With its attention turned towards experimental and innovative works of performing arts, Atalante offers a space for the artistic works, a discourse surrounding those works, and the field at large. During the spring of 2025 we will delve deeper into the various universes of the artists presenting work and make space for a dialogue between the artists, the spectators and the venue.
Presented below is a reflective text by Josephine Gray based on a discussion with Takuya Fujisawa in connection with his performance Skumitate at Atalante in March 2025.
Between sleeping and waking the powers of imagination often suggest poetic and uncanny visions of a reality that is almost like the one we experience when fully awake. These visions are also made available to us during our waking hours when we find ourselves glimpsing into the gaps of what we think we see and what we are actually seeing. Such is the case when we mistake a person we don’t know for someone we do know, or when an object appears as other than what it supposedly is. Within the Western history of art surrealism is the most well-known movement that expanded and played with this peculiar phenomenon. As the name suggest, sur-realism, is an over-realism, or more-than-realism, in that it proposes that we remain true to what appears to us in reality. One of its most prolific artists, René Magritte, famously said that he never paints what he hasn’t seen.
Today, the surrealist movement might not seem as revolutionising as it was when they first appeared in the aftermath of WWI as generations upon generations have since then been exposed, not only to their paintings and poetry, but also to in-depth analysis of the movement itself. The break from representational art, or so-called “realism”, greatly disrupted the idea of what the Western art canon was thought to be. That was–and in part still is–due to the prescription of a Platonic understanding of Reality and its Representation. The belief that there exist in the world of Ideas an original entity–such as the Idea of a Flower, or the Idea of a Cloud–which we can only approximate by a representation is a belief that has shaped all artistic mediums within the Western world. These ideas also had a great impact on the performing arts, especially theatre, as the notion of realism prevailed.
Fortunately, other perspectives are afforded us. The rich artistic legacies of the Sung and Ming periods in China as well as the Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods in Japan suggest alternative approaches to the aesthetic in its visual and theatrical forms. Within these context the idea of mitate developed and grew into both a philosophical concept as well as a lived, experiental, reality. The word mitate has come to connote a host of various things, but is in its essence “seeing with ones eyes”. Not dissimilar from the Greek theáomai [to see] from which we derive the word for theatre.
Mitateru, a derivate of mitate, simply means “to liken one thing to another”. From here on a myriad of subdivisions on the concept of mitate proliferate. At its essence mitate speaks of how one thing can be many, and many things can be one. It is used as much in the visual arts as in the performing arts. During the Edo period, mitate was used as a technique in the print-making style of ukiyo-e. These prints were satirical in nature and used primarily visual allusions, puns and incongruities. In fact, these prints grew in popularity and became widely seen due to their criticism of current state-of-affairs. They solicited an audience who found immense pleasure in deciphering the many hidden meanings of each image. Within theatre, and especially kabuki, mitate is on the one hand a technique that uses visual tropes, as for example if the character playing a samurai uses a fan in place of a sword. The change of prop signifies a multitude of meanings, both comic and tragic. Mitate is on the other hand used to signify an actor in a performance that didn’t take place, or, for a role that he was never known to have played. Hence, mitate invents what was never there, but also suggests what is already there. Through its deception it reveals a possible truth.
Engaging in conversation with Takuya Fujisawa on his work and current piece Skumitate he stresses that mitate is not a purely conceptual knowledge. For him it is simply a way of existing in the world as a way of paying attention to the multitude of perspectives that present themselves in ones daily life. He say that, “I unconsciously see the world from a mitate perspective, because that is how I grew up, I am familiar with mitate.” In its lived manifestation mitate also signals “common sense”. As an implicit understanding of how things operate in the world within the community/culture that shares that world. Takuya acknowledges that he approaches most situations with a constant likening of one situation to another as a way of bridging one experience or knowledge with one another. All in the spirit of mitate.
Although working predominantly within dance, as a youngster he began working with an amateur theatre group in Japan and was thus more familiar with the theatrical world. Working with theatrical techniques “feels like coming home [because] to create a performance is a total coordination, [it is] to build a whole world”. In gathering a team of artists such as dancers of different traditions, puppeteers, musicians and costume and -light designers the challenge remained to find a common language. Very early on Takuya saw that everyone wanted to create their own world within the piece, a realisation that surprised him, because it dawned on him that if all different elements would be complete on their own, the other elements would not be needed. Takuya explains that “if [the] musician builds a perfect song, and you can see the whole world, the imagination and feel the emotions, actually I don’t need to move. And this is the same for scenography and costume [if] it is perfect I don’t need to do anything. Then I changed my approach, I try to aim for the imperfect.” And within the imperfect, understood here as a form that isn’t self-contained and by definition open, mitate is allowed to enter.
In the process of bridging one language with another he found that puppetry held immense potential. The idea of the puppet and the puppet-master is another trope that saturates both philosophy and the arts. It demands us to ask questions about free will, autonomy, the relation between the soul and the body and the relation between the animate and inanimate. His voyage into the world of puppetry began when working on a life-sized puppet which he describes as “interesting and scary” because of its similarity to himself. Without a face, but donned with his own clothes, he felt as if the puppet-self was taking over. The materiality of the puppet-body posed problems, and questions: why a puppet together with other performers? Where to place the puppet when not in use? Eventually it led him to recognise that the fascination with the puppet relies on its relationship with the human: ”what is the puppet if the puppet doesn’t exist?” He saw that the jacket worn by the puppet was already making a shape and that items of clothing can be worn and doesn’t need to be discarded from stage. In its absence the puppet becomes stronger than the actual “body” of the puppet.
The theme of manipulation and its likenesses to situations we face in our everyday life became the main topic. He says that “if you manipulate [an] object, you [have to] take so much care that [actually] you get manipulated by the object. It looks brutal, we are poking each other with sticks and forcing [one another], but actually, we are following the puppet-person. It relates to society, parent-child, teacher-student, government-citizen. The loop has existed for so many years.” Using the technique of puppetry, the total presence and focus that it demands, becomes one available avenue to take. The materiality of an object, or of another dancers body, is actual and presents itself as a truth that neither the audience nor the performers can disregard. And, by discarding the object of the puppet, mitate can be used as its substitute through the manipulation of what remains, i.e., the costumes, objects and living bodies.
In the case of the performance Skumitate, Takuya insists that it is an unfinished work on ethical grounds. His concern is with the personality of each of the artists he collaborates with and that entails respecting the integrity of each artist. He does not create repertoire pieces that can be performed by a generic dancer. If a collaborator leaves and another one joins, as has been the case in Skumitate, the entire piece needs to be reworked, as Takuya says “if I lose someone I have to re-create everything, this takes time but is more real, it’s not a company it’s more like daily life.”
The relationship with mitate as a way of living our daily lives, of noticing the incongruities and inconsistencies present in the banal and the sublime, is one that art has dealt with throughout the ages. The predominance of one aesthetic theory over another has the tendency to make us believe that others are either non-existent or less important. Yet the exchange of ideas has been constant and it is no secret that during the 20th-century–at the height of the surrealist movement– Europe was greatly inspired by the philosophies and image-making of the Far East. The inspirations of art moves like water, springing from the well that is the lived experience. Our experience of living is filled with lucid dreams, hallucinations, smoke and mirrors, déjà-vu and other phenomena that question what we know contra what we see. It is no wonder that the stage holds its sway as a harbinger of truth through deception. A phenomenon that is also mitate.
Reflektion & text: Josephine Gray