F/T12 Jelinek Series: Kein Licht Ⅱ
Port B
Concept, Direction: Akira Takayama [Japan]
Performing Arts Festival launching from Tokyo
In September 2011 Elfriede Jelinek published her response to 3.11 on her website, the play text "Kein Licht." Then on March 12, 2012 she published a follow-up text, "Kein Licht II", branding a large question mark on the Fukushima situation, already being concluded and forgotten. In the text are scattered the words of "Antigone", the classical Sophocles play with a heroine who sided with the dead, and who never stopped speaking against authority and power.
F/T commissioned Port B's Akira Takayama to stage Jelinek's text and for this he will compose a fictional "Fukushima tour" using the urban space of Tokyo to stand in for Fukushima. Participants will experience Jelinek's words, while over the familiar Tokyo landscape they superimpose the representations of Fukushima impressed on them by media images. This is the first time in the world a Jelinek text has been staged in a tour performance like this, and it will form an attempt to re-grasp the actual relationship between Fukushima and Tokyo.
Audiences will tour around Shimbashi listening to Jelinek's text read by school students from Fukushma, tuning radios to specific frequencies at each location in the city. They travel without guides, as sightseers to both the Tokyo and Fukushima landscapes, holding tourist postcards with maps in a world of haunting voices and ambiguous urban spectacle.