Granted or Denied: Errant Dramaturgies and In(visible) Spectators in Ichihara Satoko’s KITTY

In the context of post-pandemic influx of tourists to Japan and elsewhere in Asia, this paper complicates the notions of archipelagic flows, access and openness by examining who gets access to performance spaces and on what terms. Despite the assumed democratisation through AI and social media, the questions above remain deeply rooted within the structures of privilege, language and mobility.

Echoing these structural tensions, Ichihara Satoko’s 2025 performance KITTY, premiering at Tokyo’s Spiral Hall as part of Theatre Commons Tokyo, responds with an unsettling mix of kawaii dramaturgy, AI-mediated multilingualism and performative dissonance. Featuring performers from Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, KITTY disorients the audience with its collision of cuteness, data spectacle, and bodily alienation. Voice modulation technology and motion capture overlays actresses' native tongues with AI-generated translations, abstracting language and complicating intimacy between the performer, technology and audience. Simultaneously, meat consumption and sexuality
operate narratively as metaphors for consumption in late capitalist societies.

Through the framework of errant tourist (Juraic 2025, Azuma 2017 and Glissant 1991) and autoetnography of my spectatorship, this paper explores the (in)visible resistance to conformity in Ichihara’s production. Can the process-based methods, such as co-living during rehearsals, glitches, misunderstandings, form invisible geographies in dramaturgical sense? In turn, can Ichihara’s dramaturgical strategies undermine the logic of commodity inherent within festival infrastructures?

Part of panel 'Disconnect, Discord, Disorientation: Inter/Intra-Asian Bodily Geographies' with Dr Katherine Mezur, Dr Danica Stojanovic-Schaffrath and Dr Aparna Nambiar