Contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkata, Indiaby Arnab Banerji (review)

Abstract

(discussed in chapter 2) comes closest to this senseof thedisplacementof the dramatic in contemporary object theatre. ARICA’s work is multisensory and provokes a sense of crisis: “the whole stage . . . move(s) persistently like a life form” (p. 44). As Boyd notes, ARICA’s work is perhaps the furthest away from conventional theatre of the examples discussed in the book and the company is less well-known. Nonetheless, ARICA is an excellent example of how object theatre can create new dramaturgicalperspectives that connectwith themes suchas the vibrancy of matter and the Anthropocene. Overall, in Japanese Contemporary Objects, Manipulators, and Actors in Performance Boyd shifts the discussion from puppetry to object performance and its materiality. There is an illuminating ethnographic focus on questions of labor, action, materialism, interculturalism and adaptation, technology, translation, and how to reinterpret the history of puppets and repertoire in Japan for contemporary times and audiences. The book is detailed in its discussion of newmaterialism and intermediality that is matched by forensic descriptions of plays and performances. In fact, much of book is dedicated to exploring these themes in terms of practice, looking in detail at the creative processes of and in the manipulation of material forms by artists in contemporary Japan. The book explores how actors are now in the theatre in the plural sense, not only as people playing roles, but in the Latourian sense of how things act in relation to each other.