School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemAfter angura?: recent works by Kawamura Takeshi(UNSW and Performance Paradigm, 2006)Japan’s radical theatre movement angura emerged from a cultural space in the 1960s enlivened by acts of protest and experimentation. As discussed in previous essays, angura is characterised by transhistorical dramaturgy, transforming theatrical forms and changed relationships between the stage and the audience. One of the other notable features of angura was the rise of the writer-director, an often charismatic, sometimes autocratic, ‘genius-figure.’ Such writer-directors formed ensembles where their works were developed through distinctive and singular creative processes. These ‘auteurs,’ to borrow an expression from French new wave cinema, came to shape the 1960s theatre in Japan. They included Terayama Shûji, Satô Makoto, Suzuki Tadashi, Ôta Shogo and Kara Jûrô. Working in the era of rebellion and street protest, these young directors were impatient to revolutionise theatrical form. New physical training regimes and hybrid approaches to dramaturgy, aesthetics and design, coupled with idiosyncratic political-cultural outlooks are the fruits of the angura system, the outcomes of a singular auteur-like vision.
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ItemFrom liminality to ideology: the politics of embodiment in prewar avant-garde theatre in Japan(University of Michigan Press, 2006)The aim of the avant-garde is nothing less than to bring about a revolution of everyday life by aesthetic means-to transform the modern world. This essay will examine the conditions for Japan’s avant-garde theater before World War II. A central theme of my examination will be the experience of embodiment, an active and visceral experience of the flesh in motion that is both essential to the theater experience as a whole and, when the politics of corporeality are brought into play, for example, of special importance in Japan. The avant-garde sensibility was and continues to be a fragile one in the context of Japan’s historical landscape, yet one that is ineluctably associated with ideas of cultural exploration, freedom, and above all, resistance to authoritarian forces. In the postwar period this is figured in the rise of a second wave of avant-garde theater tied to the counterculture and student protest movements in the 1960s. In the prewar era, the avant-garde’s cultural antagonist was rising militarism (that dystopian strand of the experience of modernity). In the course of their struggle, the avant-garde theater moved from exploring the body as a site of selfhood (shutaisei) to transforming itself into a quasi-socialist, social-realist vanguard force that came to reject its own historical formations.
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ItemAustralia's Japanese avant-garde theatre: habitus, cultural community and soft power(Monash University, 2006)
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Itemapoliticaldance( 2006)A live performance work devised and performed by Not Yet It's Difficult (NYID), director David Pledger, dramaturge Peter Eckersall, design Paul Jackson
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ItemTheorising the Angura Space: avant-garde performance and politics in Japan 1960-2000(Brill Academic Publishers, 2006)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTowards an expanded dramaturgical practice: A report on 'The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project'(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2006-10)This essay is a report on the Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project (Dramaturgies), a forum for the investigation of issues in professional dramaturgical practice in Australia. It reviews the textual orientation of historical theatre practice in Australia before describing a series of events aiming to promote a wider and more culturally interactive understanding of dramaturgy. New forms of dramaturgy arising in response to the post-dramatic turn in theatre are discussed as a basis for exploring an expanded dramaturgical practice. Proposals for a politics of dramaturgy that revive theatre as a forum for social critique conclude the essay. While specific to one set of theatre interventions, it is intended that the proposals discussed herein have wider applications.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFrom liminality to ideology: the politics of embodiment in prewar avant-garde theatre in Japan(The University of Michigan Press, 2006)