ASIAN THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka by Ahalya Satkunaratnam
• Merritt Denman Popp

Ahalya Satkunaratnam’s work Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict explores the dance form of bharata natyam and its practice during the final years of the Sri Lankan civil war. Satkunaratnam examines the ways in which practitioners of the traditional dance form deployed the form to navigate the complex landscape created by the war. The text explores bharata natyam as a site of political and global conflict, and demonstrates the ways in which dance at this time affected and was affected by the war. Furthermore, the book highlights the lived experiences of dancers as it outlines the ways in which personal encounters with global political problems manifest through performance. Ultimately, in the author’s words, “[b]odies and their experiences are typically left out of discussions of conflict that focus on politics and policy. Both are interconnected here, and this text aims to make transparent the process of producing subjectivity through the acquiring and performing of disciplined movement” (p. 14). Satkunaratnam deftly handles this complex intersection of individual and political bodies and successfully uses bharata natyam to illuminate the ways in which political conflict and performance interact.

Satkunaratnam’s work is an ethnography which, in her own words, explores bharata natyam’s “hint-laced exchanges and nuanced aesthetics that mark a constant awareness of potential violence and everyday war” (p. 14). Her aim is to illustrate the quotidian ways in which the political seeps into the lives of performers and examine the effect that this process has on performance. As Satkunaratnam points out, the scope of her work is not limited to that which is overtly political. Instead, the book is interested in how war shapes even that which is not intentionally political. As Satkunaratnam puts it, “I am invested in reading how politics shapes what is performed and what is received as neutral yet is politically constructed” (p. 9). This is further emphasized by the personal experiences of the author, which are integral to the text.

Satkunaratnam explores the nuanced political landscape of the Sri Lankan civil war through dance as deployed by Sri Lankan women, many of whom the author spoke to or worked with herself. In this way, her project was itself shaped by the war, her topic shifting as the geopolitical landscape around her subject changed during the final tumultuous years of the conflict.

Reviewed by:

• A History of Butō by Bruce Baird
• Tara Rodman

In A History of Butō, Bruce Baird traces the contingencies of timing, economics, personality, reception, and others that shaped the trajectory of some of the most significant artists in butō’s first two generations, producing a history of how this dance form’s wide-ranging aesthetics, psycho-physical methodologies, and international appeal developed. Baird’s approach to this history is not simply to relay information about a set of artists, but to provide deep, historical contextualization for their work. As he notes, such an approach might be unfashionable amongst streams of cultural criticism that assert the primacy of the performer’s body as either a site of unknowability, or of the affective encounter between performer and spectator. As Baird acknowledges, many of the artists he studies resisted being pinned down by assigned meanings, as they aimed to give expression to new artistic and political possibilities.

The problem is, butō’s context has already been over-determined: audiences at the 1978 performance with which Baird opens the book, and indeed, every class of students I have ever introduced to butō, all assume that the experience of the atomic bomb is the defining event out of which this dance form developed. Baird resoundingly dislodges this abiding narrative, and in its place, offers us a rigorously historicized account of how each dancer’s individual practice and preoccupations produced a set of intersecting threads that together have come to be understood as butō, and have inspired subsequent generations of dancers to participate in this form. [End Page 443]

A History of Butō’s contributions involve not only this richly-mapped history, but also Baird’s numerous, concrete examples of the highly technical and deeply theorized ways in which butō artists worked. These detailed accounts of butō methods are paired with evocative descriptions of specific performance pieces. The abundance of these two kinds of examples enables Baird to highlight commonalities across different practitioners: “databases of movement, minute sensation, and granularity of movement” (p. 229)—characteristics that help to articulate what makes something butō, even while allowing for the range and non-conformism of the genre.

Theorizing from these characteristics, Baird also offers some refreshing ways of thinking about butō in relation to contemporary phenomena in media culture: the cyborg, the video game speedrunner, and the otaku. Baird proposes that, l

Reviewed by:

• The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo by M.W. Shores
• Alex Rogals

Expanding upon current Western scholarship on the seated traditional comedic performing art, rakugo, M.W. Shores’ The Comic Storytelling of Western Japan: Satire and Social Mobility in Kamigata Rakugo provides the first English-language history of the Osaka-based Kamigata rakugo (a [End Page 440] form of comic story telling) tradition. Shores’ goal is to dispel the prevailing myth that Kamigata rakugo is an inferior second to its more popular Tokyo-based brethren. Drawing on historical research and his role as a participant/observer under the tutelage of Kamigata rakugoka (rakugo performer) Hayashi Somemaru IV, Shores provides a compelling argument for how social and cultural distinctiveness plays a major role in understanding the evolution, reception and humor of Kamigata rakugo.

