Figure 1.

McDonald’s Radio University (2017). Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 3 March 2017. The theatre café was converted into this McDonald’s lookalike. (Photo by Jörg Baumann)

In contrast to other megacities such as New York, London, Paris, and Beijing, one immediately notices when walking through the streets of Tokyo that unhoused individuals are virtually invisible. This is not because vagrancy does not exist in Japan, but because those affected are skilled at hiding in plain sight. While conducting research for Compartment City Tokyo (2009)Footnote ¹ in Ikebukuro, one of the most bustling consumer districts in Tokyo, theatre director Takayama AkiraFootnote ² observed that people without stable jobs, supportive networks, or safe dwellings were frequently hiding, or taking shelter, in the neighborhood McDonald’s (SPA! Weekly 2020).

Unhoused individuals in Japan are not necessarily unemployed, nor do they typically appear unclean. Many sustain themselves through day labor, yet remain unable to rent apartments due to restrictive federal and regional regulations. Even before McDonald’s became a common refuge, numerous people in Japan, not able to obtain a long-term rental contract, had already been living for extended periods—weeks or even months—in the so-called internet cafes (netto kafe). These spaces offer individual booths for reading manga, internet access, complimentary drinks and snacks, and even amenities like showers and reclining chairs for napping. In fact, Takayama himself was among these “hiding” in internet cafes around 2009, when he was being pursued by a member of the bōryokudan (Japan’s organized crime groups) for creating an artwork that exposed the underbelly of Japanese modern history (Matsumoto Reference Matsumoto2023).

This phenomenon of taking refuge in McDonald’s, which Takayama observed as widespread at the time, has since spread to other Asian cities like Taipei, Seoul, and Hong Kong; but it all started in 2006 when McDonald’s Japan introduced 24-hour service in some downtown franchises. This quickly transformed them into alternative shelters (CNN 2018). These victims of a winner-takes-all dystopian capitalism were pejoratively dubbed “McRefugees” (Makku nanmin). According to Takayama, his conversations with these invisible rough sleepers were the basis for his later project, McDonald’s Radio University (Droß and Takayama Reference Droß and Takayama2015:247).

Around a decade after Compartment City Tokyo, while conducting research on migrants arriving in Germany and also maintaining ongoing collaborations with European theatre institutions, Takayama expanded his reflections on Japanese McRefugees. Though culturally, politically, and economically completely different in their experiences, he drew parallels with the lived experiences of refugees in Europe, many of whom used the same fast-food joints as improvised shelters. He started visiting and interviewing migrants in European McDonald’s and this fieldwork ultimately led to the creation of McDonald’s Radio University.

This project, which invites refugees arriving in Europe to deliver lectures to the audience through portable radios, premiered in 2017 in Frankfurt’s Mousonturm Theatre (converted into a makeshift McDonald’s), and in seven McDonald’s branches scattered across the city.Footnote ³ Slightly different performances happened in different venues, with different migrant-lecturers. In these site-specific performances, Takayama aims to restore the marginalized individuals’ lost identity, respectability, and dignity by transforming them from the unknown and the unnamed into agents of knowledge and discourse. In the past few years, the performance has stealthily infiltrated fast-food franchises in diverse global locations including Berlin, Brussels, Hong Kong, Kanazawa, Tokyo, and most recently, Tottori.

Takayama, trained in Germany as a theatre director and profoundly influenced by Brechtian dramaturgy, is widely regarded as one of Japan’s most socially engaged theatre practitioners. As the founder and artistic leader of Port B, a theatre collective established in 2002, he has consistently explored pressing sociopolitical issues, such as post-WWII politics and gentrification of the cityscape, the Tokyo Olympics and eradication of unwanted histories, and nuclear fallouts and government mishandlings. Distinct from the hierarchical and auteur-driven structures of many Japanese theatre companies—where a single leader typically serves as both playwright and director—Port B operates as a loosely organized ensemble comprising scholars, artists, dramaturgs, and researchers. This collaborative model encourages an exchange of ideas among its core members during the conceptualization and production phases, fostering a multiplicity of perspectives. Further, Post B’s productions often eschew traditional theatrical venues, performing instead in the sprawling urban landscape of Tokyo, or other international cities. By situating their performances within the public and everyday spaces of the city, such as McDonald’s, the collective seeks to expand the notion of theatre, arguing that even an oft-demonized capitalist fast-food chain can offer potent venues for delivering a Brechtian critical performance.

