Between Tokyo and Frankfurt: Akira Takayama’s ‘theatre 2.0’, migratory encounters and urban solidarity in the contemporary city

ABSTRACT

This article theorises how Akira Takayama with his theatre company Port B facilitates large-scale multi-sited performance works in cities across the globe, which expand the physical architecture of the theatre and utilise digital communications technology. To probe the relation between theatre and the contemporary city, the article interrogates what Takayama calls ‘theatre 2.0’. Drawing on interpersonal exchange with the artist and the notion of ‘quiet politics’ (Askin 2015), the article argues that Takayama's theatre 2.0 forges urban interstices for quiet and tender migratory encounters within an otherwise violent geopolitical sphere of asylum, forced displacement and oppressive border regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban performance
• contemporary city
• political theatre
• migration
• refugees
• geographies of care

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Anika Marschall

Anika Marschall is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dramaturgy at Aarhus University and holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on socially engaged arts, theatre and human rights, and she has published about the Mackintosh art school fire 2018, the performance of commitment in politically engaged art, institutional aesthetics, the politics of listening, dramaturgies of statelessness, and works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Centre for Political Beauty and Claudia Bosse. Currently, she is preparing her monograph Performing Human Rights (Routledge) and she is editing the Scottish Journal of Performance.