Theatre on the Move: Sakurai Daizhou's Tent Theatre in East Asia

Abstract

This paper discusses Japanese director Sakurai Daizou's theatre productions known as the "tent theatre," a genre which first emerged during the Tokyo student movement in the late 1960s. The study focuses on Sakurai's collaborative productions, particularly the theatre's style and politics. Japanese tent theatres are distinctive in their combination of itinerary performance and temporary, guerrilla stage arrangement. Sakurai's theatre is a descendent of this tradition of political theatre; however, it departs from the other postmodernist Japanese aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s while rendering folklores mixed in avant-garde abstract fragmentations as its signature dramaturgy. This essay discusses Sakurai's unique insistence on collaborative productions in light of the international theatre network he and his troupe members established in Taiwan and Beijing since the early 1990s. The discussion of Sakurai's collaborative art practice will contribute to the conversation on the post-1968 generation of socially engaged art from a non-European perspective, challenging the scope related to the problem of reification.