Copyright © 2003 Performing Art Journal, Inc. All rights reserved.

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25.1 (2003) 7-20

Memories of the Future
Technology and the Body in dumb type's memorandum

Woodrow Hood and Cynthia Gendrich

 

High-speed visuals stir up perceptions, electronic noise jostles the viscera, silhouetted figures race through the brain.

—review of memorandum in Dance Art (Spring 2001)

Conceptual and collage art has rarely had such a powerful performance proponent as Kyoto's dumb type. Their recent US tour of memorandum demonstrates that, after seventeen years together, their creativity is at its zenith. Invoking the theme of memory, dumb type takes various musings and meditations on the topic to some startling, sensual, and deliciously bizarre places. memorandum explores how personal choices and perspectives have an immense impact on whether memory serves us with its transformative power, or whether it traps us in a macabre landscape.

A Brief History of dumb type

Only in the last few years has dumb type emerged as one of Japan's best exports, performing at theatre festivals in Europe and Asia, and—more recently—coming to the United States for brief tours. Known for their high energy, high-tech productions, the name of the Kyoto collective comes from the group's desire to transcend the cultural borders of language and create image-and-sound-driven performance. The scant use of spoken language leads to a nearly "dumb" performance. 1

Founded in 1984, dumb type has always sought to interweave many artistic practices into one. Created by frustrated art students who were not allowed to work outside their disciplines, the original members of the collective came from diverse backgrounds: sound, dance, theatre, communications, and architecture. As the group structured itself, Teiji Furuhashi emerged as the artistic director. Under Furuhashi's stewardship, dumb type grew from performances and gallery installations of the 1980s to their now-trademark multi-media, multi-layered performance pieces. With a central group tenet of seeking universality in their artistic voice, dumb type early on sought performance venues outside of their homeland. Choreographer/dancer Takai Kawagushi notes that their work is "global, it's not limited to something that's Japanese." 2 [End Page 7]

Finding financial support and artistic freedom on the European festival circuit, dumb type has performed and created their works pH, S/N, and OR 3 all over Europe, doing most of their development in France. Many of these pieces focused on issues like AIDS, sexuality, and technology's cultural dominance—issues that were close to Furuhashi, who at the age of thirty-five died from AIDS complications. Despite a difficult transitional period, dumb type has continued after his death, expanding further into world theatre festivals and US venues.

Their Process

dumb type functions as a conceptual collective. Typically the group begins with a basic concept that is derived through weeks of brainstorming and improvisation. The collective took about half a year (while OR was touring) to come up with the central idea of "memory" for the piece that would follow. The idea wasn't solidified so the group continued brainstorming until they realized that the act of brainstorming itself (contemplating, searching, recalling) were all functions of memory and settled on the idea.

Collaboratively created by a diverse assemblage of artists, each piece can begin with different source material. A piece might originate out of a single movement or action, or emerge from a bit of sound or video, or be stimulated by a prop or object. Whatever source materials are decided upon are then presented to the collective, and over a long rehearsal period each artist adds his or her own voice or talent to the final product. Takai Kawagushi remarks, "It's like a melting pot; anybody can put anything in the pot and cook. And then gradually when the steam comes up together, then each person takes the response in each field." Through long rehearsals that last many hours each day over several months, the group tweaks and rewrites the performance. They may premier an abridged portion of the work and then return to the creation process to edit, change, and create new components until they are satisfied enough with the product to tour it on a wider scale.

Since the death of Furuhashi, dumb type has worked to maintain a true sense of a collective where the group functions as a whole, rather than being driven by the central vision of a single director. dumb type seems bent on avoiding any corporate hierarchy that limits the possibilities of the group. This is not always an easy process, but it is a philosophy to which the entire group remains committed. When asked what the group does when there is disagreement, Kawagushi answers, "Say it" and concedes that it is very difficult. Choreographer/dancer Noriko Sunayama explains:

We don't really want to conciliate, but the question of conciliation, where do we conciliate, that's the tough part. No one wants to do that; everyone wants to be a director of sorts and that's why it took us so very long. It took us three years. . . . There is a deadline that usually decides for us. I think the same could be said about many other theatre groups. We're always in a space of negotiation. There is no one who is saying, "You have to do it this way." So we are always looking about how to solve it. [End Page 8]

Their solutions seem to be working. After rave responses to dumb type's 2000 US tour of OR to Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and Minneapolis, this Spring the collective returned to those same venues with memorandum. The new piece is a work of sublime beauty and hope underpinned by moments of terror, panic, and unabashed goofiness.

