Wiener Festwochen: Eraser Mountain

Toshiki Okada, for Europe one of the foremost protagonists of Japanese contemporary theatre, is returning to the Wiener Festwochen. This time with the charmingly chaotic arrangement Eraser Mountain. In a collaboration with visual artist and set designer Teppei Kaneuji, Okada explores increasingly unstable relations between people and objects. It all begins with a broken-down washing machine. Rendered redundant, it no longer has a useful purpose and becomes uncontrollable. The performers disappear among brightly coloured tubes, balls and nets. Taken out of their everyday context, they all create an unmanageable commotion. An egalitarian landscape comprised of materials, projections, performers and sound emerges, radically challenging humankind’s presumptuous interventions in nature.

For Okada, the starting point for Eraser Mountain was the man-made raising of the Rikuzentakata coastline in the wake of the 2011 tsunami. With urgency and poetry, he explores the possibility of humankind’s presence in a world not based on hierarchies. The Anthropocene? That’s so passé!