Responding to Rupture

Abstract

The 2014 confessional documentary play, A Wake: Kids Killing Kids present a unique opportunity to investigate rupture. It was a collaborative production by Australian company Too Many Weapons and Filipino company Sipat Lawin, which sought to address the limitations of a 2013 performance, Kids Killing Kids, created and performed solely by the Australians. Both of these shows were investigations into their previous collaboration, Battalia Royale.Battalia Royale was an immersive promenade performance written by the Australian playwrights and staged by Filipino theatre company Sipat Lawin in 2012. It was enormously successful in Manila, attracting large audiences, online fan-clubs and glowing reviews. However, the performance was also stridently condemned for the highly physical enactments of violence by adolescent performers, and the way audiences were encouraged to become implicit in this simulated violence.Battalia Royale is itself an adaptation of the cult Japanese novel (and subsequent manga and film) Battle Royale, written by Kōshun Takami (1999). The novel provides a visceral criticism of authoritarian policy, graphically depicting a class of adolescents committing acts of violence and murder upon one another under government order.These artworks provide a remarkable genealogy of rupture, over nearly two decades and across three countries. This essay seeks to trace how rupture is sustained and transformed through performance, providing insight into the radical potential of rupture, but also the difficulty in attempting to harness it.