Kobo Abe’s novel The Box Man tells the story of a nameless protagonist who wears a cardboard box over his head and describes the world outside that he cannot see, with his imagination. This links to our concept of narrating various places such as a jungle, meadow,beach and a party to the audience member employing language that relates to the other senses of hearing,taste, touch and smell. For example, “The sand beneath your feet feels nice at first almost as if it is giving your feet the cuddle they deserve” (Radford,2012,p.2) experiments with the sense of touch and how the environment interacts with the body, consequently attempting to stimulate the imagination. Abe describes “if the box has any striking features to it, its special anonymity will suffer” (1974,p.4). This mirrors our reasoning for having a blank box that we painted black so that when the audience member was brought into the space the box would appear as this normal square contraption.

The gap we created in the side of the box to allow for placing tablets and other sensory elements through

On the other hand we painted it with blackboard paint so that the sight could still be performed, just as a seperate entity from the performer, in essence we as performers we gained an extra sense that of ‘creating the sight’. After they leave the box this sense is then returned to them, but it has been effected by the input of five people. This was an aspect of what we wanted to discover, whether we could change their subconscious in the box and out of it, when they witnessed how the sight, as a sense, interpreted the experience.

 

The hairdryer was utilised to createheat that travelled through the gap in the box, consequently creating a warm atmosphere throughout the fire towards the end of the script

Our box had a gap in the left side of it about halfway down, so that we could allow the heat from the hairdryer to enter the box during the fire location. We utilised this port as a way of manipulating their surroundings through the temperature or by placing multivitamins in there, that acted as the sound of pills for the party narrative. In the text it suggests “every care must be taken when making the observation window. First decide on its size and location; since there will be individual variations” (Abe,1974 p.5). When the participant climbed into the box we advised them to sit facing the direction of the hole in the box, this was logical because in the fire my hand was held out to them to test of they were ‘living the story’ and how it was affecting them.

The text describes how someone offered to pay “fifty thousand yen”(Abe,1974,p.16) for the cardboard box. Although our box was made of wood it still seems outrageous that a person would be willing to pay that much money for something that seems of no value. This led me to consider our approach to the box and how we transform the places it travels to, for instance the jungle, the beach etc. Kobo Abe states “One know it is of no value,but there is nonetheless a strange fascination with the light refracted by the glass. One is unexpectedly made to feel as if one were seeing another time dimension” (1974, p.16). Talking of a piece of shattered glass on the pavement this ironically relates directly to the box and its various interpretations. In essence, the light refracted by the glass, that is of interest and worth is equivalent to the worlds in which we create through the text. Something that can only be captured in a certain environment, in the box and with the presence of our imagination and subconscious. The imagination is a powerful thing and as a group we wanted to discover its true power. Could the performance manipulate the audience member’s subconscious with the strength of the senses, with exception of sight. Our sight provides us with a visual display of the world, the colour of everything and we judge objects and people from what they are wearing or how they walk. Too much reliance is placed upon that single sense and through the use of touch,smell,taste and imagination we aimed to form another world, in a sense a parallel world that existed within their subconscious. The imagination could replace our sight with the help of the technology of headphones, they relay specific information into our minds and this effects the way in which we perceive the world around us, without the obstacle of visual stereotyping. Our box was the beginning of a new world. Our world…

 

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Works Cited

Abe,Kobo (1974) The Box Man:A Novel, United States: Random House Inc.