Theatre on the Move: Sakurai

Daizhou’s Tent Theatre in East Asia

I-Yi Hsieh

This paper discusses Japanese director Sakurai Daizhou’s theatre productions known as
the “tent theatre,” a genre which first emerged during the Tokyo student movement in the
late 1960s. The study focuses on Sakurai’s collaborative productions, particularly the
theatre’s style and politics. Japanese tent theatres are distinctive in their combination of
itinerary performance and temporary, guerrilla stage arrangement. Sakurai’s theatre is a
descendent of this tradition of political theatre; however, it departs from the other
postmodernist Japanese aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s while rendering folklores mixed
in avant-garde abstract fragmentations as its signature dramaturgy. This essay discusses
Sakurai’s unique insistence on collaborative productions in light of the international
theatre network he and his troupe members established in Taiwan and Beijing since the
early 1990s. The discussion of Sakurai’s collaborative art practice will contribute to the
conversation on the post-1968 generation of socially engaged art from a non-European
perspective, challenging the scope related to the problem of reification.
I-Yi Hsieh received her Ph.D. in East Asian Cultural Studies from New York University.
She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social
Sciences at National Taiwan University, Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology.

UNICORN BEETLE: Well, after all the overwhelming constructions, this city is
covered by crust everywhere. One layer has just been stripped off, yet
another wounded spot appears. Look, the city turns into a sealed scar
quickly covered by another crust. The city resembles a monster of crust.
MAJORITY: Where is the entrance of the city?
UNICORN BEETLE: Everywhere! Hey, we are already inside of this city of
crust!1
Excerpt from Metamorphosis: A City of Crust (Sakurai 2007: 7)2

Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (Spring 2019). © 2019 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved.