the Under the Radar festival would not return for the Public’s 23–24 season. We made the painful decision to place the festival on hiatus. I understand and share the hurt that those who participated in and loved the festival have expressed over the past few days. . . . Unfortunately, these are exceptionally challenging times in our field. The Public, like almost every other nonprofit theater in the country, is facing serious financial pressure. . . . In the certainty that better times will come, we continue to work to preserve the health and mission of the Public. We look forward to a time when we can fully expand back into the robust and expansive theater we need to be.”
Festival founder and director Mark Russell was determined that the show must go on, and he brought it back to life. “Festivals are celebrations. They mark harvests and other moments of abundance or recognition,” he said in a statement. “Under the Radar is a festival that each year celebrates the vibrancy of new theater, in New York and internationally. At this moment, even in very challenging times, there is still innovative work rising from communities around New York and in far-reaching parts of the globe. Under the Radar aims to spotlight this work for audiences — not only those ‘in the know’ but from a wider stretch of communities, diverse in all respects, that could benefit by engaging with these creative leaders.”
The 2024 program includes two dozen presentations at seventeen venues, taking place from January 5 to 21. Below are my top five choices, which do not include two highly praised and strongly recommended works that are making encore appearances in New York, Dmitry Krimov/Krymov Lab NYC’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words at BRIC and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s bilingual Public Obscenities at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. In addition, the UFO sidebar of works in progress consist of Matt Romein’s Bag of Worms at Onassis ONX Studio, Zora Howard’s The Master’s Tools at Chelsea Factory (with Okwui Okpokwasili as Tituba from The Crucible), Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon’s How does it feel to look at nothing at National Sawdust, Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions’ live debut of the previously streamed The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy at the Connelly Theater, Jenn Kidwell and *the Blackening’s We Come to Collect [A Flirtation, with Capitalism] at the Flea, and Penny Arcade’s The Art of Becoming — Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted [1967-1973] at Joe’s Pub. In addition, a free symposium at NYU Skirball Center on January 12 at 9:30 am features Inge Ceustermans, Hana Sharif, Sunny Jain, Taylor Mac, Jeremy O. Harris, Ravi Jain, and Kaneza Schaal, hosted by Edgar Miramontes, looking at the future of independent theater.
A book club offers unique insight into Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (photo by Ros Kavanagh)
THE FIRST BAD MAN
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Samuel Rehearsal Studio, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
January 5-13, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35) www.lincolncenter.org www.panpantheatre.com
Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre has staged unique versions of Beckett’s Embers and Cascando as well as Gina Moxley’s The Patient Gloria. The company now turns its attention on a unique aspect of literature; for The First Bad Man at Lincoln Center’s Samuel Rehearsal Studio, audience members watch a book club dissect Miranda July’s wildly original 2015 novel, as characters and story lines intersect with reality.
A bouncy castle becomes more than just a fun children’s place in Nile Harris’s this house is not a home (photo by Alex Munro)
this house is not a home
Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 6-14, $30.05 www.abronsartscenter.org
A bouncy castle helps Nile Harris explore how the world has changed over the last two years, with the assistance of Crackhead Barney, Malcolm-x Betts, slowdanger, and GENG PTP along with a gingerbread minstrel, vape addicts, a movie cowboy, and others, in this house is not a home. Afropessimism is on the menu in this collaboration between Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company.
Hamlet | Toilet makes its NYC debut at Japan Society (photo courtesy Kaimaku Pennant Race)
HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35 japansociety.org
In 2019, Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race blew our minds with the outrageous Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, a bizarrely entertaining mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. They’re now back with another mad mix at Japan Society; I’m not sure there’s much more to say that what’s in the press release: “Notoriously iconoclastic and scatological director Yu Murai’s Hamlet | Toilet runs the Bard’s highbrow tale of existential woe through the poop chute.” Each ticket comes with free same-day admission to the exhibition “Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus.”
VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54 stannswarehouse.org
Melding theater, dance, and sci-fi, Irish writer, director, and choreographer Luke Murphy (Slow Tide,Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) introduces audiences to the mysterious Amber Project in this four-part miniseries of forty-five-minute multimedia segments starring Murphy and Will Thompson, exploring their past as they face an uncertain future.
OUR CLASS
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 12 – February 4, $68-$139 www.bam.org ourclassplay.com
During the pandemic, Igor Golyak and Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theatre broke through with innovative, interactive livestreamed productions, attracting such stalwarts as Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the troupe. Following shows at BAC and Lincoln Center, the company brings a timely new adaptation of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class to BAM, about a 1941 pogrom in Poland that severely impacts the relationships of a group of students. Broadway veterans Richard Topol, Alexandra Silber, and Gus Birney star, alongside Jewish and non-Jewish cast and crew members from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Germany, and the US.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
TAISHO ROMAN: FEVER DREAMS OF THE GREAT RECTITUDE
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, December 15, and Saturday, December 16, $12-$16 per film
212-715-1258 japansociety.org
“Taisho is the best,” legendary Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki once said. I can’t disagree.
Japan Society is celebrating the Western-influenced Taisho period, which followed the Meiji and ran from 1912 to 1926, during the reign of the country’s 123rd emperor, Yoshihito, with the film series “Taisho Roman: Fever Dreams of the Great Rectitude.” As a general rule, I am always attracted to the most unusual, bizarre, and strange films of festivals, the kind most likely to be shown at midnight screenings. In the case of “Taisho Roman,” however, that would essentially mean all six movies.
