As artistic director of theatre companies Daisan Erotica and T Factory, Kawamura uses his plays to comment directly and indirectly on Japanese social conditions and current events while prompting audiences to consider issues such as the shaping influences of media, the confusion of reality with fantasy, and the nature of human individuality.
[2] Drawing upon and reacting to the work of such angura playwright/director/actors as Terayama Shūji, Suzuki Tadashi, and Kara Jūrō, Kawamura embraced their experimental focus and avant-garde physicality while rejecting their desire to reconcile the present with the past and their faith in social activism.
[5] Combining all of these influences, Kawamura’s early plays, created with Daisan Erotica, included Radical Party (1983), about a group of young, nihilistic male prostitutes, rebelling “in opposition to nothing whatsoever”;[6] Genocide (1984), in which a young man steps into and becomes trapped in “the film he wishes he could see”;[7] and Eight Dogs of Shinjuku: Volume 1, Birth of Dogs (1985), a deconstruction of a classic Japanese novel series, re-set in Shinjuku’s underground gay culture.
At the play's climax, the androids rebel, only to learn that their desire for “revolution” also comes from programming secretly implanted by the cows to keep them from being milked; their shadowy creators have engineered even their disobedience, in order to prepare them for war.
The piece examined Japanese current events and social frictions using live actors, image projections, video footage, modern dance, and extensive sound design, while also paying tribute to German postmodern playwright Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine – itself a pastiche and deconstruction of Shakespeare and many other sources.
Incorporating images of the World Trade Center attacks and ending the piece with the phrase “The film is finished,” the production again questioned the boundaries between reality and constructed media.