With the convergence of Takayama’s creative and political motivation—ranging from his research on McRefugees in Japan and his own temporary immersion in that world, to his collaboration with European theatre institutions that often placed migrants in positions of vulnerable visibility, to his fieldwork in European McDonald’s restaurants during the height of the refugee crisis—McDonald’s Radio University took shape. In this production, Takayama reimagines a symbol of American global capitalism as a democratic para-institutional theatre by and for the marginalized. In doing so, he establishes an invisible aural performance where anonymous migrants, often suppressed and unheard, are given the status of a performer and asked to lecture to the audience. The audience, in turn, is invited to reimagine the power dynamics of urban public life. Further, he disrupts the tacit social contract between spectators and performers—or more broadly, between the gazer and the gazed—embedded in modern Western theatres, which Maaike Bleeker describes as a “vision machine […] that invites [a] culturally and historically specific mode of looking” (2012:151). Having repeatedly witnessed immigrants staged in German theatres primarily for visual consumption—a practice he openly criticized and resisted as a non-European director—Takayama underscores the contrast between European theatres, which usually maintain a safe distance between those who look (typically a white European audience) and those who are looked at (a minority performer), and the alternative power dynamics at play within McDonald’s—often regarded as the archenemy of the liberal left. Paradoxically, according to Takayama, McDonald’s has “actualized the coexistence of multicultural and multi-ethnic individuals,” allegedly a cause célèbre of liberals (in MMCA 2018).

Whether workers or customers, the majority of people occupying European McDonald’s franchises are migrants. This is because, according to Takayama, the fast-food chain not only offers mass employment to migrants whose professional credentials are unrecognized or undervalued in Europe, but also functions as a provisional safety net, providing vital resources like food, internet, and informal networks for those navigating precarious migration routes such as the Balkan corridor (MMCA 2018). Takayama affirms:

It is within this paradoxical space that Takayama’s work unfolds, compelling the audience to confront uncomfortable intersections of vulnerability, survival, and resilience. Unlike many theatre institutions that only momentarily showcase the migration crises as a spectacle removed from the audience’s daily lives, Takayama argues that McDonald’s is a bivouac or a base camp offering essential care, interaction, and sustenance to migrants navigating their perilous journeys. Paradoxically, the fast-food workers exploited through low-wage labor, precarious contracts, and inhumane working conditions are not much better off than the homeless who seek shelter in McDonald’s.

Figure 2.

Inside Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, where the description of the project is exhibited. Frankfurt, 3 March 2017. (Photo by Jörg Baumann)

Observing the lived dynamics in the European McDonald’s locations, Takayama goes so far as to assert that, politically speaking, these spaces embody “the future of theatre” (Takayama Reference Takayama2017a). With this provocative claim, he invites European theatre practitioners, producers, and audiences to view McDonald’s through fresh dramaturgical lenses and confront their parochial assumptions about what theatre should be. Further, this radical recontextualization serves to dissolve the boundaries between the observer and observed, prompting audiences to step down from their good-and-secure moral high ground and re-engage with theatre that functions as a pharmakon: an instrument that serves as both toxin and remedy for society.

Identifying the growing influence of political correctness in shaping, constraining, and governing theatrical institutions, Takayama contends that contemporary art faces the peril of regression and creative stagnation if it aspires only to appeal to the ideals of the bourgeois, liberal European audience. For Takayama, theatre is less a space imbued with utopian potential than a space that must remain “heterotopic”—a key dramaturgical concept borrowed from Foucault (Reference Foucault1986) that he has returned to repeatedly over the past two decades. In his view, heterotopia is a site where contradictions, unfamiliarity, and discomfort coexist, a site for theatre to provoke, unsettle, and catalyze societal introspection.

When Takayama shared his plan for McDonald’s Radio University with the German art critic Boris Groys, Groys said he loved the concept but added that, according to Takayama, “the German audience will hate it” (MMCA 2018). Indeed, Takayama’s assertion that McDonald’s could embody the future of theatre was rejected by the Frankfurt audience, many of whom thought the notion was offensive, even absurd: what an affront to suggest that McDonald’s, rather than their venerated theatres, was providing a more impactful, inclusive space for migrants (Odate Reference Odate, Arfara, Mancewicz and Remshardt2018:99). However, Takayama’s statement about the future of theatre should not be read simply as a direct comparison between theatre institutions and a global fast-food chain. Rather one should note that it illuminates Takayama’s dramaturgical vision: a future where theatre strategically lurks within the urban fabric to engage broader audiences and amplify its political potential. Takayama promotes what he calls “hiding the theatre” (engeki wo kakusu):