The Performance:
memorandum 4

In dumb type's vision, memory is understood through technology, which helps us record, recall, and reflect on the events of our lives. Through our reliance on various technologies to help us remember (since human memory is not failsafe), we also allow technology itself to taint—or, less pejoratively, to shape—our memories. That is, we confuse the digital documentation of our lives with the memories themselves. However, memorandum is not wholly focused on technology, but on the interaction of technology and memory with live human bodies. Film and video exist in the performance space, not only as backdrops or sets, but also as temporal entities that clearly affect the live performers. In terms of movement, memorandum depicts the effects memory/technology can have on our corporeal selves. We see bodies in crisis and stress, tossed and twisted, writhing in agony and sometimes, though rarely, ecstasy.

For memorandum, the performance space is wrapped in black with the floor covered in a matte black cloth. The stage space is bisected by a large, translucent projection screen that fills the audience's visual field. Performers can move both in front of and behind this screen. Large banks of audio speakers ring the audience and several large computer workstations are visible behind the audience's back row. dumb type's work is essentially high tech, though the austerity of the stage belies that fact. The simplicity of the performance space allows it to become a physical metaphor for the human mind—a kind of tabula rasa on which various representations of memory are written.

Memoria Technical (Writing Sounds) 5

The first two pieces from memorandum are based on early childhood memories—in this case Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Jack and the Beanstalk. Both explore storytelling and the failure of memory.

The audience is thrust into a void. We sit in complete darkness and silence at first, and as our eyes adjust we realize that the muffled sound we've begun to hear is coming from dancers crawling across the soft, almost felt-lined dance floor. Slowly the back of the stage comes alive with a video screen displaying the text of a fragmented version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears—first one phrase and then the next appear at seemingly random intervals and spaces on the screen. A tiny videocamera has been placed in the stagehouse, focused on the performers crawling on the floor from a bird's eye view. The camera picks up the seemingly random [End Page 9] [Begin Page 11] movements of the performers and projects them onto the backdrop videoscreen. The performers appear to be crawling, not on the floor, but actually up the vertically printed, scattered Goldilocks text on the videoscreen behind them. They are like rock-climbers moving from one jutting rock to the next; some pieces of text are easier to reach than others. Not only do the performers struggle to remember and physically piece together the Goldilocks story for themselves, the mediation of the video technology makes visible the relationship between the performers and the story.

The Goldilocks piece ends as the last performer crawls across the stage and recites the Goldilocks story. (This is the only live spoken text of the performance.) However, because the performers can only move through the open spaces where no text yet exists, as the full story fills in the videoscreen, this final performer has no open space in which to move; she is literally pinned down with the words. Trapped and frustrated, she interrupts herself, asking why the three bears were so angry at Goldilocks. At this point, her memory fails because the words overwhelm her. She never gets to the end of the story, but blanks out, leaving us with her final plea, "What happened after that?"

Following this high-tech introduction is the lowest-tech piece of the evening. It consists of only one performer, Takao Kawaguchi (dancer/choreographer), who scrawls out the plot of Jack and the Beanstalk with a felt pen and a writing pad. He writes frantically, as if he's writing a memo to himself to lay down the story before he forgets it. The overhead videocamera now simply projects his writing onto the background videoscreen while a hypersensitive body microphone picks up only the sound of his pen hitting the paper (no words are spoken here). He begins with a written cliché: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," with the word "Jack" heavily underlined. Then Kawaguchi begins his version of the Beanstalk (here known as "tree"):

1. Jack likes the view from the top of the tree but misses home.

2. Upon his return, everybody has aged, much like Einstein's theory of time/ speed-of-light travel.

3. In reaction to the betrayal of time, Jack chops down the tree with his golden axe.

Here Kawaguchi becomes confused and his memory betrays him; he gets lost in the story and can't remember. Kawaguchi rants on paper about the gap between past and future and present, that memory should be the "in-between" but it doesn't work. He writes "suffering" and finally "sometimes you have to forget to remember." In frustration, he violently crumples the paper and gives up.

Scanning Memory

True to their roots as a theatre company of images and sound, the next section of memorandum is a visual/aural interpretation of the process of memory within the [End Page 11] brain. The single stage backdrop is suddenly ripped apart into four videoscreen projections and a flurry of activity (video, sound, dance) consumes the space before and behind the screen. Frantic, laptop driven music/noise by composer Ryoji Ikeda shakes the physical theatre space. With several successful compact disc releases and his own solo world concert tours, Ikeda is revered in technology-worshiping music circles for his ground-breaking manipulation of computer beeps and CPU noise into a distinct type of music or ambience.

