AKIRA TAKAYAMA

Movement and migration are common themes throughout Takayama’s artistic practice. For the 21st Biennale of Sydney Takayama presents at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Our Songs - Sydney Kabuki Project (2018), a single-channel video installation that documents a performative event that occurred at Sydney Town Hall’s Centennial Hall on Sunday, 28 January 2018. Inspired by Kabuki Theatre, a 400-year-old form of Japanese theatre, Takayama invited residents of Sydney, people who have come from across Australia and around the world, to share their family stories and cultural traditions through song.

Congregating at Sydney Town Hall, participants were welcomed one by one to walk to the stage along a specially constructed hanamichi, a raised path that is a traditional element of Kabuki Theatre. Meaning ‘the road of the flower’, the hanamichi is both a means of entering and exiting the stage and an integral part of the performance. Upon reaching the stage, each person was asked to perform a song, poem or story passed down from their ancestors through generations and across geographies. Participants sang to a seemingly empty theatre, the red velvet seats left vacant for the ancestors of the participant or the future generations yet to come. Takayama developed the concept for the performance from the etymological connection between the Japanese word for song, uta, and the word uttae, which implies an appeal or a call to action. Created in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Hikaru Fujii, Our Songs - Sydney Kabuki Project is both a documentary archive of oral and intangible histories and an artwork that brings together the individual voices that make up the social and cultural fabric of Sydney.

^{Tai Spruyt and Stephanie Berlangieri | Biennale of Sydney Exhibition Team | 2018}