The Loss of the Everyday: Borrowed Landscape – Yokohama
Review by Daisuke Muto published in the December 2011 issue of Korean dance magazine MOMM
 
At the end of October, a site specific performance bringing together national and international dancers and choreographers entitled Borrowed Landscape – Yokohama was presented. It took place in one of the display houses at a model home showroom in Yokohama and could be attended by a maximum of 15 audience members at a time.
 
Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki, who work out of Belgium, also presented Field Works Office in Yokohama in February of this year. The location for this piece was a room in an office building where business was actually going on as usual while the installation performance unfolded. I wasn't able to see it, but the idea behind this “field work,” during which performers mingle with employees who just go about their business and in which there is room for only a few audience members is very exciting. In contrast, Borrowed Landscape does not take place in a house that is actually lived in. One is quick to assume that the performance will play on the boundary between everyday reality and fiction by using furniture and everyday objects, and that using a model home at a showroom somehow won’t do the trick. Was it too difficult to use a house in which people are really living? However, upon arriving at the site, my feelings completely changed.
 
The showroom (exposition site) is located at a ten-minute walk from the station. On a plot surrounded by desolate office buildings sits a row of elaborately designed model homes. Before the show, I walked around for a while and looked at the houses. Huge glass panels boldly set in brick walls, extravagant Japanese rooms imbedded in a modern floor plan, and terraces like one would expect to find at a fashionable café: every single one of these houses represents, in an almost naïve way, the dream of and longing for the “ideal home”.
 
Unlike the actual building, on which one is forced to compromise for reasons of budget or surroundings, a model house brings together in an extreme form people's wishes and desires concerning a home. However, I’m sure that I am not the only one to feel that the lustrous, flamboyant appearance of these “ideal” homes now feels like a desolate castle in the air. We, who experienced the earthquake of March 11, and are still exposed to the threat of a nuclear incident, can only come away with a feeling of emptiness when confronted with such a naïve display of ideals. We no longer have an image of a “home” as a place where one can live with peace of mind. More than six months have passed since that day, and even though the aftershocks are only finally starting to subside, news about the radioactivity of soil and food stuffs spreading is in the media every day, and the sense of insecurity is only increasing, one is even under the illusion that, except for in the stricken area, life has returned back to normal. However effective the shrewd staging by the government and the mass media might be, under these circumstances, who seriously buys into the idea of the “ideal home”? This is exactly the reality we are facing right now.
 
Upon stepping into the spacious entrance hall of the house where the performance takes place, I see people here and there in the rooms and corridors. They are motionless, as if frozen. A couple bringing out a toast at the table, a man reading a newspaper in a sofa, a woman preparing food in the kitchen. The only noise that can be heard is that of a clock’s ticking. While roaming around the different rooms, the sounds of cooking and of people talking, etc. gradually become audible, and the performers as well begin to move. A man slowly coming down the stairs, a woman looking out the window, a man entering the bathroom and taking a seat on the toilet. It is completely silent, but every once in a while various sounds of everyday life are apparently emitted by speakers placed here and there inside the building. Audience members follow the movements of the performers or move towards where the sound comes from, experiencing the space of the rooms and the corridors, and watching the fragments of everyday life performed by these silent inhabitants. A dancer wearing a young girl’s dress is drawing zealously in the children's room. A man wearing a suit shows up with a baby doll and washes it’s body in the luxurious whirlpool tub on the balcony. The woman who was cooking earlier, moves into the bedroom, and for some reason covers her face with her hands and starts to behave more and more out of control until she lapses into a confused state and crouches down in the corner of the room. A man and woman start a fight on the terrace, expressing their lines by holding up text balloons cut out of paper above their own heads. The acting of the performers at first sight looks close to everyday movements, but their movements are also cartoonish exaggerated silent gestures, exquisitely in between raw reality and theatrical fiction. And it works wonderfully with the artificial “everyday” atmosphere of the building itself. In other words, just like a model home, rather than a real home, is a simulacre that condenses and reflects our image of and desires concerning a home, the acting of these men and women does not present the trivial everyday in a direct realistic way, but is a simulacre that condenses and presents our image of and desires concerning the everyday.
 
Before long music resounds from the bar next to the terrace and they all assemble there for a party, dancing, drinking, fooling around. When the noise dies down after a while, the performers make their way down the stairs one by one. But when the audience members follow along and go downstairs, there is no one there. The living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom, they are all empty, and there is nothing but empty time passing by. However, in the rooms, one still senses the presence of people. Only the traces and memories of the people who have already disappeared, and the “home” that contains and guards them silently still remain. It was a melancholic scene that hit unexpectedly. Like what lingers in the towns washed away by the tsunami, or the towns in Fukushima that became ghost towns. Or when the foundations of our everyday lives, far away from the stricken area, all of a sudden are laid bare and become visible. It was that kind of moment.
 
Avdal and Shinozaki’s Borrowed Landscape clearly reveals the truth about our everyday reality, that is to say, about the kind of daily life we considered normal until now (before March 11), and the feelings of security and dependence we all too lightly associated with this “everyday”. This peaceful “everyday” will probably not return for quite a while. It is not only about physical conditions. Rather, we have to change the image of and desires we have about the “everyday”. And this might be the time to do it.