The performers/dancers dart about the stage to Ikeda's music/noise, yanking, jerking, pulling, stretching, attempting synaptic connections to hidden or elusive memories while lights and veiled images quickly appear and disappear on the videoscreen. Some dancers appear in front of the screen and some appear behind. The fully visible dancers in front of the screen are haunted and stalked by the past memories of themselves, represented by the dancers behind the screens. At times these memory-selves appear in shadow-like silhouette and at other times in a low-lit, translucent, ephemeral appearance created by the material quality of the screen itself. But always a difference or gap exists between the two; the shadow and ephemeral selves always appear in a slightly different time-space, lagging behind and moving at different speeds than the fully visible dancers. In some moments the time lag is more exaggerated than others.

The amplitude of the images and sounds sometimes pushes the limits of tolerability. On the video, images/memories flash. As with memories, the images run too quickly at times to discern any detail, while others are calmer passages with slower-moving video. The sound complements the video with soft music-like tones underscoring the slower video sections while white noise screeches during the more frantic video and movement sections. It all works as an aural/visual/physical metaphor for our memories—some confused and upsetting, others pleasant and easily recalled.

After a series of short pieces about forgetting, discarding, and recovering memories comes one of the most bizarre and charming episodes of memorandum. In transition to the next piece of the collage, three bear-suited performers playfully roll in while a fourth enters with a large, leaf-blower-style vacuum as the overhead camera documents their actions. They all begin the clean up of strewn memos left over from the last segments and continue until the first three bears finish; they exit. However the vacuuming bear does not finish in time. The stage lights change to stage work lights, the clean-up music and video stop cold, and this bear is left alone onstage with a pantomimed "oops." It finishes quickly and tries to cover with a bow and a flourish and runs out.

Barely Bear

Described by the dumb type collective as a "memory for Children of the Future," Barely Bear is meant to be their version of a Sesame Street (or other educational television) character. This complicated sequence starts as one bear unsuccessfully [End Page 12] tries to make a bridge (represented by a white carpet) across the stage. A gap remains in the center of this bridge, and the bear panics as we see the true necessity of his labors. A large, white rabbit obliviously toddles toward the gap and certain doom; it will need the bridge to cross or catastrophe will ensue. To heighten the conflict and risk, the other bears place five walking baby dolls in line behind the rabbit. Not only will the rabbit not make it, the babies will also fall into the abyss! Eventually the Rabbit leaps and makes it to other side only to fall back, filling the gap in the white carpet with its own (white) body. Everything is removed suddenly and the bear and rabbit remain there as a man (Kawaguchi) enters with furniture and sets up a room. The bear and rabbit are stuck in this gap, this liminal space, and begin to help the man set up his room.

As the bear and rabbit finish the transition they run offstage only to reappear behind the videoscreen as ghosts, ethereal bodies forever chasing each other. As they finish the sequence they reappear in front of the videoscreen with walking canes and spectacles; their journey has lasted a lifetime. Behind the screen, the rabbit's and bear's memory-selves are forever young; only in front of the videoscreen do we see their actual age. Much like when we see somebody we haven't seen in ages, we find a gap between what we remember of that person and what that person looks like now. Our memories of people, places, and things never change, though time of course changes them all. dumb type has offered us a physical manifestation of the gap between their new, aged physical bodies and their unchanged, ephemeral memory-selves—similar to the difference Jack saw when he returned to his home from beanstalk land.

Unforgettable

In the next sequence, dumb type recontextualizes two familiar pieces of music and targets how memory and nostalgia are linked. During the first section, lead dancer Kawaguchi walks about as the words to "Unforgettable" begin to write out on the video wall behind him, and slowly Nat King Cole's version of the song begins to underscore the scene. As a video image behind Kawaguchi, we see his own past self, writing the lyrics—an event that has occurred earlier. He dances about in a frenzy, twisting, turning, writhing almost as if in agony, as he gasps for breath amidst some intense, unsatisfied frustration. Many of the actions are everyday gestures or movements in reverse, as if he is actually trying to go backwards in time. The harder he seems to struggle to remember what is so "unforgettable," the less successful and more violent he becomes. A strong sense of fatalism is imbedded in this section; he is fated forever to try to remember the thing that he was never supposed to forget. This song, so steeped in sentimental nostalgia, becomes a trap for Kawaguchi.

