THEATRE STUDIES Journal of Japanese society for Theatre Research
Online ISSN : 2189-7816
Print ISSN : 1348-2815
ISSN-L : 1348-2815
Volume 41
Displaying 1-23 of 23 articles from this issue
 
Special Issue: CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE THETRE
Part I Contemporary Theatre in Japan
  • Yoshie INOUE
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 3-20
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    FUKUDA Yoshiyuki may be regarded as one of the pioneers of the Little Theatre Movement in Japan. In this paper I analyze his A Long Row of Graves (1957), and come to the conclusion that the play was a leap toward the Little Theatre Movement. However, it was still not innovative enough to be taken as the definitive start of the Little Theatre Movement. A year later FUKUDA confessed at a symposium, “I could not break the conventional thinking or the style of Realist Play of Shin-geki.” The analysis of the play also approves his confession.

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  • Minako OKAMURO
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 21-40
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    “The theatre of the absurd” exerted a siginifincant influence on the works of Minoru Betsuyaku, one of the leading contemporary playwrights in Japan. This paper explores Betsuyaku's insight into Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), Fernando Arrabal's Piquenique en campagne, and Eugene Ionesco's La Leçon, the insight which is reflected in his plays and essays. But Beckett's play, in particular, illuminates the structure of Betsuyaku's plays such as Umiyukaba Mizuku Kabane and Nishimuku Samurai. In these plays Betsuyaku makes Beckett's dramaturgical strategy his own in significant respects.

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  • Sôichi YUKI
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 41-57
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    What is new about TSUKA Kôhei's plays? He was born in 1948, in the middle of the so called “period of baby-boom” after the World War II. When he was a student in Tokyo in the late 1960s, he witnessed many new plays by new avant-garde playwrights. He learned a lot from them, but refused their concept of history. They tried to visualize on the stage postwar history, in which their characters lived their own lives. But Tsuka's characters are free from that history and live on their own. Instead of history, bodies and passions make drama. Thus, for example, his play, Hiryuden, shows the students' revolt in the late 60s, which he experienced as a student, not as a fact but as a parody of it. A fact is criticized by means of a fiction. The play shows not past history, but a possible history. It is, nevertheless, a history, his history of the 60s, which, however, he could see only on the stage.

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  • Kei HIBINO
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 59-81
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    In the historical context of modern Japanese theatre, Little Theatre in the 1980s has often been regarded as a break with, rather than the continuation of, the “traditional” angura, or underground theatre movement, that had started in the late 1960s. Proponents and detractors alike find many features that supposedly distinguish Little Theatre in the 1980s from its predecessors, without further consideration of the origin of such uniqueness. In order to see how different it really is, the present writer examines one of the unique features: metatheatricality. Is there any form of metatheatre in Japan that does not fit what Lionel Abel defines in his famous book, Metatheatre? If there is such a thing as “Japanese metatheatre,” what aspects of it are observed in the Little Theatre in the 1980s?

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  • Masaaki NAKANO
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 83-96
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    AMEYA Norimizu is a changing artist. In the 1980s, he was a man of the theater: a dramatist, a director, a stage and sound designer, and an actor. In the 90s, he was an artist of the postmodern art. Since 1999, he has been an owner of a shop of rare animals. Ameya says that those activities he has been doing, including dealing with rare animals, are all for what he thinks is theatre.

    He wants to show the reality of a living body by means of theatre and technology. For example, in Skin#2 Buffalo Mix (1989), Ameya and his theatre group “M.M.M” made an exciting collaboration of living actors with a machine, which was like the “machine” of SRL of Mark Pauline. It was, in a sense, a theatre performance of Japanese cyber-punk. He was interested in the contemporary noise music and liked to use it in his theatre performances.

    But Ameya's activities are not completely different from Japanese theatre before him. He took some suggestions for his sound effect from KARA Jyuro's Jyokyo Gekijo. In Ameya's theatre Kara's sound effect was mixed with noise music, and it produced a unique effect of Ameya's own.

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  • Mariko BOYD
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 97-110
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    In this paper I present first an overview of “quiet theater,” which gained much critical attention in the 1990s; second an application of Ōta Shōgo's concept of the power of passivity to quiet theater in order to explicate quiet methodology; and last a discussion of how alterity affects subjectivity as formulated in this kind of theater.

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  • Itsuhei DEGUCHI
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 129-140
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    Some of the recent plays of MATSUDA Masataka are set in islands in the Kyusyu district and deal with the history of “hiding Christians” (kakure kirisitan). They have two themes going simultaneously. The one is the theme of sufferings and relief of the island people and the other the changing time of the island, which falls into three categories: ancient times, the time of hiding Christians and the modern times. The plays show a strong sense of holiness among people and imply that it is one of the causes of the discriminating attitude of our society. Matsuda seems to say that it is evermore difficult to resist the structure of this island life.

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  • Tokunosuke KIKUKAWA
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 159-181
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    What could be regarded as the little theater movement in Kansai emerged as the consequence of the Orange Theater Festival, which started in 1982 and lasted for five years. Therefore it started two decades after that in Tokyo. However, one can find some shoots which grew up to be the little theatre movement already in the 1960s and 70s in the Kansai theatre world. They had unique characteristics, different from those in Tokyo. This paper explores the conditions and characteristics of the little theater movement in Kanasai from the 1960s to 90s, based on what I had witnessed myself.

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Part II Contemporary Theatre in Abroad
 
50 YEARS OF KANSAI BRANCH—JSTR Colloquium 2002 on 50 Years of Kansai Theatre—
Research Article
  • Ryô YAMADA
    2003 Volume 41 Pages 383-404
    Published: December 15, 2003
    Released on J-STAGE: December 14, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    Peter Shaffer is well-known for his brilliant successes in playwriting such as Five Finger Exercise and Equus. And his willingness to constantly revise his works is also well known. His masterpiece Amadeus went through at least six big revisions from its first version in 1979 to the one in 1998-9. In this paper, the three main versions of the script are compared with each other and Shaffer's changing attitudes to his idea of “the quest for God” are discussed. The focus of the discussion is set particularly on the climactic “Last Encounter” scene between Salieri and Mozart, which Shaffer reworked on again and again over a span of twenty years. It is also important to see the change of Salieri's characterization from a clever narrator in the first version to a tragic hero in deep agony in the last one. Through the revisions, the play has been transformed from a mono-drama like play into a great tragedy of human agony.

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