The performance company Dumb Type, based in Kyoto, has always been a bit of a political animal, an in-your-face shape-shifter through dance, the visual and plastic arts, text, conceptualized performance, mime, puppetry and film. And because it has been an enthusiastic investigator of gender politics, transvestitism and the sex industry, it has provided the rest of the world with contemporary commentary on issues both general and particular to Japan.
Largely due to this involvement in varying sectors of society, Japan's top export in the contemporary performing arts -- almost constantly on tour overseas with major commissions from prestigious venues -- has been accused by very serious people in this country of marginalism, of a dependence on the refreshingly tacky arts of vaudeville, cabaret glamour and cross-dressing. But the irony of its current run of the new work "Memorandum" at the New National Theater in Tokyo through Dec. 16 is that the very seriousness it dedicates to the creation of art has resulted in a piece of "high" art dictated by a conceptualized pulse and shorn of the previous beloved romping through social sensitivities and niceties.
As Dumb Type's relentlessly charming late leader Teiji Furuhashi said, "productions should be a finger on the pulse of society, and sometimes its conscience." "Memorandum," despite the startling intensity of its visual and musical work, points no finger.