Hawaiian music replaces the Nat King Cole song. Kawaguchi freezes in stunned silence as a surrealistic group of Japanese tourists begins their Hawaiian vacation. As one entity the tourists, suited in polyester leisurewear and bad wigs, dance onstage in perfect synchronicity. Their movements are clichéd and unkempt as they snap, [End Page 13] wink, and literally show their asses. The dance is a hula but in an awful and touristy way. Homogenous and unified, the participants' actions seem predetermined and unimaginative. The frustrated Kawaguchi leaves his living room to change places with one of the tourists by slipping into one sleeve of the man's jacket while the man still fills the other sleeve. In this manner, dumb type highlights Kawaguchi's only apparent escape route—to join in the zombie-like march of nostalgia.

Possible Rooms

The new, now jacket-less dancer occupies Kawaguchi's living room in this piece about the fallibility of memory. Four video screens appear behind him and play four different versions (slow motion, fast, regular, and one near still) of the same event being enacted on stage, live. The event is simple; a bear comes in and offers the man an orange. He takes the orange and turns his back to the bear who knocks him cold. The four videos give us four different versions of one event. These video versions are set against the performer's own real-time, real-life experience of the event. As the "real" event ends on stage, the lights suddenly bump out and then back up. The live bear has been knocked cold by the man. Did we remember wrong? Didn't the bear knock the man out? Suddenly our own memory of the event is questioned and we, as the audience, are implicated in the documentation of the event. Which version is true? Is such a question even valid to begin with?

Forest of Memories

Choreographer/dancer Noriko Sunayama was inspired to create the next section, "Forest of Memories," one night in a Tokyo discotheque:

I was thinking. I was at a club dancing in the darkness and the lights would come up and the body would be fragmented towards the images of parts of a body, and I felt that that was really much the way in which memories come floating up. The idea of all these street people who don't know each other and dancing in the open, with strangers leaping about and it seemed to me almost scary and frightening.

What Sunayama saw in the nightclub has become a slowed down, hypnotic sequence of human interactions; what frightened her has now become a tranquil, meditative moment of overwhelming beauty. It works on two different scales: "There are these video images of objects that are floating about and then the scene in which five of us are dancing. And I was thinking there the way in which the materials are kind of moving around like planets. So they are moving kind of individually but they are also moving as a whole system."

In "Forest of Memories," five dancers (3 female, 2 male) slowly undulate across the floor to pulsing, hypnotic music, hands back on buttocks, grinding pelvises toward each other in an obviously sexual manner. Sunayama elucidates their movements: [End Page 14] "the moving of the hips . . . reminded me of a pendulum and I was thinking there of hypnosis." The dancers are entranced by each other and become trapped in this ersatz world. First we see two heterosexual couples dancing and one female alone. One woman then knees her male partner in the groin in reaction to something he's done. Seemingly in response to this interchange, he pairs off with the other man and she pairs off with a female. The sexes break apart and end dancing in same-sex couples, leaving one lone woman (Sunayama). As this happens, we hear Simon Fisher Turner (soundtrack composer for Derek Jarman films) and Rene Eyre recite, via prerecorded media, the following text (written by multi-media artist Stefaan Decostere):

All out/Tear the armor from my body/Don't be afraid of my skin/
Make my joints supple/Make me insensitive/Erase my memory/
In one go, hit me/Body to body/Hold me back/Leave me/
Mercy, please/Look in my mirror/Follow me/Relieve my pain/
Be kind/Kiss me/Without lips/Keep on seducing me/Free at last/
Give me peace/Stop my heart/Use me up/Make my blood flow/Carve
      into me/Lick my metal tongue clean/Make me immortal/Create me
      anew/Lick me clean/Alone/So randy/Taste me/Try me/Change me/
      Again and again/
Drag me out of my rut/Twist my words/Everything at once/Put me in
      order/
Pass me on/Kill me/Make me the next victim/Use me/Go for happiness/
Float with me/Make me transparent/Clearer and clearer/Purify me/
Faster/Make me better/Give me a face/Differently/Excite me/
Go away/Find me again/Reconquer me/Air please/Give me a new heart
      valve/
Pump up the voltage/More and more/Suck me along/Breathe me/
Smell my sweat/Experience me/Totally/Charge me up again/Give me
      away/
Probe my potential/Play with me/Use my ruses/Bring me on/Take me/
Long for me/Look for my frequency/Respond to my feelings/
Choose my entrance/Stop my thoughts/Relax my muscles/Tolerate me/
Lift me up/Higher and higher/Welcome to the next level/
Just float/The best is not good enough/Make me a god/Simulate me/
Get a kick out of me/Drive me mad/Drop me/Stay away/
Come closer now/Believe blindly/Incorporate me/Shave me bald/
Color my lenses black/Kick me/Everywhere/Destroy me/Zap me away/
Forever/Drop dead/Look at me/Here/Be silent/Stand still/Caress me/
Don't leave me cold/Set me to zero/At once/Take me seriously/
Dance with me

