PROJECT OVERVIEW ¬

In the spring of 2024, I proposed to students in my research seminar at Konan Women’s University to work on the translation and adaptation of a folktale called Yuriwaka Daijin for a performance in English using the virtual reality (VR) platform, spatial.io. Yuriwaka is the story of a skilled archer who defeats Mongolian invaders. His jealous retainers, the Beppu brothers, abandon him on a small island in Kyushu called Genkaijima. Years later, he returns home disguised as a beggar. He is recognized at an archery competition, reclaims his position, and punishes the disloyal retainers. The problem I posed to my students was how to adapt Yuriwaka into a digital performance. It set in motion a collision of ideas and practical problems, not least the fact that as a group we had little to no experience of making theatre, let alone in VR. From this turmoil, the following three strands of inquiry emerged:

1. NEW UTOPIAS

VR worlds are often (mis)represented as harmonious and complete. Like glossy magazine ads for dream holiday destinations, the metaverse– at the level of cliché–is a utopia of seductive spheres where people are free to play out their fantasies. But what happens to that cosmopolitan veneer when a group of undergraduate students and a teacher try to inhabit virtual worlds, crossing linguistic, technological, and generational divides for the purpose of cultural creation? What are some of the contradictions, deadlocks, and breakthroughs in using a VR platform for an EFL production project?

2. AN EXERCISE IN CONTAMINATION

I chose Yuriwaka for its history of philological contamination. In philology, contamination refers (often negatively) to the confluence of readings from more than one version of a text, and the difficulty this poses in the genealogical search for an archetype or original. In 1907, Japanese literary critic Tsubouchi Shoyo published a collection of essays titled Bungei Sadan (Literary Trivia). In one of the essays, Tsubouchi addressed the origin of the Yuriwaka legend, pointing out narrative similarities between Yuriwaka and Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. He argued that if the Odyssey was transmitted by European Jesuit missionaries in late Muromachi Japan, then Yuriwaka could essentially be considered an adaptation. This claim sparked academic debate on the literary and cultural origins of the Yuriwaka story. Some scholars sided with Tsubouchi, while others saw the Yuriwaka tale as part of an older pan-Asian narrative archetype. What new “contaminations” emerge from working with a multimodal platform like spatial.io where text becomes just one part in a bundle of digital assets?

3. (IN)EQUALITY

Early in the project, the class read the story of Joseph Jacotot retold by Jacques Ranciere in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Jacotot was a French teacher who found himself in Belgium before a class of Flemish speaking students. He couldn’t speak Flemish, and they couldn’t speak French. To overcome this impasse, he invited them to learn and recite a French novel, The Adventures of Telemachus Son of Ulysses, using a newly published bilingual edition of the text. Jacotot had inadvertently set in motion a lesson in what Ranciere calls ‘emancipatory equality.’ Ranciere concludes of Jacotot’s experiment that ‘equality is not given, nor is it claimed; it is practiced, it is verified.’ Equality in learning environments is always a struggle of explicit and implicit hierarchies. What new light does working in a virtual technological framework shed on hierarchies of learning?