Mayu Kanamori’s imagined theatre piece challenges us to reimagine the racial politics of Australian theatre cultures. On the one hand, her play’s ideas intend to disrupt the white dominated theatre stage in Australia and give space to the bodies and stories of people of colour. On the other hand, Kanamori unsettles hard forms of ethnic identity that arise in response to persistent forms of exclusion and marginalisation. She strikes a carefully considered balance between two quite opposing positions, and in the process asks important questions about what racial representations are possible in Australian theatre.

Choosing to remove racial or ethnic markers from the script allows directors of Kanamori’s play considerable freedom in casting ethnically diverse actors. Diverse representation over several performances of the play (by ethnically and gender diverse directors) would create a polyethnic theatre experience with overlapping subjectivities and multiple reference points of identification. While the script offers a particular structure of feeling, the ethnically diverse interpretations would allow for unexpected and no doubt challenging lines of affiliation between physically and culturally different individuals and groups. While the first iteration of the play may create, in the audience, attachments to particular bodies playing particular characters, subsequent iterations would encourage audiences to delink themselves from those attachments and reorient their investments in characters and bodies. This unique performance structure has the ability to cultivate, in the audience, a truly diverse attitude towards casting and theatre performance.

Kanamori avoids creating a scenario where the voices of a particular ethnic group monopolise the representational and thematic aims of the play. By taking the focus away from the concerns of her own ethnic and diasporic heritage, she enables a multiethnic representational politics that is quite unusual for theatrical pieces that attempt to comment on race. The traditional structure is one that develops coherency around one particular ethnic identity and experience. The multiple forms of attachment and identification alluded to earlier mean that audiences do not have the safety or security of investing in one particular construction of ethnic experience.

Having said all this, by giving directors license to make their own decisions, and by keeping her own identity anonymous, Kanamori creates a situation where the interconnections between interpretations will be unplanned, spontaneous, and potentially confrontational. The lack of curatorial decision-making to connect performances is an experimental move that leaves open all sort of possibilities. Interconnections will develop on their own during the course of the performances, and audiences will be doing the work of creating lines of affiliation between interpretations.

The openness of this structure does run the risk of producing a conceptually incoherent performance with few interconnections between interpretations. This raises the question of whether theatre pieces that engage with race as a concept should direct audiences towards particular kinds of arguments. And if there are inexplicit arguments about diverse casting and performance in this imagined piece, will they be evident to audiences? I imagine that Kanamori would want to direct attention away from self-fulfilling arguments, preferring, rather, unpredictable possibilities and unforeseen ways of understanding race and ethnicity. It is the risk involved in leaving open the conceptual meanings of this play that is its creative strength. Without this risk, we cannot imagine new ways of performing racialised bodies in Australian theatre.