Paradise Busshozan 2015

Paradise Busshozan is a series of performing arts walk consisted of stories and memories relating to the town. After our first creation in 2014, it has been projected in collaboration with Busshozan Town Planning Room, a voluntary group encouraging the revitalization of the town. There are various spatial interventions e.g. performers, music and lighting as stage effect set in the town as a theater. Audiences divide into two groups led by guides to explore the townscape, and realize the Busshozan town through narrative polyphony: storytelling from various perspectives by different individuals.

As it’s created through artist-in-residence and workshops with locals, 13 performers are all ordinary people who live, work, or were born in Busshozan expect two professionals – a dancer and an actor/musician. In the performance they are telling the audience their personal experiences within the town. When the stories and their unconscious minds have been performed and overlapped with actual townscape and audiences’ imagination, another scenery of Busshozan reveals itself. This theatrical experimentation aims not only to create the performance in the townscape but to give us an alternative perspective towards the town by pushing boundaries of reality and fiction.

This artwork was created by an artist collective Pepin Structural Designs and he took part of this project as a member from research through creation – see details on pepin.jp