Dramaturgies of Crossing Borders: Tragic Journeys Across Asia-Pacific in Yudai Kamisato’s Theatre

Between 2015 and 2017 Japanese playwright and director Yudai Kamisato born in Peru, wrote and directed three plays inspired by his travels across South America, Asia and around the Japanese archipelago. The first production, ‘+51 Aviación, San Borja’ combines semi-autobiographical tragic stories with the true story of Japanese theatre director who was banished from Japan in the 1930’s. In the second production entitled ‘Isla! Isla! Isla!’, Kamisato focuses on the tragic motives of our times – migration, wars, environmental destruction, and land ownership. The third, the Kishida Kunio award-winning play ‘The Story of Descending the Long Slopes of Valparaíso’, deals with personal tragedies, namely loss of a parent, that transcend the geographical borders.
These three productions overstep the traditional theatre framework linguistically, aurally, and corporeally. From changing the syntax and semantics of Japanese language and ritual performances to polyglossia and reversing the placement of auditorium and stage, I examine these genre-defying dramaturgies of crossing borders by combining Azuma Hiroki’s ‘tourist principle’ (2017) as an act of political resistance against the Empire (nation states and globalism) through misdeliveries and Edouard Glissant’s ‘errancy’ (1990). Through performance analyses, I explore various dramaturgical devices through which Kamisato takes us on a tragic journey across Asia-Pacific by subverting and responding to past and future tragedies on and off stage.