Errant Tourists: The Never-Ending Journeys to/from Asia

This paper examines theatre as a practice of errant tourism, staging never-ending journeys to/from Asia in which artists and spectators move across historical, ethical, and geographical borders without arrival at resolution. Rather than treating performance as a means of representation, reconciliation, or repair, I argue that certain contemporary theatre practices in Asia operate through sustained movement, hesitation, and constant ethical exposure.

Drawing on long-term embedded research with Japanese theatre makers, my own experiences of moving back and forth between Asia and other parts of the world, I reframe spectatorship, theatre making and researching about theatre as an errant condition. All of us involved in theatre and performance in whatever form are implicated in uneven relations of history, responsibility, and mobility. Through neither ethnographic nor autoethnographic methods, but perhaps something in between, I reflect on alternatives to thinking about international collaboration. ~

Following Azuma Hiroki (2017), I ask a series of questions that are not supposed to be asked: What does theatre do when it refuses arrival or resolution? Who gets to perform, see, produce, research theatre? What is actually the responsibility in contemporary theatre-making? What happens when spectators do not learn, empathise, or transform, but simply stay implicated? And in a moment of intensified global mobility and contested historical memory, how might never-ending journeys to/from Asia and the Asia-Pacific trouble our most comfortable claims about responsibility, impact, and efficacy in Theatre and Performance Studies? What if theatre does less than we hope or too much of what we hoped for?

Part of general panel: What Asian Theatre Does Between Cultures?