MIT professors bring anime 'Madness' to life

The twist, though, is that "Live Action Anime 2009: Madness at Mokuba" takes the Japanese animated form to a new medium: the stage. A collaboration between two MIT professors, Ian Condry and Thomas DeFrantz, the performance by MIT Dance Theater Ensemble members goes up this afternoon at the Hynes Convention Center for Anime Boston, then travels to Tokyo for two shows next weekend.

"Live-action anime just seemed like a crazy paradoxical idea, and that got us going," Condry explains. As for the giant robots, they grew out of his experience running a "Cool Japan" panel with some toy industry reps - one of whom showed up in a costume that was "9, 10 feet tall, with flippers on his hands," Condry says. So when he and DeFrantz started discussing a collaborative project, their first thought was: "Well, we've got a giant robot."

That genesis, Condry notes, felt consistent with what he learned from studying anime studios in Japan for his next book.

"I often thought of anime in terms of the story, and then you could look at gender, national identity, technology, through that," he says. "And that's fine; there's nothing wrong with that kind of analysis. But it was clear [in the studio] that the story was the last thing they figured out. What they started with was the characters. What are the characters that will populate this world, and then what are the dramatic events that connect them. . . . And once you start thinking of things that way, it does open up a different way of thinking about how it works and the mechanics of storytelling."

For anime creators, Condry observes, the process can lead to all kinds of spinoffs: movies, TV shows, comic books, novels, graphic novels . . . and toys, of course. For the MIT performers, it led first to an earlier version, performed to crowds in 2007 at the school's Kresge Little Theater, and now to this staging.

"Madness at Mokuba" is mostly dance, Condry says, with a little dialogue in English (and Japanese surtitles) and "a couple of Japanese words, but only ones that American anime fans would get." Just to round out the cheesy-animation feel, the actors are lip-synching to a prerecorded dialogue track - and they're in typical "character" get-ups, of course, and performing in front of anime-inspired backgrounds. MIT lecturer Peter Whincop composed some suitably "futuristic, electronic" music, too.

Interested? There's more info at liveactionanime2009.com. To see the hourlong show (appropriate for age 7 and up), you'll need to register for Anime Boston at animeboston.com, hop a plane to Tokyo, or - who knows? - wait for the action figures.