Hiding the performance in the urban landscape has been one of Takayama’s dramaturgical tropes since at least Compartment City Tokyo (2009), when he had makeshift shipping containers converted into a video shop (where you can see the video-performance on-site) installed in Ikebukuro West Gate Park—accessible to anyone, with no obvious indication that it was a work by a theatre director. And especially after the Fukushima triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear fallout in March 2011, he took a contrary path as producers and intendants called on him to create bold activist theatre directly intervening in the ecopolitical crisis. Rather than pursuing overt action and provocation, Takayama sought to make theatre that was more subtle, small, and subdued; it was a tactic to evade institutional censorship and sidestep outright rejection by political adversaries. This dramaturgical strategy came out of necessity from the experience of being covertly censored when creating his post-Fukushima work, Referendum Project (2011). Although the project did not aim to convey any decisively antinuclear and thus antigovernment message, Takayama received a call during its development from the Tokyo City Administration, politely yet insistently requesting a detailed explanation of his concept for the Director of the Cultural Department. As the process unfolded, Takayama grew increasingly aware that: “there is no point in carrying out any direct political action in Japan [as] it will always be ineffective. The result will be that you are simply ignored, [you] would lose, one hundred percent” (in Gurk, Pees, and Takayama Reference Gurk, Pees and Takayama2015:269).

Though his comment may sound politically reductive, Takayama recognized from this unnerving experience the need to design a form of theatre that could operate as a political instrument within Japan’s restrictive landscape, where peer pressure and covert censorship often silence outspoken political expression. This realization drove him to develop a subtler, more resilient theatrical approach, capable of navigating the nation’s mechanisms of indirect, elusive, yet still coercive control. Drawing inspiration from Bertolt Brecht, Takayama envisions the theatre of the future as progressively becoming “tinier,” ultimately evolving into what Brecht calls a Theaterchen—a diminutive German term meaning a tiny or adorable theatre. For Takayama, Theaterchen is pregnant with possibilities precisely because it is “small, flexible, and adaptable,” embodying a nimble form capable of navigating the bafflingly complex Japanese political landscape with quiet yet potent resilience. Just like those homoeopathic pills that contain a tiny amount of poison, just enough to combat symptoms in the patient’s body, Takayama seeks to dilute the political intent and outward structure of the theatre to such a degree that audiences do not at first realize they are stepping into something out of the ordinary and politically subversive. According to Takayama, theatre’s potency is greater as a pharmakon, when its form is “diminished, or even demolished” (Iwaki Reference Geilhorn2017:216).

From the standpoint of representational politics, Takayama aims to liberate those marginalized individuals who are often assigned narratives of the victimized, freeing them from the burdens of what he views as shame-laden exhibitionism onstage. In concealing theatre within the city, Takayama envisions a mode of performance that subverts visibility to unlock new layers of political and social engagement. As Stuart Hall astutely notes, “representation is a complex business,” especially when dealing with “people and places which are significantly different from us” (1997:225–26). This complexity arises, as T.J. Demos argues, because the representation of marginalized groups often leads to their reduction through “iconographical identification as much as the positivist typologies of scientific knowledge” (2013:8). Along the same line of thought, Isobel Blomfield and Caroline Lenette highlight two ethical dilemmas in the visual representation of refugees: first, “there is the risk of conforming to pre-existing tropes and thereby unintentionally exacerbating stereotypes of suffering and victimization”; and, second, there is the compensatory impulse to “over-emphasize assimilation and notions that refugees should be ‘just like us’” (2018:325). Whether through assimilation or dissimilation, the politics of visual representation onstage is becoming increasingly fraught in the current political climate. However, as media theorist Sven Lütticken notes, “being visible” is simultaneously becoming ever more crucial in our capitalist society, since visibility has become “a socioeconomic imperative,” driven by the need for calculable achievements and visible outcomes (2015). Against the backdrop of this both visually fraught and obsessed culture, Takayama developed a Brechtian “audio theatre,” where the spatial and physical distinction between performer and spectator is dissolved, producing a hybrid “performing spectator,” and where the director requests the audience to be the co-conspirator of the nonvisual performance (see Balme Reference Balme2006:117–24).

