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.

Notes

1 Author's notes taken at a round-table discussion of cross-cultural practice as part of the Next Wave Festival 2014.

2 The similarity of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games (2008) to Battle Royale has been widely commented on, and is well summarized by Yang (2012). In terms of the rupture explored in this essay, however, The Hunger Games follows a markedly different trajectory.

3 A copy of the letter could not be found on any newspaper website. Dr Pagaduan-Lopez has been contacted by the author and to date has not replied. However, a copy of the letter can be found on Dr Pagaduan-Lopez's public Facebook page.

4 One fan club was Class Love, a group of fans who attended performances in white T-shirts and posted photographs on their Facebook page (Class Love, 2012, Sept 16) showing the fake blood splashed on them during the performance. Numerous fan videos posted to YouTube also capture the gleeful audience responses, such as a Kakai vs Victor (juuubart 2012) and Frazer kills Timothy(Lerio 2012).

5 Krumping is an energetic style of hip-hop dancing that originated in Los Angeles. For a more detailed history see the documentary RIZE (LaChapelle 2005).

6 The image in question can be viewed on The New Yorker website (2004).