This is a long sequence for a dumb type performance (about 10 minutes), and in it we're given the time to study the violence, betrayal, and shallowness of night clubbers. It also functions as a hauntingly detached study of humanness without irony or comment. [End Page 15]

The video that accompanies "Forest of Memories" seems simple at first; a lush background of breeze-brushed greenery and a few slowly pulsing gobos enshroud the movers in a forest. But gradually small images begin to emerge in the center of the large video; basic shapes and objects can be seen spinning and floating. The nightclub lovers are envisioned as murderers, wiping out each other's existence and satiating all desire. The piece is then transformed into "Dive Into Memories" by a slow, droning musical transition into the forthcoming piece.

Dive Into Memories

This section seems a turning point in the loosely fitted, conceptual memorandum. "Forest of Memories" transitions into a section that seems to be a clear and meaningful glimpse of the transformative power of human memory. Throughout memorandum, dumb type explores how choice and chance play integral parts in how we view our world(s). Chance operations flow about us. Pain and angst are the by-products of our desires to control our understanding of life's events through our memories. However, we do have choices, as evident in "Forest of Memories"; we can choose to remember pain or pleasure or we can transform and transcend these memories to another place—a place of detachment and serenity found in "Dive Into Memories." As opposed to "Possible Rooms" or "Unforgettable," here memories are not a source of frustration or pain. Rather, memories can actually transform a frightening, real event into a moment of detached tranquility.

As "Forest of Memories" ends, the other dancers slowly move offstage and leave Sunayama alone. She sits down as a star field is projected onto the stage. Here she seems safe and at home; she has left the others behind and in solitude enjoys the quiet of the night sky. This is a stirring moment of contemplation; finally we see a body released of tension, at rest and at peace. Another memory pops up behind the videoscreen. A backlit, ephemeral man in a swimming suit stretches out and warms up. Sunayama is diving into her memories as he dives into the water. He dives in and the stage explodes with loud white noise and video. We re-enter the rat's maze that we had briefly transcended.

More Loophole(s)

The chaos of the stage overwhelms the audience; some close their eyes and ears as the information (light, sound, and movement) overloads their senses. Images of a peaceful oceanside pop up on the video in counterpoint to the aural mayhem. Flashes of a mountain and images of some people rush across the screens. Sunayama starts dancing like Kawaguchi did earlier—writhing, struggling, frustrated, twisting and turning. Much of it looks like diving/swimming as in the previous piece. She seems to be trying to get back to something, something in her past, as her actions seem to go maniacally in reverse. Is she trying to swim back to her star field and serenity? [End Page 16] [Begin Page 18]

On a Clear Day

We are left with a low hum as the video goes to white and then out. Sunayama continues to fight; the sound of the hum is replaced by the physical sounds of her body hitting itself and her labored breathing. She only succeeds in exhausting herself, so she eventually stops and exits. However, as the performance ends, there is no sense that her struggles are over. She will return the next night and repeat it all again.

The Future of dumb type

A brief European and Asian tour in the summer of 2002 was set to be the final appearance of memorandum, 6 though even amidst this tour they already premiered their next performance piece, currently entitled Voyage. Once a new work is complete, rarely does dumb type return to older work for restaging. Despite the premiere of Voyage in France at the end of April, 2002, it will probably not be complete by group standards for a couple of years. dumb type's process takes so long because they do not begin with an extant, centralized text and because all members continually interact in some way. This intense collaboration is not easy with a large troupe of sixteen members (eight are performers, two video, one lighting, one stage builder, one sound, one manager, one computer graphic and concept writer, and one computer programmer). 7

For Voyage, dumb type is trying an even more fragmented approach. memorandum is clearly about one thing: memory. Voyage, by contrast, has emerged out of breaking the collective into six different groups. Each group has come up with a theme, and the direction of each theme has been left up to them. Every element, including concepts, video, music, sets, lights, has also been decided within each group. dumb type's subversion of a dominant artistic vision proceeds through their willingness to experiment with new creative processes.