Cultural history plays a starring role in Shores’ approach, and he identifies Kamigata rakugo’s center, Osaka, as a culture defined by its merchant class. In the first chapter, Shores provides a brief history of the Osaka area, as well as the circumstances by which it became premodern Japan’s economic hub. While the merchants of the Edo era (1600–1868) were the lowest class in the Tokugawa shogunate’s enforced social strata, Shores positions Osaka’s distance from the shogun’s capital of Edo (now Tokyo) as a driving force for the creation of a culture very much defined by merchants and those who worked for/with them. As such, the chōnin (townsmen), play an equally vital role for Shores, as their tastes and social mobilities were quite different from those of the samurai, whose ubiquitous presence defined Edo culture. Shores posits this distance has characterized the Osaka merchant and his familiars, both past and present, as easygoing, frugal, and enterprising people.

Chapter Two provides a history of Kamigata rakugo and illustrates how comic storytelling traditions as far back the Heian Period (794–1185) served as precursors to the form. Shores draws attention to the fact that outdoor performances comingled with variety-act street performances to establish the tradition of Kamigata storytelling. This, in turn, became a primarily outdoor affair, as well as an event which storytellers (at first) and their rakugoka successors drew on a variety of artistic skills. This outdoor, variety-act format, Shores argues, was in direct confl

Abstract:

This paper is a historical and conceptual inquiry into the nature of performance censorship and resistance, particularly in the context of subaltern “folk” forms, and its relationship to the archive. All censorial gestures also serve as archival ones, insofar as legislating censorship necessitates the generation of a collated record of objectionable material. However, this paper argues that in certain cases—like that of tamasha, a popular performance form in Maharashtra—this kind of archival windfall is not simply an accidental consequence, but is fundamental to the way censorship is imagined and posited: as an actively preservatory, rather than prohibitive, force. Assembling accounts from government reports, censor files, magazine articles, memoirs, and oral histories, I trace how this archival discourse around censorship was articulated and enforced, and examine its impact, on modern tamasha historiography, in particular, and on institutionalized cultural regulation in the region at large. I argue that the re-framing of censorship as “preservative” imposed severe limitations on the possibilities for resistance, and consequently paved the way for the enduring appropriation of tamasha along caste and class lines.

Abstract:

This play is a new interpretation of Urvashi and Arjuna from the epic Mahabharata. Immortal Urvashi of heaven was the life partner of mortal emperor Pururavas of earth, Arjuna’s fortieth ancestor. The story is that Urvashi, assigned to be an eternal virgin who was denied motherhood, experiences the bliss of motherhood because of Arjuna. Indra, Arjuna’s father, has brought him to heaven so that he might annihilate Indra’s enemies. Urvashi, who has fallen in love with Arjuna, approaches him for love but is rejected by Arjuna. Urvashi curses Arjuna to become a eunuch. Arjuna, who has realized that Urvashi was Pururavas’ wife, tells her in despair that she is no different from his biological mother Kunti and his stepmother Indrani, Indra’s wife. Urvashi’s dormant motherhood bursts forth as she hears this. At the end of the story, Urvashi embraces Arjuna with maternal love, lays him on her lap, and sings a lullaby. Arjuna and Urvashi are the protagonists of this play. The other characters include Urvashi’s two friends and two nymphs who appear in the interlude.

• Godot Came
• Betsuyaku Minoru Translated by John K. Gillespie

Characters:

• Godot

• Pozzo

• Lucky

• Estragon

• Vladimir

• Woman 1

• Woman 2

• Woman 3

• Woman 4

• Boy

Scene One

A telephone pole. Just to stage left a bench and bus stop sign. No other props. Early evening. Woman 1 enters stage right, carrying a basket full of knitting materials, sees the bus stop sign, looks at her wristwatch, then disappears stage left. Estragon appears stage left, boot on one foot only, hops along on that foot, the other boot dangling from his hand, and hunkers down next to the telephone pole. He turns the boot upside down, empties grime from it, and attempts to put it on. [End Page 251]

This one’s not right! (Puts the boot down, grabs the boot he’s wearing) I’ll take this one off . . . .

Woman 2 and Woman 3 emerge stage right, carrying folding chairs and cardboard box on top of a small office desk and set it all down.

Here . . . ?

Why not? (Looks at Estragon) Let’s not stop here . . . .

Okay . . . .

Woman 2 and Woman 3 exit stage left, taking the desk and other things with them.

(Tiring from trying to remove his boot) Nothing to be done . . . . Or maybe not . . . . (Picks up the other boot) This one here’s the one I’m trying to put on . . . .

Vladimir emerges stage left, carrying a beat-up toy horn, and toots it near Estragon’s ear.

(Startled, jumps up) Stop, what th’ . . . ?

Relax, it’s nothing at all. Just asking if you’re still here . . . . Of course, it was after I said, hey, Estragon, what’s up!

It’s been a bit. Been here a while . . . (Sits down again to the matter of his boot) This damn . . . .

(Toots horn)

(Scoots away) I said stop it . . . !

This just now, it means I’m glad to see you back . . . I mean, um . . . . (Toots horn again)

Cut it out, you jerk!

I mean, um, I thought you were gone forever . . . .

Can’t you just talk like usual . . . ?

Okay, got it. So, I’m lending this to you (holds out his horn) . . . when you got something you want to say, just blow it.