Theorizing the Angura Space

Theorizing the Angura Space PDF

Author: Peter Eckersall

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9047409957

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This book sheds light on Japan’s underground theatre in a time of its most intense, creative and original productions, viz. 1960-2000, investigating the interrelationship of aesthetics and politics in the period 1960-2000. The first history of avant-garde theatre in Japan.

The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film

The Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film PDF

Author: Timothy Iles

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 900417138X

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This study, from a variety of analytical approaches, examines ways in which contemporary Japanese film presents a critical engagement with Japan's project of modernity to demonstrate the 'crisis' in conceptions of identity. The work discusses gender, the family, travel, the 'everyday' as horror, and ways in which animated films can offer an ideal space in which an ideal conception of identity may emerge and thrive. It presents close, theoretically-informed textual analyses of the thematic issues contemporary Japanese films raise, through a wide range of genres, from comedy, family drama, and animation, to science fiction and horrror by directors such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Morita Yoshimitsu, Miike Takashi, Oshii Mamoru, Kon Satoshi, and Miyazaki Hayao, in language that is accessible but precise.

Transgenerational Remembrance

Transgenerational Remembrance PDF

Author: Jessica Nakamura

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2020-01-15

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0810141310

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In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this time, survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism, previously silent about their experiences, have sparked contentious public debates about the form and content of war memories. The book opens with an analysis of the performance of space at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine, which continues to promote an anachronistic veneration of the war. After identifying the centrality of performance in long-standing dominant narratives, Transgenerational Remembrance offers close readings of artistic performances that tackle subject matter largely obscured before 1989: the kamikaze pilot, Japanese imperialism, comfort women, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japanese American internment. These case studies range from Hirata Oriza’s play series about Japanese colonial settlers in Korea and Shimada Yoshiko’s durational performance about comfort women to Kondo Aisuke’s videos and gallery installations about Japanese American internment. Working from theoretical frameworks of haunting and ethics, Nakamura develops an analytical lens based on the Noh theater ghost. Noh emphasizes the agency of the ghost and the dialogue between the dead and the living. Integrating her Noh-inflected analysis into ethical and transnational feminist queries, Nakamura shows that performances move remembrance beyond current evidentiary and historiographical debates.

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific PDF

Author: D. Varney

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 113736789X

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Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific is an innovative study of contemporary theatre and performance within the framework of modernity in the Asia-Pacific. It is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore.

Dissenting Japan

Dissenting Japan PDF

Author: William Andrews

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1849045798

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Conformist, mute and malleable? Andrews tackles head-on this absurd caricature of Japanese society in his fascinating history of its militant sub-cultures, radical societies and well-established traditions of dissent Following the March 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis, the media remarked with surprise on how thousands of demonstrators had flocked to the streets of Tokyo. But mass protest movements are nothing new in Japan and the post-war period experienced years of unrest and violence on both sides of the political spectrum: from demos to riots, strikes, campus occupations, faction infighting, assassinations and even international terrorism. This is the first comprehensive history in English of political radicalism and counterculture in Japan, as well as the artistic developments during this turbulent time. It chronicles the major events and movements from 1945 to the new flowering of protests and civil dissent in the wake of Fukushima. Introducing readers to often ignored aspects of Japanese society, it explores the fascinating ideologies and personalities on the Right and the Left, including the student movement, militant groups and communes. While some elements parallel developments in Europe and America, much of Japan's radical recent past (and present) is unique and offers valuable lessons for understanding the context to the new waves of anti-government protests the nation is currently witnessing.

Dramaturgy to Make Visible

Dramaturgy to Make Visible PDF

Author: Peter Eckersall

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-14

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1040036643

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This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities. This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.

Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan

Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan PDF

Author: Miryam Sas

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 168417502X

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"In the years of rapid economic growth following the protest movements of the 1960s, artists and intellectuals in Japan searched for a means of direct impact on the whirlwind of historical and cultural transformations of their time. Yet while the artists often called for such “direct” encounter, their works complicate this ideal with practices of interruption, self-reflexive mimesis, and temporal discontinuity. In an era known for idealism and activism, some of the most cherished ideals—intimacy between subjects, authenticity, a sense of home—are limitlessly desired yet always just out of reach. In this book, Miryam Sas explores the theoretical and cultural implications of experimental arts in a range of media. Casting light on important moments in the arts from the 1960s to the early 1980s, this study focuses first on underground (post-shingeki) theater and then on related works of experimental film and video, buto dance and photography. Emphasizing the complex and sophisticated theoretical grounding of these artists through their works, practices, and writings, this book also locates Japanese experimental arts in an extensive, sustained dialogue with key issues of contemporary critical theory."

Text & Presentation, 2007

Text & Presentation, 2007 PDF

Author: Stratos E. Constantinidis

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2009-08-11

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0786451181

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Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. It represents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference. This anthology includes papers from the 31st annual conference held in Los Angeles, California. Topics covered include Chicano theatre, the Vietnam War and 9/11 in the French theatre, actresses and modern Hamlet, Asian theatre, Antigone in pre- and post-communist Germany, adapting an Internet comic strip for the stage, and the future of dramatic literature in the academy, among others.

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama PDF

Author: J. Thomas Rimer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-04-29

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0231537131

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This anthology is the first to survey the full range of modern Japanese drama and make available Japan's best and most representative twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century works in one volume. It opens with a comprehensive introduction to Meiji-period drama and follows with six chronological sections: "The Age of Taisho Drama"; The Tsukiji Little Theater and Its Aftermath"; "Wartime and Postwar Drama"; "The 1960s and Underground Theater"; "The 1980s and Beyond"; and "Popular Theater," providing a complete history of modern Japanese theater for students, scholars, instructors, and dramatists. The collection features a mix of original and previously published translations of works, among them plays by such writers as Masamune Hakucho (The Couple Next Door), Enchi Fumiko (Restless Night in Late Spring), Morimoto Kaoru (A Woman's Life), Abe Kobo (The Man Who Turned into a Stick), Kara Juro (Two Women), Terayama Shuji (Poison Boy), Noda Hideki (Poems for Sale), and Mishima Yukio (The Sardine Seller's Net of Love). Leading translators include Donald Keene, J. Thomas Rimer, M. Cody Poulton, John K. Gillespie, Mari Boyd, and Brian Powell. Each section features an introduction to the developments and character of the period, notes on the plays' productions, and photographs of their stage performances. The volume complements any study of modern Japanese literature and modern drama in China, Korea, or other Asian or contemporary Western nations.

Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan

Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan PDF

Author: Adam Broinowski

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1780935978

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Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan examines how the performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped and been shaped by the political and historical conditions experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry, probes the interrelationship that exists between the body and the nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan over a duration of dramatic change. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan explores issues of discrimination, marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.