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This article examines the solo work Lovers (1994) by Teiji Furuhashi, a prominent member of the influential Dumb Type group in Japan's theatre and dance scene from the 1980s onwards. Lovers was Furuhashi's only solo work; he died shortly after its installation at a Tokyo art centre in 1994. The essay examines the work in the context of themes of mobility, migration, and shifting corporealities in Japan across the post-war decades, especially through the key event for art and technology of those decades, which was the Osaka World Exposition of 1970. Lovers was commissioned by the arts laboratory of a Japanese technology corporation, Canon Inc., and incorporated what at the time were innovations in moving-image elements within theatre and dance. But those technologies rapidly became obsolete, and the essay explores the dilemmas about the digital experienced by the curators of the New York Museum of Modern Art in 'upgrading' Lovers to show it in their galleries in 2016–17. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article Stephen Barber investigates performances that take the form of last works by their performers and specifically utilize the distinctive medium of last-gasp monologues which intimate imminent death or unconsciousness. He assesses three such final performances, across theatre and dance – by Ko Murobushi, Antonin Artaud, and Patrice Chéreau – arguing that such performances often engage in a combative manner with processes of representation, and are able to articulate strong currents of memory and anger, often in fragmentary form. These performances also appear prescient for theatrical works today which deal with the vocal evocation of forthcoming calamities, whether corporeal or ecological. Stephen Barber is a Research Professor in Visual Culture at the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, Kingston University. He is the author of several books on the work of Antonin Artaud, including Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993), and most recently Muybridge: the Eye in Motion (2012), Performance Projections (2014), and Berlin Bodies (forthcoming, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]