A similarly liminal projection-experiment, leaving behind a precarious residue, took place a quarter-century before Lovers, in the form of the project conceived for Osaka Expo ‘70, The Birth, that involved the celebrated originator and choreographer of the ankoku butoh performance-art form, Tatsumi Hijikata. Placing Furuhashi and Hijikata together necessarily generates a salutary site of disjuncture and tension, since Furuhashi was not a great admirer of ankoku butoh, commenting in 1995: “I can’t get into the mysterious profound butoh atmosphere, that profound look and mood. I’m more into how to invent the profound moment with cheap-looking materials and movements from daily life … And my choreography is more influenced by people dancing disco.”4 To trace any valid intersection between the work of Furuhashi and Hijikata, it is necessary to go back to the very beginnings of Hijikata’s work, in 1959, to investigate what he originally envisaged for his emergent performance art. In his manifesto To Prison, inspired by the work of Genet, Hijikata wrote: “To a production-oriented society, the aimless use of the body, which I call dance, is a deadly enemy which must be taboo. I am able to say that my dance shares a common basis with crime, male homosexuality, festivals and rituals because it is behaviour which explicitly flaunts its aimlessness in the face of a production-oriented society.”5 Hijikata and his dancers notoriously worked across the late-1960s in nightclubs and discotheques, such as the Club Space Capsule in Tokyo’s Akasaka district, in spectacles which prefigure Furuhashi’s transvestite spectacles of the mid-1980s in Kyoto nightclubs.
A more tangible connection is that of the involvement of both Furuhashi and Hijikata in immersive, 360-degree projection experiments holding moving-image sequences of human figures in performative movement. Hijikata had been closely involved in a succession of performance collaborations with experimental filmmakers, such as Takahiko Iimura and Donald Richie, throughout the early stages of his work. At the end of the 1960s, he participated in a large-scale project involving a newly developed, immersive moving-image technology for the recording and projection of images, ‘Astrorama.’ For many years, all surviving evidence of this project appeared to have vanished. The Astrorama technology generated a spatial moving-image installation, The Birth, installed at the ‘Midori-kan’ (the ‘Green Pavilion’) at the Osaka Expo, which ran from March to September 1970. The Midori-kan was itself constructed by an alliance of Japanese technology corporations, to display innovations in image-projection among other technological developments, and was sited within the extensive grounds of the Expo, that formed a sub-city at Osaka’s peripheries. The event – together with the Tokyo Olympic Games, six years earlier – marked Japan’s new ascendancy both in media technology and in the visual and performing arts, and attracted vast crowds (over 60 million spectators in all) and international attention. World’s fairs and ‘Expo’ events have often constituted spectacular showcases for experimental projection technologies, most notably at the event held in Chicago in 1893. As a result, Osaka Expo ‘70 formed an ideal context for the developers of the Astrorama projection technology, Goto Inc., to show off their new development, inspired at least in part by IMAX technology, and intended for large-format, 360-degree immersive projections that surrounded their audiences within specially designed spaces.
The inclusion of many contemporary Japanese performers, musicians and artists as participants in Expo ’70 was an attempt to emphasise the event’s aura of innovation; the influential performance-art group of the mid-1950s, Gutai, took part (in one of their final spectacles before the group’s dissolution), and two of Hijikata’s previous collaborators, the architect Arata Isozaki and the artist Tadanori Yokoo, were closely involved in conceptualising Expo ’70 and issuing invitations to participants. The Astrorama film of Hijikata’s performance had been shot in June of the previous year, on location on the slopes of the volcanic Mount Atosanupuri (also known as Mount Io) in north-eastern Hokkaido; the volcano, close to the caldera Lake Kussharo, remained active and emitted sulphurous steam. Hijikata’s performance was shot over six or seven nights, by the team of twenty-one Astrorama technicians, including their supervising director Tomohiro Akiyama. Hijikata appears in only one sequence of the ten-minute film, as a magician or shaman, who conjures up the world as part-miracle, part-malediction; at the end of the sequence, Hijikata moves directly towards and then leaps over the Astrorama film-camera. The film’s scenarist, the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, had specially requested Hijikata’s appearance as a monstrous, grotesque figure, present at the world’s origination directly through the medium of dance; other sequences for the film showed primal natural landscapes, and fragments of cities about to be destroyed. A further sequence, shot in the Meguro district of Tokyo, at Hijikata’s studio – the ‘Asbestos-kan’ – depicts his company of dancers, naked and shot directly from above, rather than frontally; that sequence was then superimposed with images of hell, from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and others.
The Astrorama film-camera had five separate lenses, each shooting simultaneously with the intention of creating sequences that would be multi-dimensional and sensorially engulfing. The sequences were recorded on a special 70mm celluloid film stock (an extremely large format) whose exacting development process required it to be sent to specialist laboratories in Hollywood for processing. In the Midori-kan at the Osaka Expo, the Astrorama film was screened using an ambitious system simultaneously projecting five film-reels, onto the internal dome of the Midori-kan, across five huge screens, thereby generating a 360-degree, immersive environment for its audiences. It was certainly not one in which the projected human figures in motion could be approached intimately, as in Lovers. An estimated 15 million spectators visited the Midori-kan during the six-month run of Expo ‘70, but most passed-through the pavilion rapidly, as part of tour-groups, rather than amassing to experience the projection as a collective, static audience. That abbreviated, tangential experience of traversal (both an ocular and physical transit), experienced by the spectators of Hijikata’s performance on film, is one familiar to visitors to digital-image installations at contemporary art museums.
After Expo ’70 had closed, in September 1970, most of the extravagant pavilions were abandoned and left to deteriorate into ruins, despite the vast expense entailed in constructing them. Several years later, the site, including the Midori-kan, was almost entirely razed, and converted into a suburban commemorative park for the citizens of Osaka, with Expo ’70’s emblematic ‘Tower of the Sun,’ designed by the artist Tarō Okamoto, standing at its entrance. The Astrorama projection technology proved too complex and expensive for the massive commercial exploitation which its designers had envisaged, with the result that it became immediately obsolete; the original celluloid film-cans containing the film of Hijikata’s performance were then stored-away, and forgotten, until researchers from the Center for the Arts at Keio University in Tokyo re-located them, forty years later, in the Osaka storage-facilities of the Sanwa Midori-kai alliance of technology corporations, whose previous incarnation had sponsored the Midori-kan. The film had been preserved over those four decades more through oblivious neglect than active conservation; its status was that of the stored-away detritus of the now-defunct Astrorama projection technology, rather than that of a vital moving-image document of Hijikata’s performance work. In that sense, the Astrorama film survived as an aberrant form of archival entity; if Lovers had been preserved in the same way, it would have been as a manifestation of mid-1990s video and laser-disc technologies (and of their imminent obsolescence), rather than as a unique work of performance art. To revivify the Astrorama projection of Hijikata’s performance, in its spatial and immersive dimensions, would involve reconstructing the vast environment of the Midori-kan, whilst recreating the space of the Lovers installation forms a less challenging project, requiring only the reactivation of its archived components.