Gessnerallee
Zürich

Language: Japanese with subtitles

Consumer goods are very promising. They can promise so much one can get sick of it. Toshiki Okada’s piece «Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich» leads us to the edge of good taste. Into a well lit sparkling clean microcosm of a 24-hour shop in Tokyo called «Smile Factory». Where banal and control-obsessed administrative structures rule and a pimped-up assortment of goods manipulates clients, everyday rituals between employees and clients unravel. The chashiers indulge in rowdy speculations about the question when the manager last had sex with his wife and a client falls into despair because she cannot find her favourite rice anymore. What does it mean for a society when its dreams depend upon a line of goods? Director and author Toshiki Okada is one of the leading voices of a generation of artists who focus on the apathy that had begun after the Fukushima catastrophe. He developed a ‹Theatre of Alienation›, in which movement and language seem to be separate things. Intentionally slow and with a Johann Sebastian Bach score the choreographical is grotesquely elaborated. In a capitalism that is getting out of hand this seems like a beautiful yet totally vain dance.
 

→ This event takes place in the context of CULTURESCAPES TOKIO 2014.