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Staging the World, Worlding the Stage: The Social Functions of Theater in Japan, 1800-1970
Organizer and Chair: Hoyt J. Long, University of Michigan, Japan
Discussant: Neil Safier, University of Pennsylvania
The idea of the world as a stage – and the stage as its own kind of world – has a long history in Japan and has itself been central to the ways in which the social, as well as performative, dimensions of the theater have been understood over the past several centuries. Even if expressed in different terms and with different meanings over time (Tsubouchi Shoyo, for example, rejected the early modern idiom of "heaven and earth as a grand stage" for a more literal rendering of “all the world’s a stage” in his translation of As You Like It), the very practice of thinking the social through the theater has an important genealogy that suggests certain convictions as to the spectacular nature of society and the social nature of theater.
This panel seeks to trace this genealogy through a series of questions linked to specific historical contexts and varied social and political circumstances: How have theatrical practices and techniques been mapped onto models of social interaction? How has the stage been appropriated as an organizing element for society and even as a conceptual map of social space itself? What have been the cultural and ideological consequences of doing either? We explore the curious dialectic between world and stage in Japan by considering the conceptual and literal geographies of the kabuki stage in the early nineteenth century, the social topographies of gender in the Meiji period, the intersection of performance and public space in Taisho children's theater, and the possibility for theatrically mediated polities on the streets of late 1960s Tokyo. In bringing together these diverse topics under a single theme, we hope to compare some of the conceptual linkages made between theater and society in Japan while calling into question certain conventional periodizations and generic classifications central to the historiography of Japanese theater, ultimately reflecting on how the idea of theatrum mundi (“world as stage”) has persisted in spite of competing cultural media and the changing social status of the stage.
Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Maps: Kabuki and the Cartographic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Jonathan Zwicker, University of Michigan
Across the early decades of the nineteenth century, there was a growth of interest among those who wrote on the history of kabuki to see the theater of their own age along both a temporal and a spatial axis, that is as part of a tradition that reaches back to the distant past, but also as one example of a broader category of "theater" (shibai) that could be found in neighboring and in more distant lands. In these same decades, maps and diagrams of all sorts began to appear in theater books and ephemera, and just as the real spaces of kabuki (stages, theaters, and theater districts) were mapped in remarkable detail so too were conceptual maps- of actors and their careers, for example, or the history of Edo kabuki as an institution- fashioned which drew upon what Marcia Yonemoto has called the powerful "geographic imaginary" of early modern Japan.
By examining a variety of nineteenth-century printed ephemera, this paper aims to explore how theatrical culture emerged as an object of knowledge in relation to a particular kind of historicism by which early nineteenth-century theater historians located, often quite literally mapped, contemporary theatrical practice in both historical and spatial dimensions. My aim is to pose a series of broad questions about how the early modern geographic imaginary worked within an emerging "logic of seriality"- Benedict Andersonīs term for a way of seeing an individual phenomenon as part of a larger series of like phenomena - to provide a way of understanding contemporary theatrical practice within a broadly spatialized conception of history.
"Exit Woman Onnagata": The New Gender Economy of Twentieth-Century Kabuki Theater
Maki Isaka Morinaga, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
The theatrical practice of onnagata has long been a central aspect of kabuki dramaturgy and has also helped shape both the concept of femininity and the economy of gender construction in Japan from the seventeenth century onward. Little has been discussed, however, as to the existence of women kabuki performers. Women actors, including women onnagata, existed in kabuki not only in its initial phase but also in a marginalized, hidden quarter thereafter. This paper will examine the brief phenomenon of female kabuki actors who appeared on public stage in the Meiji era, a particularly informative site for thinking through the larger implications of women performers because despite great critical acclaim this phenomenon was short lived. My focus will be the disappearance of women onnagata not in terms of artistic elements (at the level of performance) so much as of the social embeddedness of this phenomenon (at the level of expectations and norms). Women onnagata performed in accordance with the established, "man"-made norms of kabuki dramaturgy, and the best compliment that a woman onnagata could win was to be compared with a male counterpart ("once Actor X was on stage, it was impossible to tell that she was not a man.") Ironically, precisely due to such success as acting as men acting as women, the tradition of women onnagata was destined to be abandoned in the course of modernization. When the dichotomy of natural femininity (of women) and artistic femininity (of male onnagata) materialized, successful women onnagata could belong to neither.
Performing the Public Square in Late-Taisho Japan
Hoyt J. Long, University of Michigan, Japan
Richard Sennett has suggested that the state of public relations in a society correlates to the willingness of its members to exercise their capacity to playact. It is an intriguing hypothesis, and one whose limits are worth exploring for the case of late-Taisho Japan. In the teens and early twenties, as urban parks and other public spaces served as stage for testing the limits of public demonstration, the theatrical stage was being reimagined by a number of dramatists as an ideal space for social unification and community building. Only a decade after the first professional production of a Western play, non-traditional theatre had entered a phase of unprecedented vitality and was finding inspiration from populist theater movements in France, Soviet Russia, America, and elsewhere. This creative energy also found its way into the nation’s school system, where teachers active in the Free Education Movement experimented with theater as a means to encourage personal expression and artistic sensibility.
Emerging at the intersection of these related trends was the play “Poran no hiroba” (or Poran’s Square), performed in 1924 by a group of students at a small agricultural school in northeastern Japan. Written by their teacher Miyazawa Kenji, the play centered around a young boy’s search for a mythical hiroba, a place where the normative rules of social association were no longer to apply. In my talk, I will read the play and its performative context against their wider historical backdrop, using “Poran no hiroba” to examine ideas about the relation of theatricality to subject formation and of theater to social idealism in the late-Taisho period. The play will also offer an opportunity to consider the very possibilities for imagining public space, specifically rural public space, at this critical moment in the transformation of Japanese civil society.
Street Theatre, Fake Revolution, and Imaginary Mini-Polities in 1960s/70s Tokyo
Steve Clark Ridgely, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Japanese underground theatre of the late-1960s and early-1970s cannot be understood without examination of its claim to urban public space. The playwright/director/actor Kara Juro duped local cops with a bait-and-switch move in West Shinjuku Park to perform a tent play on public property after being denied a permit. Riot police arrived, allowed the performance to finish, then arrested Kara and several other leads. Kara’s angura (“underground”) rival Terayama Shuji soon after organized a coordinated street theater event, also in Shinjuku, which was disguised as a set of normal occurrences (street musicians, random surveys, etc) such that bystanders might initially mistake the theatre for everyday life. The actors felt like spies, spontaneous participants were integrated, and, most importantly, all involved might have begun to suspect the legitimacy of their other daily interactions. The project flirted with insurrection; either a politically void fake revolution or, alternatively, perfect cover for the real thing: “Don’t worry officer, it’s just a play.” This performance, called “Jinriki hikoki Solomon” (Solomon, the Man-Powered Airplane), opens with two actors standing in an imaginary one square meter nation: an independent, fictional (?) polity in western Tokyo (later recreated in Amsterdam). The actors’ job is to recruit two additional participants, and at that point expand the mini-polity to a four square meter nation, and so on until the game performs a peaceful land-grab of the entire city.
I address the following problem in this paper: Does theatre’s move toward the streets in the late-60s reflect a smooth expansion of angura’s characteristic blurring of actor/audience boundaries? Or does this moment mark a more abrupt discontinuity—a move from social commentary aimed at voluntary patrons to an intervention and a reconfiguration of the social space by force?