McDonald’s Radio University is an audio-cued performance whereby the audience members, upon entering one of the performance venues, can order a “lecture” delivered by a migrant professional alongside the usual fare of burgers, fries, and drinks. Beyond the typical food menu, an alternative “lecture menu” presents a selection of stories and subjects to choose from. For instance, when I attended the performance at a McDonald’s in central Brussels, audiences could select, for example, a chemistry lecture from a young Syrian pharmacist who used her skills to aid displaced populations during the Syrian Revolution; an economics session led by a former Guinean economic analyst sharing his struggles with contributing to his country’s development; or a lesson on swimming from a young Iraqi para-athlete who trained himself daily in the Tigris River. Spectators do not know who the “professor” is, nor could they see the person delivering the lecture because the performer stealthily sits somewhere in the same McDonald’s, speaking into a microphone that is all but unseen. The only direct connection the audience has with the performers is through their voices, which are transmitted to individual headsets via a portable radio device delivered at the checkout counter.Footnote ⁴ And given that many lecturers communicate in a language other than their mother tongue, they often mumble, stutter, and falter, inviting the audience to enter a mode of heightened, almost vigilant listening. This auditory fragility and required attentiveness reinforce the performative frame of the experience, transforming each pause and misstep into a moment of shared vulnerability.

Equally integral to the auditory experience is the sensory and atmospheric immersion that audience members share with the performers. For example: the smell of greasy fries wafting through the air, the murmur of unknown languages blending in the background, the discomfort of rigid plastic chairs, and the harsh glare of fluorescent lights exposing every speck of dust even in the late hours. These ambient details coalesce to create an uncomfortably real, immersive environment, dislodging the audience from the cozy distance of safe spectatorship and plunging them into a visceral, full-body experience. Moreover, if McDonald’s epitomizes the finely tuned universal design—where, as George Ritzer argues, “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and controllability” are upheld as pillars of their global success (2018:20), Takayama invites audiences into an unpredictable, uncontrollable, and deliberately ill-choreographed amateur performance. Here, a spontaneous brawl between customers, the lingering odor of urine from the restroom, or a blaring siren from a nearby police car can instantly disrupt the anticipated theatrical experience. Through the immersive experience where art and life collide unpredictably, audiences are nudged from the safety of their pleasant bourgeois life and distanced observation into a dynamic engagement with the everyday lives of migrants inhabiting the same, yet drastically different city filled with toxins, noise, violence, and junk.

Devoid of any explicit visual representation of migrants, McDonald’s Radio University can be situated within what I conceptualize as “postvisual theatre”—a dramaturgical approach that responds to the complexities of visual politics by suspending the dominance of visuality, inviting a reassessment of cultural stigmas and reinterpreting performance as a form of multisensory engagement. Drawing on theoretical contributions of scholars and thinkers such as Hito Steyerl (Reference Steyerl2012), McKenzie Wark (Reference Wark, Brouwer, Spuybroek and van Tuinen2016), T.J. Demos (Reference Demos2017), Jennifer Gabrys (Reference Gabrys2019), and Una Chaudhuri (Reference Chaudhuri2023), among others, who variously advocate for epistemologies transcending positivist logic, I resist the reductive pull of conventional visual representation. Instead, I seek to transcend the constraints of human sight, which frequently embodies humancentric biases, omissions, and oversights. Postvisual dramaturgy serves as a radical dramaturgical gesture that calls for the relinquishment of an anthropocentric worldview predicated on optical epistemologies. And in alignment with this perspective, postvisual dramaturgy liberates both human and more-than-human entities from their confinement within the entrenched narratives of the Western European stage, narratives that often serve to constrain and reify a singular, reductive understanding of identity.

Figure 3.

Lecture menu of McDonald’s Radio University at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, which was temporarily renovated as a mock McDonald’s shop. Frankfurt, 3 March 2017. (Photo by Jörg Baumann)

