Lola Isang: A Performance on the Story of Comfort Women Using Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and Rhizome Lee’s Subbody Butoh Method

• Main Author: Duran, Hannah Kirei B.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Narcisa Claveria; comfort woman; japanese occupation, butoh; theater of cruelty; Acting; Arts and Humanities; Theatre and Performance Studies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/conf_shsrescon/2022/arts_ta/4; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&context=conf_shsrescon
• Institution: De La Salle University

This artwork aims to promote awareness and to highlight the plight of Lola Narcisa to show people the abuse that these comfort women have experienced during the Japanese occupation and to encourage thespians to add narratives and plays about comfort women to keep their stories alive. The plight of the comfort women is barely taught in schools. In this performance, the audience will obtain knowledge about the horrors and the plight made from war. At the end of this study, the researcher hopes that learning about the horrors that the comfort women experienced may stop them and the future generation for the history to repeat itself. In this artwork, the researcher will create a fragmented performance inspired by fragmented memories using Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the Subbody Butoh Method of Rhizome Lee. Following Rhizome Lee’s Butoh manual, Behind the Mirror: A Butoh Manual for Students, taps into one’s hidden creativity and uniqueness that are folded in one’s darkness of body through these fundamental steps in the process: meditation, breathing, conditioning, studying, strolling, and resonating. Moreover, the researcher will use Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty to the staging aspects of the performance for the audience to be disturbed.