The festival kicks into high gear Friday night with a half dozen wide-ranging works, beginning with a double feature at 6:00 of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s hourlong 1926 silent classic, A Page of Madness (the 1970s New Sound version of this previously lost silent film), about a man who takes a custodial job in a mental institution where his ailing wife is being treated, partly inspired by the director having met the emperor, and Shuji Terayama’s 1979 forty-minute Grass Labyrinth, a psychosexual memory tale based on the novel by Kyoka Izumi. At 9:00, Japan Society screens a thirty-fifth-anniversary 35mm print of Toshio Matsumoto’s 1988 Dogra Magra, a surreal drama of memory and identity from a story by detective novelist Kyusaku Yumeno.
On Saturday at 3:00, it’s time for Teruo Ishii’s wild and unpredictable 1969 Horrors of Malformed Men, in which the protagonist escapes an asylum and tries to figure out who he is. At 5:00 is the international premiere of Suzuki’s 1980 genre-defying Zigeunerweisen, a unique adaptation of Hyakken Uchida’s Disk of Sarasate and Yamataka-boshi. The series concludes at 8:00 with a thirty-fifth-anniversary screening of Akio Jissoji’s 1988 Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, based on the first three volumes of Hiroshi Aramata’s 1980s epic Teito Monogatari, an occult reimagining of the history of Tokyo.
“Exploring one of Japan’s most fascinating periods, ‘Taisho Roman’ pulls from some of Japanese literature’s most occult and imaginative texts — writings that to this day remain untranslated,” Japan Society film programmer and series curator Alexander Fee said in a statement. “Featuring films that range from exploitation to avant-garde and angura, this series collects both well-known and forgotten works that envisage differing realities of the often-mythologized era of Japanese history.”
John Cage’s unique relationship with Japan and Japanese culture will be celebrated in Japan Society series (photo by Yasuhiro Yoshioka / courtesy of Sogetsu Foundation)
JOHN CAGE’S JAPAN
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, September 28, and Friday, September 29, $28-$35, 7:30
Saturday, October 21, Thursday, November 16, Thursday, December 7, $32-$40
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
“If John Cage had not encountered Japanese culture, there would have been no John Cage!” Japan Society artistic director Yoko Shioya recently declared.
In 1989, experimental composer John Cage was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the category of Creative Arts and Moral Sciences; the citation, presented in Kyoto, Japan, noted that he was “a rebel against Western music. . . . His creative activities and philosophy of art have truly constituted a revolution in culture. . . . Mr. John Cage has stood in the vanguard of change in the postwar Western musical world, and has continually demonstrated his leadership among the most avant-garde group of composers.” Cage, who was born in Los Angeles in 1912, first visited Japan in 1962; he returned in 1964, 1976, and several times in the 1980s. Not only was Cage impacted by Japanese art and culture — he was particularly interested in Zen Buddhism — but he was a major influence on such Japanese composers as Tōru Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yoko Ono, and Yuji Takahashi, in what was called “Jon Kēji shokku,” or John Cage Shock.
Japan Society pays tribute to the relationship between Cage and Japan in the series “John Cage’s Japan,” which kicks off September 28-29 with Paul Lazar’s Cage Shuffle. From 1958 to 1960, Cage wrote and recorded a series of sixty-second real-life anecdotes called Indeterminacy. At Japan Society, Lazar, the cofounder of Big Dance Theater, will perform pieces related to Japan and the East; using an iPhone — “a device that John Cage invented,” Lazar jokes in the above video — Lazar will have Cage’s recordings of the stories piped into his earbuds and will repeat them out loud, along with quotes from such Cage contemporaries as D. T. Suzuki, Isamu Noguchi, and Hidekazu Yoshida. Meanwhile, Lazar will be moving to choreography by BDT cofounder and Tony winner Annie-B Parson. The movement is fixed but the text is random, creating the kind of chance Cage was celebrated for. The September 29 show will be followed by an artist Q&A.
On October 21, “John Cage’s Ryoanji” features the composer’s 1983 work, inspired by the Zen rock garden at Kyoto’s Ryoanji Temple. Directed by Tomomi Adachi, it will be performed by International Contemporary Ensemble in New York City (with Michael Lormand on trombone, Lizzie Burns on double bass, and Clara Warnaar on percussion), joined virtually from a teahouse in Kanazawa City by Hitomi Nakamura on the ancient hichiriki woodwind and Maki Ota on vocals. The multimedia concert, with 3D projections by Dr. Tsutomu Fujinami, will be preceded by a lecture from Cage scholar James Pritchett at 7:30.
Adachi’s “Noh-opera / Noh-tation: Decoding John Cage’s Unrealized Project” takes place on November 16 at 7:30, for which Adachi used AI to compose music and lyrics based on Buddhist koans for Cage’s unrealized Noh-opera: Or the Complete Musical Works of Marcel Duchamp. The work will be performed by vocalist Gelsey Bell, noh actor Wakako Matsuda, and Adachi with ICE’s Alice Teyssier on flute, James Austin Smith on oboe, Campbell MacDonald on clarinet, Rebekah Heller on bassoon, and Lormand on trombone and will be followed by an artist Q&A.
The series concludes on December 7 with “Cage Shock: Homage to His First Japan Visit,” consisting of a lecture by Dr. Pritchett, live performances of 1951’s Haiku, 1958’s Aria and Solo for Piano with Fontana Mix, and 1962’s 0’00” by Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s 1962 Sapporo, which Cage conducted, and soundscapes by Tania Caroline Chen and Victoria Shen, with ICE’s Kyle Armburst on viola, Wendy Richman on viola, and Katinka Kleijn and Michael Nicolason on cello.
“I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage,” Takemitsu wrote. “The reason for this is that in my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.” At Japan Society this fall, we can all express our deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage.
