"Audience seats"

...These were plays with a strong spectacle character, in which strange and mysterious actors such as dwarfs, large women, cross-dressers and beautiful boys suddenly appeared in the dark, closed rooms of the city. In such skillfully staged anti-public worlds, ``total worlds'' in which bodies and minds that are unjustly rejected as having negative value by the norms of the everyday world coexist, various thoughts that lurk in our subconscious are examined. Terayama's avant-garde spirit was the most radical in Japan at that time. For example, in Letter from the Blind (1973, 74), in which the performance was in complete darkness for nearly half the time and the audience used their imagination to construct the invisible parts to create the play, and in Knock, a street play that caused a sensation when it was performed simultaneously in more than twenty locations in Tokyo for 30 hours from 3pm on April 19th, 1975 to 9pm on the following day, Terayama also placed many actors in the auditorium, surprising the audience and making them the protagonists and questioning the meaning of their existence in his work The Audience (1978), which was an attempt to shake the foundations of theatrical acts and theatrical venues that had become lazy and habitual. Terayama participated in many overseas theater festivals and gained an international reputation, but he died in May 1983 at the young age of 47.

*Some of the terminology that refers to "spectator seats" is listed below.

Source | Heibonsha World Encyclopedia 2nd Edition | Information

…これらは都会の暗い密室のなかに，突如として侏儒（しゆじゆ），大女，女装者，美少年などの奇優･怪優を出現させる強く〈見世物〉的な性格を帯びた劇であったが，そのような巧みに演出された反･公的な世界，日常世界の規範によって負の価値を帯びたものとしていわれなく排除された肉体･精神が共存する〈全的な世界〉の中で，われわれの無意識下に潜むさまざまな想念が検証されるのであった。寺山の前衛の精神は，日本のこの時代においては最もラディカルなものであり，たとえば上演時間の半分近くが真っ暗闇で，観客はそれぞれの想像力によって見えない部分を組み立て演劇を作りあげるという《盲人書簡》(1973,74)や，75年の4月19日午後3時から翌20日の午後9時にいたる30時間に，都内の二十数ヵ所で同時多発的に行われセンセーションを巻き起こした市街劇《ノック》，また観客席に多数の俳優を配して観客を不意打ちすることにより，観客自身を主人公としてその存在の意味を問う《観客席》(1978)などは，怠惰に習慣化した演劇行為と演劇の場を，その根底から揺さぶる試みであった。寺山は多くの海外の演劇祭に参加して国際的な声価を高めたが，83年5月，47歳の若さで死去した。…

※「《観客席》」について言及している用語解説の一部を掲載しています。

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