School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemIntercultural performance in the context of cultural pluralism(Circus Oz and Monash University, Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, 2001)In this paper I will provisionally argue for the possibility of localised intercultural relationships in the live performing arts as an effective and pluralist site of resistance to totalising forces associated with globalisation. There will be four themes to my argument and I apologise in advance that I will only briefly touch on each of them. They are: i.Defining globalisation ii.Cultural pluralism iii.Australia and Japan (the two sites of performance culture that I have expertise in and have been asked to address) iv.Live performing arts: the Gekidan Kaitaisha-NYID project.
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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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ItemWhat can’t be seen can be seen: Butoh politics and (body) play(Rodopi, 2000)Asobi, a Japanese term that connotes play and amusement is rarely associated with the physical or cultural dynamics of butoh. Yet as performer Yumi Umiumare who danced with Maro Akaji’s dark-soul (ankoku) butoh group Dairakudakan for ten years argues: “these days their work seems more like pop” (Umiumare 1999). Bodies in performance are subject to the interplay of context and culture and for this reason what was once rare in art and distasteful to society can become commonplace and fashionable; To cite Jameson, a cultural turn of “postmodern mutations where the apocalyptic suddenly turns into the decorative (or at least diminishes abruptly into ‘something you have around the home’)” (1991: xvii). If attempts to signify butoh have become playful (for example, a trend seen in the increasing emphasis on performing the sensibilities of cuteness [kawaii] in Japanese post-butoh dance) and bodies are the decorative agents of the ludic condition, have we in fact reached an endgame for butoh? Alternatively, might artists not intensify the qualities of play in performance, escalate and increase their velocity to reach a point at which they explode and divulge an anti-playful opposite? This is to engage in what Auslander observes as a “transition from transgressive to resistant political art” in the postmodern era (1997: 58), resistance that might be found in this instance in an intense accumulation of signs on and through the body and their reproduction ad infinitum to the point of absurdity. Except that there are apparent resistances to some bodies; resistance also in Asian bodies opening-up new spaces in contemporary Australia. Umiumare and her collaborations with Malay-Australian performer Tony Yap might be productively read in this way.