Review: “Field Works – Office”
 
Magazine “Ketoru” (Ohta Publishing Co.)
Text by Sakurai Keisuke (Dance Critic, Composer,)
 
I’m off to Yokohama to see a performance. Audience is limited to two persons each time. The meeting point is the counter on the ground floor of YCC[1] in front of the Bashamichi station. I say my name and I am handed a map. A building in the neighborhood is marked and for the first time I realize that that’s the venue. At the entrance to the building, I am guided on to a higher floor. A board reads “OO Architects”. I enter and I am told, “Please wait here for a moment”, so I sit down and the scenery around me comes to my eyes. Oh, yes. People are drawing diagrams and constructing building models, someone’s dug his head deep in his computer screen. Indeed, truly an architect bureau. Feels like a I’m on a fieldtrip. What am I saying? No, no, almost forgot. I came to see a performance. So, are these people… they‘re drawing etc. like the most natural thing in the world - very convincing - but could they be performers and not architects? For that their going about their daily business seems too confident… And then, as I look sideways, there’s this guy making a totally incomprehensible handicraft that looks like a georama of those miniature gardens that you make when you are in sandplay therapy. He’s a fake. I know it. Meaning he’s an (REAL) actor. What? The office-lady who guided me to this place in the beginning puts her hands into a big drawer, and as I think she is getting out something, all of a sudden her upper half body is in there and now she’s flapping her arms and legs!
All right. So this performance is probably about something infiltrating a real office with real office workers. That’s it. Maybe. But, what is real and what is acting cannot be known for sure. The more you think about it, the more it all seems suspect. Actually, this may be some kind of a political activist group or a scam group, I can’t say. (Or maybe the people around me are all fakes = aliens!) Delusion whelms up in me. In other words, a feeling like I’ve landed in the midst of a con game.
When you think about it, this “How to deceive in the best way“ of the scammers has something in common with the “How to play a story (= fiction = lie) as real as possible”, a contradiction that theatre carries within itself. In this line of thought, “Field Works – Office” is a performance strategically built on the thin line that separates truth from lie, and has brought to us - in this case as a paradox – the fundamental potentials that lie within theatre; “To enjoy a lie as a lie” and “To see the truth that resides only in fiction”. And all the while performers are enjoying the prank they pull on us. And the “lie/truth” can probably also be interpreted as “ordinary/extraordinary”. This performance succeeded in “turning around” our ordinary world for just one moment. Oh, yes. Something else was also “turned around”. We thought we had been the audience, but in fact we were being observed all the time we were there. In the beginning we were asked to fill in a questionnaire, and then, all of a sudden the display on the desk showed the results of a Google search in my name. And on the paper handed to me as I was leaving was a caricature drawing of me with them.