After almost three decades, Yoshiko Shimada and BuBu de la Madeleine have resumed their collaboration, which has long used drag, performance and artwork to question settler colonialism, imperialism, and nationalist sentiment in postwar Japan. At the core of their shared practice lies an anger at the disregard for basic human rights.
Their new work, Showa Angura (underground) Drag Sugoroku, focuses on subversive (and often forgotten) political movements and underground art in post-war Japan. The pink helmets of the militant feminist group Ch/piren are back, along with references to the massive protests led by students in the 1960s and 1970s opposed to US military presence, and to the Ju-satsu Kito Sodan collective of Buddhist monks who fought corporate owners responsible for pollution-related diseases.
The duo will also enact a procession to mourn those who lost their lives in the struggle for social justice. Titled Procession for fallen comrades and fallen angels, the performance has multiple inspirations, including the final scene of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. “Just as these youths guide the heroine from despair to hope through music and cheerfulness”, Shimada and La Madeleine explain, “we aim to offer a sense of hope through solidarity to those despairing from the discrimination, conflict and massacres repeated worldwide”.
—Johann Fleuri
