MADNESS AT MOKUBA

MIT unites to take live-action anime to the people

By David Day

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For all the nerd stereotypes and bookworm images and secret government projects, the student body at MIT can get pretty weird and wild when they want to. This weekend the geek squad dreams the impossible dream: make anime come alive.

"What can I tell you about this crazy thing we're doing?" asks Thomas "Tommy" DeFrantz, the affable theater arts director for our city's center of all things technological. "It struck me as a really interesting project: unusual and impossible." DeFrantz began to think about it a full three years ago, when the considerably huge anime club at MIT started to mull over how to present the esteemed Asian art in a live setting.

"Once the production process started earlier this year, like any great college play, it all came together very quickly," he says. "And the students are always up for something kooky."

Live-action anime is not particularly new, but to do it on such a large stage for such a time and to do so with an original libretto, is totally kooky. The story, Madness at Mokuba, includes the gamut of anime characters: robots, schoolgirls, deathgods, samurais, evil corporation, the lot.

"If there are parts of the show that you don't understand that's okay," quips librettist and Japanese cultural guru Ian Condry. "That's a part of the anime experience." Condry is perhaps best known for his book Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization published last year by Duke University Press, and is one of the nation's leading experts on the Land of the Rising Sun.

"For one thing, it takes a paradoxical idea, that anime and live-action can go together," he says. "But on the other hand, that is one of the things so interesting about the project: its intersection with the real world. Part of the show is to play with that boundary ... and part of it is having large robots on stage."

The event is blurring that boundary to the max thanks to the multifaceted nature of MIT's student body, where some students have more tricks than MacGyver with a Swiss Army knife. "When that does happen at MIT its pretty fantastic," DeFrantz says. "MIT kids can do this and do that. So we're using a live projection screen and creating environments where the action happens, and the dancers wear devices that generate sound when they move, the sounds of the attacks."

DeFrantz describes the performance as "physical karaoke." "Most of the movement we do is stylized, as if they drew you there," says MIT student and dancer Ashley Micks, a double-major in Aerospace Engineering and Theater. "Instead of behaving naturally you stop in some sort of pose."

Live anime is certainly unique, and not a precise art form at all. There are no giant tearing eyes and no big-headed costumes like you might see at Cambridge's other Manga headquarters, Kaiju Big Battel. It's better described as a human interpretation of anime in all its glory.

"We expect the people who are into anime to enjoy it the most," says Condry, "but we also see them as the most critical audience. It's designed to be a play that is accessible to everyone." MIT is home to a huge anime club, arguably the nation's largest, and the club is rapt with anticipation of the event.

"There is a competition amongst the schools who has the largest anime clubs," he says. "Michigan was bragging that they have the biggest, but I know MIT is the oldest." The club's president, Kim Baldauf, is front and center in the production, even. "The anime kids were like 'This sounds really cool, I have to be involved in this,'" says arts director DeFrantz.

In addition to writing the original story, anime expert Condry is giving an informative lecture on the subject Thursday at 4:30pm, "Explaining Anime's Global Power." "It's a vision of the future that is a little dark and it's willing to be really extreme," he says.

The show admittedly has a tiny budget ("It's much more interesting that way," says DeFrantz) and the collaborative efforts of the players is remarkable. Amateur dancer Micks admits she's the least into anime of the bunch. "I've seen a moderate amount, the mainstream stuff like Princess Mononoke and of course I've seen Pokemon."

As the experience goes off three times this weekend and is free, there is hardly an excuse to not check out such a strange and kooky dance interpretation.

"We have to figure out very specific places to be at these different places in time," says Micks. "It's not normal movement or acting. At all."

LIVE ACTION ANIME 2007: MADNESS AT MOKUBA

11.29-12.1.07

KRESGE LITTLE THEATRE @ MIT, CAMBRIDGE

617.253.4771

THU-SAT 8PM

FREE

LIVEACTIONANIME2007.COM