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From liminality to ideology: the politics of embodiment in prewar avant-garde theatre in Japan

ECKERSALL, PETER (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.