Toco Nikadio, Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker: Extreme Voices, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
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Adam Alston: Capitalism, decadence and excess in contemporary theatre
Owen Parry: After Trash: When Underground Sex Cults become Surveillance Theatres, where do we go?
Adam Alston: Capitalism, decadence and excess in contemporary theatre
This paper is prompted by the staging of agitated bodies and super-saturated scenography in a decade bookended by the 2008 financial crash, and the coronavirus pandemic. I’ll be surveying the strategies used by two Japanese theatre makers - Toshiki Okada and Toco Nikaido - to engage with the excesses of twenty-first-century capitalism in the 2010s, making the case that their work evinces a peculiarly ‘decadent’ aesthetic well-suited to exploring these excesses. I’m particularly interested in the tempos and intensities of productivity. ‘Project Speed’ and ‘turbo-charging the economy’ have fast become political watchwords in the wake of the pandemic, just as inequality has been brought into even sharper relief as the productive intensity of different sectors ramps up, or comes to a grinding halt. But what is there to learn from the staging of freneticism and inertia in the years between crises, and what can it tell us about issues that run deeper than the pandemic’s immediate economic impact? Drawing on fields of competing interests and prejudices both inside and outside of Japan, ranging from conservative diagnoses of the ‘decadent society’ (Douthat 2020) and the ‘degeneracy’ of otaku superfans, to anti-productivism in Japan’s various ‘schools of decadence’, I’ll be approaching decadence as a stage upon which cultural values are forged, appropriated, contested or undermined: a stage that has much to teach us about the outmoded valorisation of speed and productivity in twenty-first century capitalism.
Adam Alston is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Theatre at Goldsmiths. He is an AHRC ECR Fellow and Principal Investigator of Staging Decadence: Decadent theatre in the long twentieth century, is co-editor of a forthcoming issue of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies on ‘Decadence and Performance’ (Winter 2021), and author of a forthcoming monograph provisionally titled Decadence, Capitalism and Excess in Contemporary Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Owen Parry: After Trash: When Underground Sex Cults become Surveillance Theatres, where do we go?
My paper explores how trash, waste and excess have been taken up as a generatively queer methodology in expanded performance practice. From the compulsive and anarchic ‘mouldy labours’ of Jack Smith – a pioneer in Performance Art in the 1960s – right through to its more recent re-deployment as compulsory performance in the ‘If Facebook had a nightmare, it would look like this', movies of Ryan Trecartin. Using Jeffrey Sconce’s concept of ‘para-cinema’ in media studies to describe the underground practices of trash cinema, I map out a shift in intent, purpose and status of trashy performance in networked cultures. In doing so, I aim to pose questions about the renewed uptake of the trashy, low-fi, and the poor in surveillance capitalism, and to propose an alternative to trash's incorporation/sublimation into the neoliberal agenda via examples from my own performance practice. I argue that the potential of trash to be re-valued and transformed into something else denotes its appeal and power to activate the collective imagination.
Dr Owen G. Parry is an artist and researcher working in contemporary theatre, live art, and visual and digital processes. He is a Researcher on the Staging Decadence project (Goldsmiths, UoL), and an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, Critical Studies at Central Saint Martins. www.owengparry.com
This event is co-presented by The Performance Research Forum @ Goldsmiths and Staging Decadence, and has been made possible with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.