Kazuko Hohki is best known as half of the Japanese cabaret anarchists Frank Chickens. Here she speaks frankly about a duck. My Husband is a Spaceman is an improbable tale about mating with a mallard, a personable lecture-demonstration in the Japanese art of gimmicks.
Hohki's narrative, developed in association with London's BAC and Japan 2001, is introduced as half-traditional and half-true. She reveals that her major ambition as a young girl growing up in Tokyo was to become taller, hairier and less hygienic. In other words, she hoped to grow up European. The piece describes how she made the transition, and takes its place alongside the fringe favourites Toothless and the Shining Princess as the final part of a loose trilogy investigating the experiences of a Japanese woman living in the UK.
To make it to England, Hohki dated a duck - or rather, she went out with a peculiar English anthropologist who turned out to be a cosmic being in webbed-footed form. A likely story, you may think. But this is a rather clever conflation of two venerable Japanese traditions, the Kamishibai Ya and the office lady, or OL. Kamishibai Ya - ancient Japanese storytellers - pushed little bits of paper around a wooden frame to illustrate their narratives; OL's push little bits of paper around the office photocopier and blow their salaries in the designer outlets of Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district.
There's a bit of both in Kazuko Hohki. One moment she croons karaoke lullabies to Shibuya shopping sprees, the next she employs the Kamishibai Ya favourite about a peasant who married a crane to explain how she herself got hitched to a duck. Her presentation has a delightfully flimsy, homemade feel, although she also uses witty video sequences. There's always the danger of technology letting you down, however - at one point the projection screen collapsed. "As soon as I came to England, my background disappeared," she improvised, without missing a beat.
At BAC, London SW11 (020-7223 2223), from June 12.