Final Reflections

We have discussed at length why we believe dumb type's work is important, and our conclusions have to do with values we hold about the future of theatre. First and foremost, like all good theatre dumb type's works explore ideas that can open up our sense of what is theatrically and humanly possible. Their pieces are well-shaped, exciting, dynamic, stimulating, and beautiful. We leave their performances feeling changed, inspired, and full of energy. memorandum, like OR and other earlier dumb type pieces, is excellent theatre. dumb type is also important for their successful transcendence of boundaries of language and culture. Theirs is global, transcultural work that seeks to explore elements of human experience that connect us: themes of life and death, memory, pleasure, fear, disease (AIDS, especially) and more. And though not obviously political, dumb type's vision is in some ways utopian. They are [End Page 18] certainly focused on transformation—a theme important to feminists, social visionaries, and anyone who believes in the power of art to revision the world. Every element in dumb type's arsenal speaks to the possibility of change: lights, sound, space, the body are all transformed—not fixed in a realistic world.

Perhaps most obviously, the body and technology are equally important elements in dumb type's exploration of human consciousness and experience. Here, technology is not simply a cold, mechanical component designed to create dissonance between human beings and our mechanized society. Nor are lights and sound supposed to be rendered invisible, as in the realistic theatre. Instead, technology emerges in dumb type's world as a tangible part of our emotional, spiritual, rhythmic, physical experience; it is linked inextricably with who we have become.

dumb type's process also has much to teach us. The Kyoto collective has evolved into a truly collaborative enterprise. In the early years, they relied on Furuhashi's leadership, but without him they have continued to make performance pieces of surpassing beauty. They show us that it is possible to produce viable works of art without a single "boss"—the corporate paradigm that plays out in many theatre companies today. Their work has no single author, no single director. (Even the use of the small "d" and "t" in their name signals their de-centered, collective thinking; all letters have equal say in their name.) Decisions come out of "a general feeling of the whole company." Not even source material can be seen as a final authority, since the genesis of a piece can come from almost anywhere. A movement or idea for a dance may generate one piece, while a sound or piece of videotape spawns the next. Sound, body, and space are the textual components of dumb type's theatrical experience. Like Peter Brook's intercultural work with the Centre International de Recherches Théâtrales, 8 dumb type tries to move beyond the narrow confines of talking heads or of one culture, one language.

The only sad part for us is that these pieces take as much time to create as they do, and that we in the US have taken so long to find dumb type. Because most of the works take around three years to develop, and because these are such physically demanding pieces, we are likely to have only a limited amount of time in which to enjoy dumb type. In a recent interview, Kawagushi responded to the query, "What is [your] next step as a group?" He said, "I think we are struggling to find an answer to that. We don't really see a specific goal. Each member is now reaching their thirties and forties, and for how long more can we go on? That is a very serious question." In the meantime, the members of dumb type continue their work to keep the collective forward-looking while creating within the rigors of true collaboration.

 



Woodrow Hood teaches performance and theatre history at High Point University. He recently finished the new edition of Theatre: Its Art and Craft with Cynthia Gendrich and Stephen Archer. He has also written articles for Theatre Journal, Postmodern Culture, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Cynthia Gendrich teaches performance and dramatic literature at Wake Forest University. A collaborator on the fourth edition of Theatre: Its Art and Craft, she has also published in The Oxford American National Biography, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Studies.

Notes

1. What little language is used is, to some extent, dependent upon the country in which they perform. They use English in the US and in their audio/video recordings. However, they have also performed in French and Japanese. [End Page 19]

2. dumb type, Group Interview, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, March 2, 2002. All subsequent quotes from the group are also taken from this interview.

3. For a more detailed history of dumb type and "japanoise," as well as a discussion of OR, see Gendrich/Hood, "Noise and Nudity: Kyoto's dumb type," Theatre Forum, (18), Winter/Spring 2001.

4. memorandum. dumb type. Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, March 2-3, 2002.

5. Section titles throughout the "Performance" section of this essay are the titles of the individual sections of memorandum. However, in the interest of space, we have not included detailed descriptions of every section of the performance.

6. memorandum appeared for the first time, in a much different form, in October of 1999; once its run is complete it will have been in performance for almost three years.

7. The pressures of touring a troupe of sixteen has taken its toll on the members. The costs involved in such an undertaking have also affected the number of venues they've had access to; not every presenting organization can afford them.

8. The International Center for Theatre Research, specifically, The Conference of the Birds, 1979.

Location:  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/performing_arts_journal/v025/25.1hood.html

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