NAGANO - THE SHORT TOUR
Street performance: Nagano, Japan. March 2006.
Duration: 4 minutes
Presented as part of NIPAF 06

In front of the train station at Nagano in the west of Japan’s main island is a large square that is entirely filled with a complicated queue of a hundred or more taxis. The head of the queue is at the top right-hand corner of the square and arrivals are deposited at the bottom-left.
An audience assembled for my performance and I positioned them at the ‘taxi-arrivals’ point in the bottom-left corner of the square. I then ran round to the head of the taxi queue, jumped in the car and presented the driver with instructions to drive around the square and deposit me at the ‘arrivals’ point where the audience waited.

The driver needed some persuading to do this – apart from the pointlessness of the exercise it would mean that, for a minimum fare, he’d then have to rejoin the back of the enormous queue of taxis. A reasonable ‘extra’ fee was agreed and after just two minutes or so I arrived in front of the audience to exit the cab, pose for photos and take a bow.

After several weeks on tour in Japan as part of the NIPAF 06 performance festival for which I was devising new performances on a daily basis, I was reminded of the apocryphal tale about the writer Raymond Roussel who reputedly drew on his enormous wealth to purchase a luxury yacht and embark on a cruise from France to India in 1910. After several weeks at sea and about to reach port, Roussel called for a telescope to peruse the shoreline. Remarking enthusiastically on how fascinating and exotic India appeared to be, he then instructed the boat’s Captain to immediately turn round and return to France.

My own engagement with Nagano, which is a pleasant Japanese city, ran somewhat deeper than this. But the experience of travelling and visiting places to devise and present not-yet-conceived performances is an exhilarating forum for art-making that can be informed precisely by the paucity rather than the thoroughness of one’s encounter with a city or place.