Daizō Sakurai's Trans-Asian Tent Theater, Picun, and the Reenchantment of Urban Space

Abstract

This article discusses the 2010 Picun performance of Crow2Topia, the first play by the Beijing division of Daizō Sakurai's tent theater. Sakurai had previously participated in grassroots theater activities in Japan and Asia: in 2007 members of the mainland independent theater scene introduced him to the labor NGO and community cultural center Migrant Workers Home in the urban village Picun in Beijing. Sakurai's collaborators suggested that the suburban village-in-the-city, populated by rural migrant workers, would be a performance venue that fit the Japanese director's vision of theater as being located on the margins of society. The article delineates the trajectory of Sakurai's tent theater, analyzing the play Crow2Topia and pointing to intertextual references to premodern theater traditions and modern texts. Drawing on similarities between the play, which portrays a contemporary Chinese city from the perspective of the inhabitants of a garbage dump, and the precarious position of the actual tenants of Picun, it argues that the tent theater and the Migrant Workers Home can both be described as unstable “shared spaces” with permeable borders. In these spaces, social roles and personal identities are in constant flux. The closing part of the article expands the notion of “shared space,” first introduced by Dai Jinhua in her discussion of the emerging popular culture in mainland China in the 1990s, beyond the borders of the local cultural scene and embeds it into transregional networks of grassroots cultural activism.