DUMB TYPE

Attack on the body and senses

Dumb Type is an artists´ collective founded in 1987 in Kyoto. It is committed with unparalleled resolve to the interaction of new technologies and the performing arts, thus transforming all reminiscence of local tradition. This interdisciplinary project includes composers, dancers, engineers, architects, translators, programmers, artists and graphic designers. Along with the audience the group transports itself as the performer to border zones of perception between life and death, inner and outer, image and reality. The performances by Dumb Type attack the recipient´s perception with their speed, volume, irritations in the transitional zones between real and virtual bodies, between representation and reality. This strategy has brought the group world-wide recognition.

Dumb Type, the artists´ collective that was founded in 1987 in Kyoto is almost unparalleled in its fusion of the body and new media. Both artists and audience are transported to border zones of perception between life and death, inner and outer, image and reality. The group asks the question posed by many Performers in East Asia: is the body a projection space for social, economic and political processes which are written into every individual? Or is the body the last core of resistance of archaically anchored identity in a culture?
The group has been pursuing this question from the very beginning. After their first production "Pleasure Life" had achieved a certain level of international success, Dumb Type secured a global triumph with "pH" which had its premiere in autumn 1990 in Tokyo and was also performed in 1991 at the Granada festival in Spain. In this multimedia masterpiece by Teji Furuhashi, the head of the group who died of AIDS in 1995, the stage acted as a huge photocopier which scanned the dancers from right to left like some copy object, subjecting them to innumerable choreographic constellations in the rhythm of an "exposure process". Parallel to this a slide projector showed images of urban environments and computer chips while a 16mm was also running.

The performances by Dumb Type are an attack on the observer´s perception. Dumb Type provokes the observers, besieges them with incredible force in order to overcome perception thresholds, break old habits and remind them of a space of peace and existence. The artists´ collective from Kyoto is committed with unparalleled resolve to new technologies and their influence on the performing arts, thus transforming all reminiscence of local tradition. Since the beginning of the 1990s the group has probably enjoyed far more international acclaim than any other Japanese cultural export product.

Their themes and performances are not always easy to digest: this applies to the artificiality of the theatre languages, the way they play on the surface appearances of people and objects, and the way they play with light and the theme of the realm of the dead. In the "S/N" production of 1992 Furuhashi came to terms with his AIDS illness. "S/N" fuses fiction and reality. Furuhashi, "male, Japanese, HIV positive, homosexual" played himself. In the 1992 production the dancers were banished to the roof of a four-metre-high wall of light from where their dramatic, "dumb" falls resemble plunges into a bottomless chasm. At the same time the audience watched four stage-filling projection screens with images of naked breasts gliding past or medicines for AIDS patients dancing to techno music. Body and identity had lost all validity when Furuhashi proclaimed: "I dreamed of losing my nationality. / I dreamed of losing my gender. / I dreamed of losing my passport."

After producing "Pleasure Life", "pH" and "S/N", Teiji Furuhashi was only able to realize the video installation "Lovers" which went on a world tour after his death on 29 October 1995 and is now in the New York Museum of Modern Art. As in "S/N", "Lovers" questions not only identity, the dancers also seem to lack any vestiges of personality. The virtual dancers seem to represent the anticipation of death. The life-size image of Furuhashi is projected on all four black walls of the room. He seems like an apparition from another world approaching the viewer with outstretched arms only to embrace itself before it disappears again. The dancers seem like hallucinated dream figures pursued by sentences such as, "Don?t fuck with me, fellah, use your imagination".

In "\OR" (as in "Orientation"), the Dumb Type performers concentrate on the border zone between life and death. The Japanese Butoh tradition of Ohno is a shamanistic concept which Dumb Type transforms into a concrete struggle with the theme of death through AIDS. "\OR" centres around a number of key images, such as recurring visits to Furuhashi´s death bed and the oppressive atmosphere of an intensive care unit. A two-hour staccato of flashing strobe lights transforms the stage into a place between this world and the next. Light becomes a physical stress factor. One dancer even loses her hair as a result. The group touches on the great ancient themes of humanity and uses all the available means of the electronic world. Each Dumb Type performer, with his physical condition, possibilities and limitations, is the absolute measure of the performance and finds himself woven into the reality levels of media, sound and image. Although there is not so much dancing, the vehicle of the media disjoins or accelerates the movements of the body by means of strobe lights so that the dancer seems suspended in mid-leap.

Butoh performances are conceived as a radical confrontation with the viewer´s physical experience. In a similar way, the Dumb Type performances attack the viewer´s perception with their speed, volume and irritations in the transitional zones between real and virtual bodies, between representation and reality. The battlefield of the stage is transmitted to the eyes and bodies of the observers who are bombarded to breaking point with visual and acoustic stimuli. Dumb Type also pursues this method in "MemoRandum" (1998) which is dedicated to the phenomenon of memory. This performance assaults the viewers´ senses to breaking point in a visual and acoustic overkill of electronic sound cascades.

In analogy to the "random choices" of virtual aesthetics, which delegate the artistic decisions to a computer generator, Dumb Type takes a similar path by allowing the representations of meaning to disintegrate. This is a way of lending description to the logic of the information society and creating an experience of the symbiotic relationship between the human being and the digital world in which the borders between human and electronic memory storage dissolve.

Dumb Type created its unprecedented installation entitled "Cascade" at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin as part of the exhibition "Translated Acts". "Cascade" is directly linked to the spectacular performance "MemoRandum". Two huge projection screens opened a three-metre-wide corridor. In the "normal state", a virtual waterfall was visible which transformed itself at regular intervals into a thundering sound and image collage. The viewer, poised between the two huge video screens, became part of the installation with his own reactions. Performance heightened the bombardment of the senses even more. Under the guidance of the choreographers, they were rehearsed by six performers from Berlin who then acted behind the screens. The performances by Dumb Type attack the recipient´s perception with their speed, volume, irritations in the transitional zones between real and virtual bodies, between representation and reality. Dumb Type provokes the viewers, attacks them with incredible force in order to overcome perception thresholds, break old habits and remind them of a space of peace and existence. The body becomes part of the media network, it is rediscovered for the theatre as an interior view or as a virtual play.