Post-Tourist/Post-Migrant Theatre: From AI to Stand-Up in Yudai Kamisato’s Dear Potential Foreigners

A significant part of Japanese urban culture in the Edo period revolved around various entertainment forms. Among these forms, misemono (lit. show, exhibition, sideshow) involved tricks, magic and ad-hoc performances. The form reappeared in post-war Japanese performance, most notably in the works of angura director Terayama Shūji (1935-1983). Through a contemporary reading of misemono as an excess of identity; digital and physical, virtual and real, this paper examines  Dear Potential Foreigners (2023-2024), the latest work by Japanese writer and director Yudai Kamisato, born in Peru. This mobile performance installation moved and technologically evolved between Brazil, Japan, Peru and the UK. I was involved in the UK version which ran over two-days in a small English town of Lancaster. It was based on stories of migrants and tourists that Kamisato collected across Asia and South America both physically and virtually. These stories were machine translated from Japanese to other languages (Portuguese, Spanish, English) and combined with AI-created audio and video and the real video footage. Every two hours Jerusalem-born stand-up comedian and former human lawyer Daphna Baram would perform her jokes for the visitors. Although not initially conceived as misemono, this performance could be read as a technologically driven subversion of the form, moving in-between the real and the artificially created. By employing artificial intelligence to create various audio, video and textual material, it turned the stand-up comedy into a sideshow to a spectator experience mostly mediated by technology. Combining my notes from the creative process, Kamisato’s writings and accounts from the creative team, I examine how the creative process employs excess of identities and subversion of technology, place and culture to reposition identities as post-tourist and post-migrant in the (upcoming) era of artificial intelligence. Who is the (post)-tourist and who is the (post-) migrant in and out of virtual, real or AI Japan?