School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Start date: 2004 × End date: 2009 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: 20th century × Subject: history ×

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    Theatre of body in Japan: Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness)- Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction)
    Broinowski, Adam Richard Gracjusz ( 2004)
    This thesis is an analysis of two Japanese theatres of body; Ankoku Butoh (Dance of Darkness) and Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction), and a practical and theoretical investigation of the possibilities for an embodied political philosophy. It is divided into two chapters. The first identifies the genesis and development of the philosophy and methodology of Hijikata Tatsumi's Ankoku Butoh in a chronological analysis beginning in late 1950s Japan. Apart from introducing some new material to the study of Ankoku Butoh and analyzing Hijikata's concepts, the first chapter serves as a genealogical source for the examination of the theatre of body of Gekidan Kaitaisha in the second chapter: the practice, philosophy, and productions within the social and political context. Flowing on from Hijikata's radically subjective work born from and profoundly rooted in an ethos and socio-political context of rebellion, Kaitaisha's theatre responds to 'what is' and refuses to accept it is all there is. Both Ankoku Butoh and Gekidan Kaitaisha are designed to actually deconstruct physical and perceptual codes integrated in the body to create the conditions for the body to become itself. While implicitly showing how one has informed the other, debate is focused on their distinct methods of embodied resistance to social conformity and on interpretations in relation to the political environment. The methods of Kaitaisha described in this thesis are generally based on the principle of 'moving the inside out to allow the outside in'. In tracing the evolution of two theatres of body in Japan) parallels are made with the conditions of the period, beginning with the transformations of late 1950s modernity, through the 1970s and the birth of post-modernity to its results being carried from the twentieth into the twenty-first century in the bodies of Kaitaisha.