Searching for Response-Ability: Rehearsing Kamome Machine's Nanjing Project

ince 2022 Tokyo-based theatre company Kamome Machine has been working on the Nanjing Project, a performance project that deals with the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Having previously discussed the project's various phases in Tokyo, Chiayi (Taiwan) and Naha (Juraic 2023), I focus on the creative process of the latest iterations in Yokohama and Lancaster, UK. The rehearsals, or rather ‘experiments in sharing thoughts’ (Kamome Machine 2022), became a central site for negotiating response-ability within a process marked by hesitation, duration, repetition, exhaustion, shifting roles of the creative team and spectators in local and global contexts.

Drawing on my involvement in the project since the beginning, I trace not just my own position of someone with direct experience of war in Croatia, but also that of company members and other collaborators without such physical experience. My role shifted from embedded researcher and interlocutor toward a more fluid, exposed, and implicated role within the process itself. This shift never stabilised into a clear dramaturgical function but remained contingent and relational. In these latest iterations, all our roles were completely blurred and demanded a significant personal engagement with the history itself.

From this embedded perspective, I question how the Nanjing Project invites us to rethink rehearsal not as preparation for performance, but as an ethical practice that already implicates spectators. What does it mean to rehearse with the knowledge that audiences are not external endpoints but recurring participants whose responses and/or silences are carried back and forth between the performance space and the rehearsal room? Situating these questions within broader debates on ‘memory of war’ in contemporary Japanese performance, I approach “rehearsing response-ability” as a methodology to rethink the past, the present and the future of Japan. How might rehearsal and spectatorship together form a space for thinking with history rather than about history?

Part of Performing Cultural Memory with Otherness in Contemporary Japanese Theatre panel
with Dr Kyoko Iwaki (University of Antwerp), Dr Corey Wakeling (Aoyama Gakuin University), Luca Domenico Artuso (University of Antwerp)
Discussant: Ana Elena Puga (Ohio State University)