In Takayama’s performance, the postvisual dramaturgy serves a dual purpose. First, it derives from pragmatic constraints: when Takayama pitched his idea for transforming real McDonald’s branches into theatre spaces to the company’s executives, they stipulated that no visible performance should occur, fearing it might deter regular customers from entering the shop (Takayama Reference Takayama2017a). Thus, as coconspirators of the performance’s success, though tacitly, the audience members are tasked with ignoring the performers. Even if they happen to recognize a performer, they are expected to deliberately avoid them—neither gathering around them nor making eye contact. Though the director provides no explicit instructions, the setting itself imposes a kind of unspoken etiquette: in an ordinary McDonald’s, it feels inherently inappropriate to gather around a single table to watch a performer, especially if it means disrupting other customers. In this sense, the audience members take on a ghostly presence—silent participants who perform the gestures of ordinary McDonald’s customers, blending seamlessly into the scene and listening through their headsets. For Takayama, “the audience members are performers [because] they are performing a gestus in the Brechtian sense,” performing subtle yet deliberate acts that align with the everyday behavior expected, not in theatres, but in a fast-food environment. These gestures—sipping coffee, scrolling through a phone, casually eating a burger, waiting idly, and almost always looking somewhat anxiously fatigued—take on the mundane rhythm of McDonald’s customers. In doing so, the audience becomes integral to the work’s social camouflage, blurring the line between performance and daily life, visibility and invisibility (Droß and Takayama Reference Droß and Takayama2015:250). Second, the choice to create a postvisual performance reflects Takayama’s personal frustration. As briefly mentioned, after witnessing nearly two decades in the German theatre scene of what Alison Jeffers describes as “the victimhood narrative,” where marginalized subjects are visually represented for predominantly white bourgeois audiences, Takayama wanted to move away from that strategy of exhibiting migrants as detached objects onstage (Jeffers Reference Jeffers2008). Driven by these two motives, Takayama sought a theatrical form that transcends visual representation.

Figure 4.

A migrant performer giving a lecture through a microphone in a McDonald’s. Südbahnhof branch, Frankfurt, 3 March 2017. (Photo by Hasunuma Masahiro)

In his 1926 essay “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” Brecht envisions radio as an ideal theatrical communication device, one that could be revolutionary “if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship, instead of isolating him” ([1926] 1974:52). What Brecht highlights here is the potential of radio as a relational theatrical medium, through which alienation and interaction would coexist as a uniquely intimate yet distanced auditory experience. Radios have the relational ability to create profoundly private experiences, facilitating a connection that feels personal and immediate, even in the absence of the visual presence of the other party. Takayama seeks to create a Brechtian relational aural theatre that physically blurs the line between the speaker and the listener as both are subtly engaged in the gestus of hiding by attuning to the ambient murmurs and suspicious utterances of nearby customers who might be sensing that something odd is developing in the shop. Though the delegated amateur performer speaks in relative isolation, the performer and the audience share the same space and the same quiet concern about not being noticed or removed from the shop.

Through the secretive aural performance, the audience gains a fleeting sense of what it might feel like to be compelled to hide in plain sight, though without the constant scrutiny and surveillance faced by migrants under the watch of police or immigration authorities. Through the performance, Takayama invites empathy by subtly echoing the tensions of living under persistent, unseen observation making the audience affectively feel the reality of the migrants. The audience is participating in what Caroline Wake calls “ethical eavesdropping,” where the audience deliberately chooses “to stand outside in an uncomfortable spot, on the border of knowing and not knowing […] granting others the inside position [and] listening to learn” (2014:90–91). In Takayama’s work, the act of listening takes on an ethical stance, challenging audiences to confront their own positionality and to engage in a form of audio-spectatorship that places them in the vulnerable position of the surveilled lives it seeks to understand.

Figure 5.

Audience members tune in to the portable radio and listen to the lecture through headphones. McDonald’s Hauptwache branch, Frankfurt, 3 March 2017. (Photo by Hasunuma Masahiro)

Through McDonald’s Radio University, Takayama develops a postvisual dramaturgy that fosters aural and affective para-institutional encounters, sidestepping the violent commodification of refugees by dissolving the binary positionalities of “us” and “them.” It is an indirect, diverted, or “bipassed” encounter, to cite another theatrical trope that Takayama often uses (2017b). Much like Brecht, who famously envisioned an audience relaxed enough to casually smoke in their seats, Takayama seeks to cultivate, or deploy, the relaxed atmosphere of McDonald’s, which is a place where people let down their guard and enables unanticipated interaction, rather than a decisively confrontational encounter. Takayama believes that by creating a hidden bypass in society that allows for moments of unforeseeable connection between two parties, he can develop a theatrical site that privileges reflection over resolutions and solidarity over solutions. Through aural performances that prompt us to recognize the hidden migrants, we gain knowledge of other realities that are part of our everyday lives. And according to Takayama, such heterotopic sites where a hidden bypath of society is revealed warrant recognition as “theatre,” as they facilitate a reimagining of the sociopolitical landscape through performative engagement. Through McDonald’s Radio University, we should ask again how theatre might operate as an apparatus of small acts of resistance in a world obsessed with politically correct visual representation.